The language of the market
Language signs and other signs are mediating devices between the object represented in the market and the interpretant-the human beings constituting themselves in the process of interpretation, including satisfaction of their needs and desires. No matter what type of market we refer to, it is a place and time of mediations. What defines each of the known markets (barter, farmers' markets and fairs, highly regulated markets, so-called free markets, underground markets) is the type of mediation more than the merchandise or the production process. Of significance is the dynamic structure involved. It is obvious that if anything anticipated our current experience of the market, it was the ritual.
Objects (things, money, ideas, process), the language used to express the object, and the interpretation, leading or not to a transaction, constitute the structural invariable in every type of socio-economic environment. In the so-called free market (more an abstraction than a reality) and in rigidly planned economies, the relation among the three elements is the variable, not the elements themselves. Interpretation in a given context can be influenced in the way associations are made between the merchandise and its representations.
The history of language is rich in testimony to commerce, from the very simple to the very complex forms of the latter. Language captures ownership characteristics, variations in exchange rates, the ever-expanding horizon of life facilitated through market transactions. It is within this framework that written records appear, thus justifying the idea that, together with practical experiences of human self-constitution, market processes characteristic of a limited scale of exchange of values are parents to notation, to writing and to literacy.
Expectations of efficiency are instantiated, within a given scale of human activity, in market quantities and qualities. Nobody really calculates whether rice production covers the needs of humankind at any given instance, or if enough entertainment is produced for the billions living on Earth today. The immense complexity of the market machine is reflected in its dynamics, which at a certain level of its evolution could no longer be handled by, or made subject to the rules and expectations of literacy. Market processes follow a pattern of self-organization under the guise of many parameters, some of which we can control, others that escape our direct influence upon them. Languages of extreme specialization are part of market dynamics in the sense that they offer practical contexts for new types of transactions. Netconomy started as a buzzword, joining net, network, and economy. In less than one year, the term was used to describe a distributed commercial environment where extremely efficient transactions make up an increasing part of the global economy. But the consequences of the Netconomy are also local: distribution channels can be eliminated, with the effect of accelerating commercial cycles and lowering prices. Computers, cars, software, and legal services are more frequently acquired through the virtual shops of the Netconomy.
To see how the practical experience of the market freed itself from language and literacy, let us now examine the market process as semiosis in its various aspects. As already stated, in trading products, people trade themselves. Various qualities of the product (color, smell, texture, style, design, etc.), as well as qualities of its presentation (advertising, packaging, vicinity to other products, etc.), and associated characteristics (prestige, ideology) are among the implicit components of this trade. Sometimes the object per se-a new dress, a tool, wine, a home-is less important than the image it projects. Secondary functions, such as aesthetics, pleasure, conformity, override the function of fulfilling needs. In market semiosis, desire proves to be just as important, if not more so, than need. In a large part of the world, self-constitution is no longer just a question of survival, but also one of pleasure. The higher the semiotic level of the market in a context of decadent plenty-the number of sign systems involved, their extent and variety-the more obvious the deviations from the rule of merely satisfying needs.
Human activity that aims at maintaining life is very different from the human activity that results in surplus and availability for market transaction. In the first case, a subsistence level is preserved; in the second, new levels of self-constitution are made possible. Surplus and exchange, initially made possible through the practical experience of agriculture, constituted a scale of human activity that required human constitution in signs, sign systems, and finally language. Surplus can be used in many ways, for which sign and later language differentiation became progressively necessary. Rituals, adornment, war, religion, means of accumulation, and means of persuasion are examples of differentiations. All these uses pertained to settled patterns of human interaction and led to products that were more than mere physical entities to be consumed. To repeat, they were projections of individual self-constitution.
Behind each product is a cycle of conception, manufacture, and trade, and an attached understanding of utility and permanence. With the advent of writing and reading, from its rudimentary forms to the forms celebrated in literacy, and its participation in the constitution of the market, the avenue was opened towards using what was produced in surplus to cover the need to maintain life, so that more surplus could be generated. The market of merchandise, services, slaves, and ideas was completed by the market of salaried workers, earning money for their life's salt, as Roman soldiers did. These belong to the category of human beings constituting themselves in the pragmatic framework of an activity in which production (work) and the means of production separated. The language through which workers constituted themselves underwent a similar differentiation. As work became more alienated from the product, a language of the product also came into being.
The language of products
Exchanging goods pertinent to survival corresponds to a scale of human praxis that guarantees coherence and homogeneity. People who have excess grain but need eggs, people who offer meat because they need fruit or tools, do not require instructions for using what they obtain in exchange for what they offer. Small worlds, loosely connected, constitute the universe of their existence. The rather slow rhythm of production cycles equals that of natural cycles. A relatively uniform lifestyle results from complementary practical experiences only slightly differentiated in structure. Together, these characteristics constitute a framework of direct sharing of experience. This market, as limited as it is, forms part of the social mechanism for sharing experience.
Today's markets, defined by a complexity of mediations, are no longer environments of common or shareable experience. Rather, they are frameworks of validation of one type of human experience against another. This statement requires some explanation. Products embody not only material, design, and skills, but also a language of optimal functioning. Thus they project a variety of ways through which people constitute themselves through the language of these products. Accordingly, the market becomes a place of transaction for the many languages our products speak. The complexity of everything we produce in the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy is the result of expectations made possible by levels of human efficiency that literacy can only marginally support.
This comes at a cost, in addition to the dissolution of literacy: the loss of a sense of quality, because each product carries with itself not only its own language, but also its own evaluation criteria. The product is one of many from which to choose, each embodying its own justification. Its value is relative, and sometimes no value at all dictates the urge to buy, or the decision to look for something else. Rules of grammar, which gave us a sense of order and quality of literate language use, do not apply to products. Previous expectations of morality were anchored in language and conveyed through means of literacy. The morality of partial literacies embodied in competing products no longer appears to participants in the market as emanating from high principles of religion or ethics, but rather as a convenient justification for political influence. Through regulation, politics inserts itself as a self-serving factor in market transactions.
Transaction and literacy
A visit to a small neighborhood store used to be primarily a way of satisfying a particular need, but also an instance of communication. Such small markets were spaces where members of the community exchanged news and gossip, usually with an accuracy that would put today's journalism to shame. The supermarket is a place where the demands of space utilization, fast movement of products, and low overhead make conversation counterproductive. Mail-order markets and electronic shopping practically do away with dialogue. They operate beyond the need for literacy and human interaction. Transactions are brought to a minimum: selection, confirmation, and providing a credit card number, or having it read automatically and validated via a networked service.
