Anthropologists have tried to categorize the experience
transmitted in order to understand how orality and, later,
writing (primitive notation, in fact) refer to the particular
categories. Researchers point to the material
surroundings-resources, in the most general way-to successful
action, and to words as pertaining to the more general
framework (time, space, goals, etc.). Speculation goes as far as
to suggest that these human beings became increasingly dependent
on artifactual means of notation. As a consequence, they relied
less on the functions of the brain's right hemisphere. In turn,
this resulted in decreased acuteness of these functions. Some
even go so far as to read here an incipient Weltanschauung, a
perspective and horizon of the world. They are probably wrong
because they apply an explanatory model already influenced by
language (product of a civilization of literacy) on a very
unsettled human condition. In order to achieve some stability
and permanence, as dictated by the instinctive survival of the
species, this human condition was projected in various sequences
of signs still unsettled in a language. The very objects of
direct experience were the signs. This experience eventually
settled and became more uniform through the means and
constraints of orality.
Language is not a direct expression of experience, as the same
anthropologists think. In fact, language is also less
comprehensive than the signs leading to it. Before any
conversation can take place, something else-experience within
the species-is shared and constitutes the background for future
sharing. Face to face encounter, scavenging, hunting, fishing,
finding natural forms of shelter, etc., became themselves signs
when they no longer were related only to survival, but embodied
practical rules and the need to share. Sharing is the ultimate
qualifier for