Literacy-based transactions involved all the characteristics of written language and all the implications of reading pertinent to the transaction. Literacy contributed to the diversification of needs and to a better expression of desires, thus helping markets to diversify and reach a level of efficiency not possible otherwise. With required education and laws prohibiting child labor, the productive part of people's lives was somehow reduced, but their ability to be more effective within modes adapted to literacy was enhanced. Thus market cycles were optimized by the effects of higher productivity and diversified demands. From earliest times (going back to the Phoenician traders), writing and the subsequent literacy contributed to strategies of exchange, of taxation- which represents the most direct form of political intervention in the market-and regulations regarding many aspects of the constitution of human beings in and through the market. Written contracts expressed expectations in anticipation of literacy- supported planning.
There are many levels between the extraction and processing of raw material and the final sale and consumption of a product. At each level, a different language is constituted, very concrete in some instances, very abstract in others. These languages are meant to speed up processing and transaction cycles, reduce risk, maximize profits, and ensure the effectiveness of the transaction on a global level. Literacy cannot uniformly accommodate these various expectations. The distributive nature of market transactions cannot be held captive to the centralism of literacy without affecting the efficiency of market mediation. The ruin left after 70 years of central planning in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries-highly literate societies-is proof of this point. The expected speed of market processes and the parallelism of negotiations require languages of optimal functionality and minimal ambiguity. Sometimes transactions have to rely on visual arguments, well beyond what teleconferencing can offer. Products and procedures are modified during negotiations, and on-the-fly, through interactive links between all parties involved in the effort of designing, manufacturing, and marketing them. As fashion shows become prohibitively expensive, the fashion market is exploring interactive presentations that put the talent of the designer and the desire of the public one click away from each other.
The expectation of freedom results in the need to ignore national or political (and cultural and religious) allegiances, which, after all, means freedom from the literate mode of a national language, as well as from all the representations and definitions of freedom housed in literate discourse. Indeed, since sign systems, and language in particular, are not neutral means of expression, one individual has to specialize in the signs of other cultures. There are consulting firms that advise businesses on the cultural practices of various countries. They deal in what Robert Reich called symbol manipulation, semiotic activity par excellence. These firms explain to clients doing business in Japan, for instance, that the Japanese have a penchant for exchanging gifts. Business cards, more symbolic than functional, are of great importance. These consultants will also advise on customs that fall outside values instilled through literacy, such as in which countries bribery is the most efficient way to do business.
Whose market? Whose freedom?
A market captive to moral or political concepts expressed in literate discourse soon reaches the limits of its efficiency. We face these limits in a different way when ideals are proclaimed or negotiations submitted to rules reflecting values attached to expectations-of a certain standard of living, fringe benefits-frozen in contracts and laws. Many European countries are undergoing the crisis of their literate heritage because outdated working relations have been codified in labor laws. Contracts between unions claiming to represent various types of workers are not subject to criteria for efficiency at work in the market.
On the other hand, the freedom and rights written into the U.S. Constitution are totally forgotten in the global marketplace by people who take them for granted. An American-even a member of a minority group-who buys a pair of brand-name sneakers is totally ignorant of the fact that the women, and sometimes the children, making those sneakers in faraway countries earn less than subsistence wages. It is not the market that is immoral or opportunistic in such cases, but the people who constitute their expectations for the most at the lowest cost. Would literacy be a stronger force than the demand for efficiency in bringing about the justice discussed in tomes of literature? To read morality in the market context of competition, where only efficiency and profit are written, is a rather futile exercise, even though it might alleviate pangs of conscience. Markets, the expression of the people who constitute them, are realistic, even cynical; they call things by their names and have no mercy on those who try to reinvent an idealized past in the transaction of futures.
For reasons of efficiency only, markets are frameworks for the self-constitution of human beings as free, enjoying liberties and rights that add to their productive capabilities. It will probably irk many people to read here that markets, instances of terrible tension and amorality, are the cradle of human freedom, tolerance (political, social, religious, intellectual), and creativity. To a great extent, it was a fight over market processes that led to the American Revolution. Now that Soviet-style communism has fallen, the flow of both goods and ideas is slowly and painfully taking place, in ways similar to that in the West, in the former Soviet Bloc. Democratic ideals and the upward distribution of wealth are on a collision course. But the compass is at least set on more freedom and less regulation. Only mainland China remains in the grip of centralized market control. The struggle between open markets and the free flow of ideas going on there today can have only one outcome. It may take time, but China, too, will one day be as free as its neighbors in Taiwan. Market interaction is what defines human beings, facilitating the establishment of a framework of existence that includes others.
Some people would prefer a confirmation of culture as the more encompassing framework, containing markets but not reducible to them. Culture itself is an object in the market, subjected to transactions involving literacy, but not exclusively. Here new languages are used to expedite the exchange of goods and values. When literacy reaches the limits of its implicit capabilities, new transaction languages emerge, and new forms of freedom, tolerance, and creativity are sanctioned through the market mechanism. There is a price attached here, too. New constraints, new types of intolerance, and new obstacles come about. An example is the preservation of wildlife at the expense of jobs. Efficiency and wide choice entail a replacement of what are known as traditional values (perceived as eternal, but usually not older than 200-300 years) with what many would have a hard time calling value: mediocrity, the transitory, the expedient, and the propensity for waste.
The market circumvents literacy when literacy affects its efficiency and follows its own course by means appropriate to new market conditions. In the quest for understanding how markets operate, the further cultivation of explanations originating from previous pragmatic circumstances is pointless. The time-consuming detour might result in nostalgia, but not in better mastery of the complexities implicit in the practical experience of human self-constitution in the market.
New markets, new languages
With the descriptive model of markets as sign processes, allusion was made to the open character of any transaction. With the discussion regarding the many phases through which markets are constituted, allusion was made to the distributed nature of market processes. In order to further explain the changed condition of human self- constitution in the market of a radically new scale and dynamics, we need to add some details to both characteristics mentioned.
Like any other sign process, language processes are human processes. The person speaking or writing a text continues to constitute his identity in one or the other, while simultaneously anticipating the constitutive act of listening to or interpreting the potential or intended readership. Visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, verbal, or written expression, as well as combinations of these, which composes the language of performance, dance, architecture, etc., are in the same condition. A viewer or viewers can associate an image with a text, music, odors, textures, or with combinations of these. Furthermore, the association can continue and can be conveyed to others who will extend it ad infinitum, sometimes so far that the initial sign (which is the initial person interpreting that sign in anticipation of the interpretation given by others), i.e., the image, text, or music that triggered the process, is forgotten.
Expanding this concept to the products of human activity, we can certainly look at various artifacts from the perspective of what they express-a need specifically fulfilled by a machine, a product, a type of food or clothing, an industry; what they communicate-the need shared by few or many, the way this need is addressed, what it says about those constituted in the product and those who will confirm their identity by using it, what it says about opportunity and risk taking; andwhat they signify-in terms of the level of knowledge and competence achieved.
This is not to say that the milk we buy from a farmer or in the supermarket, the shoes, cars, homes, vacation packages, and shares in a company or options in a stock are all signs or language. Rather, they can be interpreted as signs standing for an object (the state of manufacturing, quality of design, competence, or a combination of these) to be interpreted in view of the framework for the pragmatics of human self- constitution that the pragmatics makes possible. There are many instances when a word simply dies on the lips of the speaker because nobody listens or nobody cares to continue interpreting it. There are as many instances when a product dies because it is irrelevant to the pragmatic framework of our lives. There are other instances when signs lose the quality of interpretability.
A company that goes public is identified through many qualifiers. Its potential growth is one of them-this is why Internet-oriented companies were so highly valued in their initial public offerings. Potential can be conveyed through literate descriptions, data regarding patents, market analysis, or an intuitive element that there is more to this new market sign than only its name and initial offering price. At a small scale of human experience, the neighbors wanted to own some of the action; at a larger scale, literacy conveyed the information and acted as a co-guarantor. At today's scale, many similar businesses are already in place, others are emerging; supply and demand meet in the marketplace where one's risk can be someone else's gain. Literacy is no longer capable of providing the background for the dynamics of change and renewal. If literacy could still control market transactions, Netscape-synonymous with the Internet browser-would have never made it; nor the companies that develop software facilitating telephone calls via the Internet.
In the markets of relative homogeneity, language proved to be an appropriate means of coordination. For as long as the various contexts making up today's global market were not as radically different as they are becoming, literacy represented a good compromise. But when market transactions themselves shift from exchanging goods against goods, or the exchange of goods for some universal substitute (gold, silver, precious stones with qualities of permanency), or even for a more conventional unit (money), for more abstract entities, such as the Ecu (the basket of currencies of the European Community), the Eurodollar, or the e-money transacted over networks, literacy is replaced by the literacies of the segmented practical instances of each transaction. Shares of an Italian or Spanish company, futures on the American commodities market, bonds for Third World investment funds-they all come with their own rules of transaction, and with their own languages.
The specialization that increases market efficiency results in a growing number of literacies. These literacies bring to the market the productive potential of companies and their management value. They encode levels of expected productivity in farming (and a certain wager on weather conditions), entrepreneurial risks assumed within the context of progressive globalization of the economy. In turn, they can be encoded in programs designed to negotiate with other programs. In addition, the mechanisms assuring the distributed nature of the market in the global economy insert other literacies, in this case, the literacy of machines endowed with search and heuristic capabilities independent of literacy.
Market simulations trigger intelligent trade programs and a variety of intelligent agents, capable of modifying their behavior, and achieve higher and higher transaction performance. In short, we have many mediations against the background of a powerful integrative process: the pragmatic framework of a highly segmented economy, working in shorter production cycles, for a global world. In this process, almost nothing remains sequential, and nothing is centralized. Put in different words, almost all market activity takes place in parallel processes. Configurations, i.e., changing centers of interest, come into existence on the ever fluid map of negotiations. Being a self-organizing nucleus, each deal has its own dynamics. Relations among configurational nuclei are also dynamic. Everything is distributed. The relations between the elements involved are non-linear and change continuously. Solidarity is replaced by competition, often fiercely adversarial. Thus the market consumes itself, and the sequels of literacy, requiring provisional and distributed literacies.
Each time individuals project their identity in a product, the multi-dimensional human experience embodied in the product is made available for exchange with others. In the market, it is reduced to the dimension appropriate to the given context of the transaction. Human behavior in the market is symptomatic of the self-awareness of the species, of its critical and self-critical capabilities, of its sense of the future. The progressive increase of the abstract nature of market transactions, the ominous liberation from literacy, and adoption of technologies of efficient exchange define a sense of future which can be quite scary for people raised in a different pragmatic context.
We are beyond the disjunctive models of socialist ideologies of bourgeois property, class differences, reproduction of labor power, and similar categories that emerged in the pragmatic framework that made literacy (and human constitution through literacy) possible and necessary. Property, as much as markets, is distributed (sometimes in ways that do not conform with our sense of fairness). People define their place in the continuum of a society that in many ways does away with the exceptional and introduces a model based on averaging and resulting in mediocrity. The human being's self-constitutive power is not only reproduced in new instances of practical activity, but also augmented in the pragmatics of surplus creating higher surplus. Along with the sense of permanency, humans lose a sense of the exceptional as this applies to their products and the way they constitute themselves through their work.
Literacy and the transient
When a product is offered with a lifetime warranty and the manufacturer goes bankrupt within months from the date of the sales transaction, questions pertaining to ethics, misrepresentation, and advertisement are usually asked. Such incidents, to which no one is immune, cannot be discarded since the experience of market transactions is an experience in human values, no matter how relative these are. Honesty, respect for truth, respect for the given word, written or not, belong to the civilization of literacy and are expressed in its books. The civilization of illiteracy renders these and all other books senseless. But it would be wrong to suggest that markets of the civilization of illiteracy corrupt everything and that, instead of confirming values, they actually empty values of significance. Markets do something else: They integrate expectations into their own mechanisms. In short, they have to live up to expectations not because these were written down, but because markets would otherwise not succeed. How this takes place is a longer story, starting with the example given: What happens to a lifetime warranty when the manufacturer goes bankrupt?
The pragmatic framework of human self-constitution in language through the use of the powerful means of literacy is one of stability and progressive growth. The means of production facilitated in this framework are endowed with qualities, physical, first of all, that guarantee permanency. The industrial model is an extension of the model of creation deeply rooted in literacy-dominated human activity. Machines were powerful and dominating. They, as well as the products they turned out, lasted much longer than the generation of people who use them.
After participating in the complex circumstances that made the Industrial Revolution possible, literacy was stimulated and supported by it. Incandescent lighting, more powerful than the gas or oil lamp, expanded the time available for reading, among other activities. Books were printed faster and more cheaply because paper was produced faster and more cheaply, and the printing press was driven by stronger engines. More time was available for study because industrial society discovered that a qualified workforce was more productive once machines become more complicated. All this happened against the background of an obsession with permanency reflected also in the structure of the markets. As opposed to agricultural products, subject to weather and time, industrial products can be accepted on consignment.
Literacy was a mediating tool here since transactions became less and less homogeneous, and the institution of credit more powerful due to the disparity between production and consumption cycles. The scale of the industrial market corresponded to the scale of industrial economy. Industrial markets are optimally served by the sequential nature of literacy and the linearity inherent in its structure. Production cycles are long, and one cycle follows the other, like seasons, like letters in a word. Remember when new model automobiles came out in October, and only in October? A large manufacturer embodied permanence and so did its product. In this framework, a lifetime warranty reflects a product's promised performance and the language describing this performance.
This is no longer the case in the civilization of illiteracy. From the design of the product, to the materials used and principles applied, almost nothing is meant to last beyond a cycle of optimal efficiency. It is not a moral decision, neither is it a devious plan. Different expectations are embodied in our products. Their life cycle reflects the dynamics of change corresponding to the new scale of human self-constitution, and the obsession with efficiency. Products become transient because the cycles of relative uniformity of our self-constitution are shorter.
We know that life expectancy has increased, and it may well be that people past the peak of their productive capability will soon represent the majority of the population. Nonetheless, the increased level of productivity facilitated by mediating strategies is independent of this change. Longer life means presence in more cycles of change (which translates into other changes, such as in education and training, family life). What was once a relatively homogeneous life becomes a succession of shorter periods, some only loosely connected. In comparison to centuries of slow, incremental development, relatively abrupt change testifies to a new human condition.
Where once literacy was necessary to coordinate the variety of contributions from many people-who projected as much permanency in their products, even if the individuals were more literate in drawing than in writing-new forms of coordination and integration are now in place. The corresponding pragmatics is characterized by intension and distribution, and the products capture the projected sense of change that dominates all human experiences. Thus conditions were created for markets of the transient, in which lifetime functioning of ingenious artifacts is promised, because the lifetime meant is as short as the cycle of the entire line. The fact that the manufacturer goes bankrupt is not even surprising since the structural characteristics of the obsession with efficiency results in manufacturing entities that last as long (or as short) as the need for their product, or as long as the functional characteristics of the product satisfy market expectations. This is how expectations are integrated in market mechanisms. Since mediation is now exercised through many literacies integrated in the product, it is clear why, together with the exhausted lifetime warranty, we throw away not only manufactured items, but also the literacy (and literacies) embodied in them. Each transaction in the transient corresponds to a pragmatics that transforms the Faustian promise into an advertising slogan.
Market, advertisement, literacy
First, the indictment: "If I were asked to name the deadliest subversive force within capitalism-the single greatest source of its waning morality-I should without hesitation name advertising." These words belong to a commentator of the ill-reputed supply side economics, Robert L. Heilbroner, but could have been signed by many sharing in this definition. Now comes the apologia: "The historians and archaeologists will one day discover that ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities." McLuhan's words, as familiar as they are, bear the imprint of his original thinking. The issue is not to take sides. Whether admired or despised, ignored or enjoyed, advertisement occupies an inordinately important place in our life today. For anyone who went through the history of advertisement, it becomes obvious that the scale of this activity, which is indeed part of the market, has changed radically.
It used to be true that only 50 to 60 percent of the investment in advertisement resulted in higher sales or brand recognition. Today, the 50 to 60 percent has shrunk to less than 2 percent. But of the 2 percent that impacts the market, 2 percent (or less) results in covering the entire expense of advertisement. Such levels of efficiency-and waste, one should add, in full awareness that the notion is relative-are possible only in the civilization of illiteracy. The figures (subject to controversy and multiple interpretation) point to efficiency as much as to the various aspects of the market. Our concern with advertisement is not only with how literate (or illiterate) advertisement is, but also with how appropriate literacy means can be to address psychological, ethical, and rational (or irrational) aspects of market transactions.
A look at advertisements through the centuries is significant to the role of literacy in society and in the world of merchandising. Word-of-mouth advertising and hanging signs outside a business reflect the literacy levels of an age of small-scale market transactions. The advertisements of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century exemplify the levels of literacy and the efficiency expected from it for merchandising in the context and scale of that time. The ads contain more text than image and address reason more than the senses. In the age of the magazine and newspaper, advertisers relied on the power of verbal persuasion. Honesty or value was not the issue here, only its appearance. The word committed to paper, black on white, had to be simple and true.
In Europe, advertisement took a different style at this time, but still reflected value. Manufacturers engaged many well known artists of the time to design their ads. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, El Lissitzky, and Herbert Bayer are among the best known. To the highly literate but more artistically inclined Europeans of the time, such ads for upscale products and events were more appealing. Probably taking their cue from Europe, American designers experimented with image advertising after World War II, and graphic design took off in the USA. With the advent of more powerful visualization media, and based on data from psychology to support its effectiveness, the image began to dominate advertising. As ambiguously as an image can be interpreted, its efficiency in advertising was confirmed in rising sales figures.
In the rare cases when literacy is used today, it is usually for its visual impact. In an attempt to relate to the qualities of the black-on-white advertisement of earlier times, Mobil started a series of ads in the mid-1980's. To those not semiotically aware, the ad was simply text appealing to the reader's reason. Literacy rediviva! To people attuned to semiotics, the ad was a powerful visual device. The simple tombstone style evoked relations between literacy and values such as simplicity, honesty, the permanence of the idea, the dominance of reason. The visual convention was actually stronger than the literacy element, used as an alibi in these ads. Indeed, the people who hand out the Clio awards for advertising were so taken in as to award Mobil a first prize for these ads.
Markets are far from being simple causal phenomena. A market's easy switch from a well structured, rational interpretation and ethical conduit, to irrationality and misrepresentation is revealed in the new forms markets take, as well as in their new techniques for transactions and the associated advertisement. The term irrationality describes a contradiction of common sense rules (or economic theories setting them forth) of exchange of goods. During the 1980's, this occurred in the oil market, the art market, the market for adoptable children, and in new stock market offerings.
The literate discourse of theories or of an advertisement can only acknowledge the irrationality and suggest explanations. There are schools of market analysis based on game theory, psychodrama, cyclical modeling, the phases of the moon, etc., etc., each producing newsletters, giving advice, trying to render understandable economic and financial phenomena difficult to predict. Language-like explanations and advice are part of advertising, part of market language, forming its own literacy and keeping many captive to it. But even the most literate participant cannot stop the process since the literacy involved in what some perceive as an aberration is different from the literacy embodied in the product traded or in its advertisement. Irrational elements are present in the market, as in life, at all times, but not to the extent to which the language of the market reflects hysteria (as on Black Monday in 1987 on the New York Stock Exchange) or simply ceases its pragmatic function.
We all deplore the continuous shrinking of the intimate sphere of our lives, but admit, in the act of constituting ourselves in the space and time of market transactions, the integrating power that the market exercises, ignoring how close the relation between the two aspects is. Literacy was once a protective medium and entailed rules of discretion and decency. Illiteracy makes us fear; it allows us to become more efficient, but at the same time we become subject to intrusion by all the means that capture our identity. People making purchases on-line will not hesitate to write down their personal data and credit card numbers, trusting in a sense of privacy that is part of the code of literate behavior. Of all people, the computer-literate should realize the power of the Net for searching, retrieving, and sorting such information for all types of uses imaginable.
In the civilization of illiteracy, advertisement is no longer an integrative device that addresses a non-differentiated market but a device that addresses powerful distinctions that can capture smaller groups, even the individual. "Tell me what you want to buy or sell and I'll tell you who you are," is a concise way of declaring how market semiosis X-rays its participants. The enormous marketing efforts associated with a new brand of cereal, software, a political campaign, a role in a movie, or a sports event result in advertisement's becoming a language in itself, with its own vocabulary and grammar. These are subject to rapid change because the pragmatics of the activities they represent change so fast. "Tell me what you buy and I'll tell you who you are"-mug shots of all of us are taken continuously, by extremely inventive digital devices, while the market fine-tunes us. Buying products ended long ago. Products now buy us.
Advertising in the civilization of illiteracy is no longer communication or illustration. It is an information processing activity, bizarre at times, extremely innovative in the ability to cross reference information and fine-tune the message to the individual. Automatic analysis of data is complemented by refinement methods that adjust the weight of words in order to fit the addressee. In the reality of the market and its attendant advertising, languages pertaining to art, education, ideology, sexuality, are integrated at a high level of sophistication in the infinite series of mediations that constitute the pragmatic framework of human existence. Nothing is more valuable than the knowledge of who we are. One can risk stating that brokers of information about each of us will probably fare best in this market of many competing partial literacies.
When markets rely more and more on mediations, and market cycles become faster and faster, when the global nature of transactions requires mechanisms of differentiation and integration far beyond the scope of language, literacy ceases to play a dominating role. The literate message assumed that the human being is the optimal source of information and the ideal receiver. The illiterate message can send itself automatically, as image or as speech, as video or as Internet spamming, whatever best hits its human target, to people's addresses. Whether we like it or not, face-to-face negotiations have already become fax-to-fax and are bound to be converted into program-to-program dealings. The implications are so far-reaching that emotional reactions, such as enthusiasm or disgust, are not really the best answer to this prospect.
Market pragmatics in our civilization is defined by the need to continuously expand surplus to meet a dominant desire and expectation driven exchange of goods and services. These desires and expectations correspond to the global scale of human interaction for which a dominant literacy is poorly suited. Hundreds of literacies, representing hundreds of forms of human self-constitution around the world, are integrated in the supersign known as the market.
The market-in its narrow sense as transaction, and as a sign process joining structure and dynamics-focuses all that pertains to the relation between the individual and the social environment: language, customs, mores, knowledge, technology, images, sounds, odors, etc. Through the market, economies are ascertained or subjected to painful restructuring. Recent years brought with them turmoil and economic opportunity as an expression of new pragmatic characteristics. Competition, specialization, cooperation, were all intensified. An exciting but just as often disconcerting growth path of economic activity generated markets of high performance. Just-in-time, point-of-sale, and electronic interchanges came into being because the human pragmatic made them necessary.
This is why it is difficult to accept views, regardless of their public acclaim, that explain the dynamics of economic life through technological change. The increased speeds of economic cycles are not parallel but related to the new practical experiences of human self-constitution. Cognitive resources became the main commodity for economic experiences. And the market fully confirms this through mechanisms for accelerated transactions and through sign processes of a complexity that technology has really never reached. New algorithms inspired by dynamic systems, intelligent agent models, and better ways to handle the issues of opportunity and prediction are the expression of cognitive resources brought to fruition in a context requiring freedom from hierarchy, centralism, sequentiality, and determinism. As exciting as the model of the economy as ecosystem is (I refer to Rothschild's bionomics), it remains an essentially deterministic view.
No semiosis triggers forces of economic change. But sign processes, in the form of elaborate transactions, reflect the change in the pragmatic condition of the human being. All those new companies, from fast food chains to microchip makers and robot providers that convert human knowledge into the new goods and services, are the expression of the necessity of this pragmatic change. Diversity and abundance might be related to competition and cooperation, but what drives economic life, market included, is the objective need to achieve levels of efficiency corresponding to the global scale human activity has reached. Central planning, like any other centralized structure, including that of businesses, does not come to an end because of technological progress, but in view of the fact that it prevents efficient practical experiences.
Markets of the civilization of illiteracy, like the economy for which they stand, are more and more mediated. They go through faster cycles, their swings wilder, their interdependency deeper than ever. The literate experience of the market assumed that the individual was the optimal source of information and the ideal receiver. Decision- making was an exclusively human experience. The illiterate message of complex data processing and evaluation can send itself automatically and reach whatever has to be reached in a given context: producers of raw materials, energy providers, manufacturers, a point-of-sale unit. As shoppers start scanning their purchases by themselves, information regarding their buying patterns makes it quickly into programs in charge of delivery, production, and marketing. Face-to-face negotiations, many times replaced by fax-to-fax or e-mail-to-e-mail transactions, are converted into more program-to-program dealings. Instead of mass markets, we experience point-cast markets. Their pragmatics is defined by the need to continuously meet desire and expectation instead of need. Their dynamics, expressed in nuclei of self-organization, is in the last instance not at all different from that of the human beings self-constituted in their reality.
Language and Work
Work is a means of self-preservation beyond the primitive experience of survival. Actually, one can apply the word work only from the moment awareness of human self- constitution in practical experiences emerged from these experiences. Awareness of work and the beginnings of language are probably very close to one another.
By work we understand patterns of human activity, not the particulars of one or another form of work. This defines a functional perspective first of all, and allows us to deal with replication of these patterns. Interaction, mutation, growth, spreading, and ending are part of the pattern. For anyone even marginally informed, it is quite clear that work patterns of agriculture are quite different from those of the pre-industrial, industrial, or post-industrial age. Our aim is to examine work patterns of the civilization of literacy in contrast to those of the civilization of illiteracy.
That agriculture was determined, in its specific aspects, by different topography and climatic biological context is quite clear. Nevertheless, the people constituting their identity in experiences of cultivating the land accomplished it in coherent ways, regardless of their geographic location. Their language experience testifies to an identifiable set of concerns, questions, and knowledge which is, despite the fragmented picture of the world, more homogenous than we could expect. If, by contrast, one considers a chip foundry of today's high technology, it becomes clear how chip producers in Silicon Valley and those in Chinese provinces, in Russia, or in a developing country of Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa share the same language and the same concerns.
The example of agriculture presents a bottom-up structure of pre-literate nature, based mainly on reaction. Reaction slowly but surely led to more deliberate choices. Experience converged in repetitive patterns. The more efficient experiences were confirmed, the others discarded. A body of knowledge was accumulated and transmitted to everyone partaking in survival activities. In the case of the chip foundry, the structure is top-down: Goals and reasons are built in, and so is the critical knowledge of a post-literate nature required for achieving high efficiency. Skills are continuously perfected through reinforcement schemes. Activity is programmed. An explicit notion of the factory's goals-high quality, high efficiency, high adaptability to new requirements-is built into the entire factory system.
In both models, corresponding to real-life situations, language is constituted as part of the experience. Indeed, coordination of effort, communication, record keeping, and transmission of knowledge are continuously requested. As a replicative process, work implies the presence of language as an agent of transfer. Language pertinent to the experience of agriculture is quite different from the language pertinent to the modern production of chips. One is more natural than the other, i.e., its connection to the human being's natural stage is stronger than that of the activity in the foundry. In the chip age of the civilization of illiteracy, languages of extreme precision become the means for an efficient practical experience. Their functions are different from those of natural language, which by all means still constitutes a medium for human interaction.
All these remarks are meant to provide a relatively comfortable entry to the aspects of the changing relation between language and work. The terminology is based on today's fashionable lingo of genetics, and of memetics, its counterpart. Still, I would suggest more than caution, because memetics focuses on the quantitative analysis of cultural dynamics, while semiotics, which represents the underlying conception, is concerned primarily with qualitative aspects.
As we have already seen, evolutionary biology became a source of metaphors for the new sciences of economics, as well as for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, or the replication of ideas. Many people are at work in the new scientific space of memetic considerations. The majority are focused on effective procedures, probably computational in nature, for generating mechanisms that will result in improved human interactions. As exciting as all this is, qualitative considerations might prove no less beneficial, if indeed we could translate them in effective practical experiences. If the purposeful character of all living organisms can be seen as an inevitable consequence of evolution, the dynamics of human activity, reflected in successive pragmatic frameworks, goes beyond the mechanism of natural selection. This is exactly where the sign perspective of human interaction, including that in work, differentiates itself from the quantitative viewpoint. As long as selection itself is a practical experience-choose from among possibilities-it becomes difficult to use selection in order to explain how it takes place.
In the tradition of analogies to machines-of yesterday or of today-we could look at work as a machine capable of self-reproduction (von Neumann's concept). In the new tradition of memetics, work would be described as a replicative complex unit, probably a meta-meme. But both analogies are focused ultimately on information exchange, which is only a limited part of what sign processes (or semioses, as they are called) are. This is not to say that work is reducible to sign processes or to language. What is of interest is the connection between work and signs, or language. Moreover, how pragmatic frameworks and characteristics of language experiences are interconditioned is a subject that involves a memetic perspective, but is not reducible to it.
Inside and outside the world
Comparisons of the efficiency of direct human practical experiences to that of mediated forms-with the aid of tools, signs, or languages-suggest one preliminary observation: The efficiency of the action mediated through sign systems is higher than that of direct action. The source of this increase in efficiency is the cognitive effort to adapt the proper means (how work is done) to the end (what is accomplished) pursued. In retrospect, we understand that this task is of a tall order-it involves observation, comparison, and the ability to conceive of alternatives. As we learn from attempts involving the best of science and the best of technology, the emulation of such cognitive processes, especially as they evolve over time, is not yet within our reach.
Language, together with all other sign systems, is an integral part of the process of constitution and affirmation of human nature. The role it plays in the process is dynamic. It corresponds to the different pragmatic contexts in which human beings project their structural reality into the reality of their universe of life. The biophysical system within which this projection took and takes place underwent and still undergoes major changes. They are reflected in the biophysical reality of the human being itself. To be part of a changing world and to observe this change places the human being simultaneously inside and outside the world: inside as part of it, as a genetic sequence; outside as its conscience, expressed in all the forms through which awareness, including that of work, is externalized.
Whether a very restricted (limited by the pragmatic horizon of primitive human beings), or a potentially universal system of expression, representation, and communication, language cannot be conceived independent of human nature. Neither can it be conceived independent of other means of expression, representation, and communication. The necessity of language is reflected in the degree to which evolutionary determination and self-determination of the individual or of society, correlate. Language is constituted in human practical experiences. At the same time, it is constitutive, together with many other elements of human praxis: biological endowment, heuristics and logic, dialectic, training. This applies to the most primitive elements of language we can conceive of, as well as to today's productive languages. Embodied in literacy, language accounts for the ever-deepening specialization and fragmentation of human praxis. The replacement of the literate use of language by the illiteracy of the many languages dismissing it in work, market transactions, and even social life is the process to which we are at the same time witnesses and agents of change.
Sign systems of all kinds, but primarily language, housed and stored many of the projects that changed the condition of praxis. The major changes are: from direct to mediated, from sequential to parallel, from centralized to decentralized, from clustered (in productive units such as factories) to distributed, from dualistic (right or wrong) to multi-valued (along the continuum of acceptable engineering solutions), from deterministic to non-deterministic and chaotic, from closed (once a product is produced, the problem-solving cycle is completed) to open (human practical experiences are viewed as problem generating), from linear to non-linear. Each of these changes, in turn, made the structural limits of language more and more evident. Practical experiences in the design of languages, in particular the new languages of visualization, are pushing these limits in order to accommodate new expectations, such as increased expressiveness, higher processing speed, inter-operability-an image can trigger further operations.
Globality of human practical experience succeeds against the background of the emergence of many languages that are very specific, though global in scope in that they can be applied all over the world. The chip factory already mentioned-or, for that matter, an integrated pizza or hamburger production facility-can be delivered turn-key in any corner of the world. The languages of mathematics, of engineering, or of genetics might independently be characterized by the same sequentiality, dualism, centralism, determinism that made natural language itself incapable of handling complexities resulting from the new scale of human activity. Once integrated in practical experiences of a different nature, such as those of automation, they all allow for a new dynamics. Obviously, they are less expressive than language-we have yet to read a DNA sequence poem, or listen to the music of a mathematical formula-but infinitely more precise.
We are what we do
In the contemporary world, communication is progressively reified and takes place more and more through the intermediary of the product. Its source is human work. Characteristics of the languages involved in the work are also projected into them. A new underlying structure replaces that which made literacy possible and necessary. In the physical or spiritual reality of the product, specialized languages are re-translated into the universal language of satisfying needs, or creating new needs, which are afterwards processed through the mediating mechanisms of the market. Reification (from the Latin res: transformation of everything-life, language, feeling, work-into things) is the result of the alienating logic of the market and its semiosis.
Markets abstract individual contributions to a product. In the first place, language itself is reified and consumed. Markets reify this contribution, turning life, energy, doubts, time, or whatever else-in particular language-into the commodity embodied in the product. The very high degree of integration leads to conditions in which high efficiency-the most possible at the lowest price-becomes a criterion for survival. The consequence is that human individuality is absorbed in the product. People literally put their lives, and everything pertaining to them-natural history, education, family, feelings, culture, desires-in the outcome of their practical experiences. This absorption of the human being into the product takes place at different levels. In the second place, the individual constituted in work is also reified and consumed: the product contains a portion of the limited duration of the lives of those who processed it.
Each form of mediated work depends upon its mediating entities. As one form of work is replaced by another, more efficient, the language that mediated is replaced by other means. Languages of coordination corresponding to hunting, or those of incipient agriculture, made way for subsequent practical experience of self-constitution in language. This applies to any and all forms of work, whether resulting in agricultural, industrial, artistic, or ideological products. The metaphors of genetics and evolutionary models can be applied. We can describe the evolution of work in memetic terminology, but we would still not capture the active role of sign processes. Moreover, human reproduction, between its sexual and its cultural forms, would become meaningless if separated from the pragmatic framework through which human self-constitution takes place.
To illustrate how language is consumed, let us shortly examine what happens in the work we call education. In our day, the need for continual training increases dramatically. The paradigm of a once-for-life education is over, as much as literacy is over. Shorter production cycles require changes of tools and the pertinent training. A career for life, possible while the linear progress of technology required only maintenance of skills and slight changes of knowledge, is an ideal of the past. Efficiency requirements translate into training strategies that are less costly and less permanent than those afforded through literacy. These strategies produce educated operators as training itself becomes a product, offered by training companies whose list of clients includes fast food chains, nuclear energy producers, frozen storage facilities, the U.S. Congress, and computer operations. The market is the place where products are transacted and where the language of advertising, design, and public relations is consumed. Training, too, focused more and more on non-literate means of communication, is consumed.
Literacy and the machine
Man built machines which imitated the human arm and its functions, and thus changed the nature of work. The skills needed to master such machines were quite different from the skills of craftsmen, no longer transmitted from generation to generation, and less permanent. The Industrial Revolution made possible levels of efficiency high enough to allow for the maintenance of both machines and workers. It also made possible the improvement of machines and required better qualified operators, who were educated to extract the maximum from the means of production entrusted to them.
At present, due to the integrative mechanisms that humans have developed in the processes of labor division, natural language has lost, and keeps losing, importance in the population's practical experience. The lower quality of writing, reading, and verbal expression, as they apply to self-constitution through work and social life, is symptomatic of a new underlying structure for the pragmatic framework. Literacy-based means of expression and communication are substituted, not just complemented, by other forms of expression and communication. Or they are reduced to a stereotyped repertory that is easy to mechanize, to automate, and finally, to do away with. Overseeing an automated assembly line, serving a sophisticated machine, participating in a very segmented activity without having a real overview of it, and many similar functions ultimately means to be part of a situation in which the subject's competence is progressively reduced to fit the task. Before being rationalized away, it is stereotyped. The language involved, in addition to that of engineering, is continuously compressed, trimmed according to the reduced amount of communication possible or necessary, and according to situations that change continuously and very fast.
Today, a manual for the maintenance and repair of a highly sophisticated machine or weapon contains fewer words than images. The words still used can be recorded and associated with the image. Or the whole manual can become a videotape, laser disk, or CD-ROM, even network-distributed applications, to be called upon when necessary. The machine can contain its computerized manual, displaying pages (on the screen) appropriate to the maintenance task performed, generating synthesized speech for short utterances, and for canned dialogues. Here are some oddly related facts: The Treasury designs dollar bills that will tell the user their denomination; cars are already equipped with machines to tell us that we forgot to lock the door or fasten our seat belt; greeting cards contain voice messages (and in the future they will probably contain animated images). We can see in such gadgets a victory of the most superficial tastes people might have. But once the gratuitous moment is over, and first reactions fade away, we face a pragmatic situation which, whether synthesized messages are used or not, reflects an underlying structure better adapted to the complexities of the new scale of humankind.
The holographic dollar bill that declines its name might even become useless when transactions become entirely electronic. The voice of our cars might end up in a museum once the generalized network for guiding our automobiles is in place, and all we have to do is to punch in a destination and some route expectations ("I want to take the scenic route"). Moreover, the supertech car itself might join its precursors in the museum once work becomes so distributed that the energy orgy, so evident on the rush-hour clogged highways, is replaced by more rational strategies of work and life. Telecommuting is a timid beginning and a pale image of what such strategies might be. The speaking greeting card might be replaced by a program that remembers whose birthday it is and, after searching the mugshot of the addressee (likes rap, wears artificial flowers, is divorced, lives in Bexley, Ohio), custom designs an original message delivered with the individualized electronic newspaper when the coffee is ready. A modest company manufacturing screensavers, using today's still primitive applications in the networked world, could already do this.
Anticipation aside, we notice that work involves means of production that are more and more sophisticated. Nevertheless, the market of human work is at a relatively low level of literacy because human being do not need to be literate for most types of work. One reason for this is that the new machines incorporate the knowledge needed to fulfill their tasks. The machines have become more efficient than humans. The university system that is supposed to turn out literate graduates for the world of work obeys the same expectations of high efficiency as any other human practical experience. Universities become more and more training facilities for specific vocations, instead of carrying on their original goal of giving individuals a universal education in the domain of ideas.
The statement concerning the literacy level does not reflect the longing of humanists but the actual situation in the manpower market. What we encounter is the structurally determined fact that natural language is no longer, at least in its literate form, the main means of recording collective experience, nor the universal means of education. For instance, in all its aspects-work, market, education, social life-the practical experience of human self-constitution relies less on literacy and more on images. Since the role of images is frequently mentioned (formulated differently, perhaps), the reader might suspect this is only a way of speaking. The actual situation is quite different. Pictographic messages are used whenever a certain norm or rule has to be observed. This is not a question of transcending various national languages (as in airports or Olympic stadiums, or with traffic signals, or in transactions pertinent to international trade), but a way of living and functioning. The visual dominates communication today.
Words and sentences, affected by long-time use in various social, geographical, and historical contexts, became too ambiguous and require too much educational overhead for successful communication. Communication based on literacy requires an investment higher than the one needed for producing, perceiving, and observing images. Through images a positivist attitude is embodied, and a sense of relativity is introduced. Avoiding sequential reading, time and money consuming instruction, and the rigidity of the rules of literacy, the use of images reflects the drive for efficiency as this results from the new scale of human survival and future well-being. The change from literacy-oriented to visually-oriented culture is not the result of media development, as romantic media ecologists would like us to believe. Actually, the opposite is true. It is the result of fundamental ways of working and exchanging goods, within the new pragmatic framework that determined the need for these media in the first place, and afterwards made possible their production, dissemination, and their continuous diversification.
The change under discussion here is very complex. Direct demands of mediated praxis and the new, highly mediative means of mass communication (television, computers, telecommunication, networks), acting as instruments of integrating the individual in the mechanism of a global economy, are brought to expression in this mutation. Transition from language to languages, and from direct to indirect, multimediated communication is not reducible to abandoning logocentrism (a structural characteristic of cultures based on literacy) and the logic attached to it. We participate in the process of establishing many centers of importance that replace the word, and compete with language as we know it. These can be found in subculture, but also within the entrenched culture. One example is the proliferation of electronic cafés, where clients sipping their coffee on the West Coast can carry on a dialogue with a friend in Barcelona; or contact a Japanese journalist flying in one of the Soviet space missions; or receive images from an art exhibit opening in Bogota; or play chess with one of the miracle sisters from Budapest. These experiences take place in what is known generically as cyberspace.
The disposable human being
While it is true that just as many different curves can be drawn through a finite number of points, consistent observations can be subsumed under various explanations. Observations regarding the role and status of literacy might result in explanations that put radically different glosses on their results, but they cannot escape confirming the sense of change defined here. This change ultimately concerns the identity humans acquire in illiterate experiences of self-constitution.
Progressively abandoning reading and writing and replacing them with other forms of communication and reception, humans participate in another structural change: from centralization to decentralization; from a centripetal model of existence and activity, with the traditional system of values as an attraction point (religious, aesthetic, moral, political values, among others) to a centrifugal model; and from a monolithic to a pluralistic model. Paradoxically, the loss of the center also means that human beings lose their central role and referential value. This results in a dramatic situation: When human creativity compensates for the limited nature of resources (minerals, energy, food supply, water, etc.), either by producing substitutes or by stimulating efficient forms of their use, the human itself becomes a disposable commodity, more so the more limited its practical self-constitution is.
Within the pragmatics characteristic of the underlying literacy, machines were changed less often; but even when changed, the human operator did not have to be replaced. A basic set of skills sufficed for lifelong activity. Engineering was concerned with artifacts as long lasting as life. The pragmatic framework of illiteracy, as one of rapid change and progressively shorter cycles, made the human more easily replaceable. At the new scale of human activity, the very large and growing commodity of human beings decreases in value: in its market value, and in its spiritual and real value. The sanctity of life gives way to the intricate technology of life maintenance, to the mechanics of existence and the body-building shops. In the stock market of spare parts, a kidney or a heart, mechanical or natural, is listed almost the same way as pork bellies and cement, van Gogh's paintings, CD players, and nuclear headscrews. They are quoted and transacted as commodities. And they support highly specialized work, compensated at the level of professional football or basketball.
Projected into and among products of short-lived destiny, the human beings working to make them project a morality of the disposable that affects their own condition and, finally, the dissolution of their values. As a result of high levels of work efficiency, there are enough resources to feed and house humankind, but not enough to support practical experiences that redeem the integrity of the individual and the dignity of human existence. Within a literate discourse, with an embedded ideology of permanency, the morality of the disposable makes for good headlines; but since it does not affect the structural conditions conducive to this morality, it soon gets lost in the many other literate commentaries, including those decrying the decline of literacy.
The broader picture to which these reflections belong includes, of course, the themes of disposable language. If basic skills, as defined by Harvard professor and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Lester Thurow, and many educators and policy-makers, become less and less meaningful in the fast-changing world of work, it is easy to understand why little weight can be attached to one or another individual. Under the guise of basic skills, young and less than young workers receive an education in reading and writing that has nothing to do with the emergent practical experiences of ever shorter cycles. Companies in search of cheap labor have discovered the USA, or at least some parts of it, and achieve here efficiencies that at home, under labor laws originating from a literate pragmatics, are not attainable. Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, and many Japanese companies train their labor force in South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other states. The usefulness of the people these companies train is almost equal to that of the machine, unless the workers are replaced by automation.
The technological cycle and the human cycle are so closely interwoven that one can predicate the hybrid nature of technology today: machines with a live component. As a matter of fact, it is interesting to notice how progressively machines no longer serve us, but how we serve them. Entirely equipped to produce high quality desktop publishing, to process data for financial transactions, to visualize scientific phenomena, such machines require that we feed the data and run the program so that a meaningful output results. In the case in which the machine might not know the difference between good and bad typography, for example, the human operator supplies the required knowledge, based on intangible factors such as style or taste.
Scale of work, scale of language
Within each framework, be that of agriculture, pre-industrial, industrial, or post- industrial practical experiences, continuity of means and methods and of semiotic processes can be easily established. What should most draw our attention are discontinuities. We are going through such a discontinuity, and the opposition between the civilization of literacy and the civilization of illiteracy is suggestive of this. Evidently, within the new practical experiences through which our own identity is constituted, this is reflected in fast dynamics of economic change. Some industries disappear overnight. Many innovative ideas become work almost as quickly, but this work has a different condition. Discontinuity goes beyond analogy and statistical inferences. It marks the qualitative change which we see embodied in the new relations between work and language.
One of the major hypotheses of this book is that discontinuities, also described in dynamic systems theory as phase shifts, occur as scale changes. Threshold values mark the emergence of new sign processes. As we have seen, practical experiences through which humans continuously ascertain their reality are affected by the scale at which they take place. Immediate tasks, such as those characteristic of direct forms of work, do not require a division into smaller tasks, a decomposition into smaller actions. The more complex the task, the more obvious the need to divide it. But it is not until the scale characteristic of our age is reached that decomposition becomes as critical as it now is. In industrial society, and in every civilization prior to it, the relation between the whole (task, goal, plan) and the parts (subtasks, partial goals, successive plans) is within the range of the human's ability to handle it. Labor division is a powerful mechanism for a divide and conquer strategy applied to tasks of growing complexity. The generation of choices, and the ability to compensate for the limited nature of resources as these affect the equation of population growth, integrate this rule of decomposition.
Literacy, itself a practical experience of not negligible complexity, helps as long as the depth of the division into smaller parts, and the breadth of the integrative travail do not go beyond litercy's own complexity. When this happens, it is obvious that even if means belonging to literacy were effective in managing very deep hierarchies in order to allow for re-integration of the parts in the desired whole, the management of such means would itself go beyond the complexity we are able to cope with. Indeed, although very powerful in many respects, when faced with many pragmatic levels independent of language, literacy (through which language attains its optimal operational power) appears flat. Actually, not only literacy appears flat, but even the much glorified human intelligence.
Distinctions that result from deeper segmentation of work, brought about by the requirements of a scale of population and demand of an order of magnitude exponentially higher than any experience an individual can have, can no longer be grasped by single minds. Since the condition of the mind depends on interaction with other minds within practical experiences of self-constitution, it results that means of interaction different from those appropriate to sequentiality, linearity, and dualism are necessary. This new stage is not a continuation of a previous stage. It is even less a result of an incremental progression. The wheel, once upon a time a rounded stone, along with a host of wheel-based means of practical experiences, opened a perspective of progression. So did the lever, and probably alphabetic writing, and the number system. This is why the old and new could be linked through comparisons, metaphors, and analogies in a given scale of humankind. But this is also why, when the scale changes, we have to deal with discontinuity and avoid misleading translations in the language of the past.
A car was still, in some ways, the result of incremental progression from the horse-drawn carriage. An airplane, and later a rocket, are less along a line of gradual change, but still conceptually close to our own practical experience with flying birds, or with the physics of action and reaction. Nevertheless, a nuclear reactor is well beyond such experiences. The conceptual hierarchy it embodies takes it out of the realm of any previous pragmatic experience. The effort here is to tame the process, to keep it within a scale that allows for our use of a new resource of energy. The relation between the sizes actively involved-nuclear level of matter compared to the enormous machinery and construction-is not only beyond the power of distinction of individual minds, but also of any operators, unless assisted by devices themselves of a high degree of complexity. The Chernobyl meltdown suggests only the magnitudes involved, and how peripheral to them are the literacy-based experiences of energy management.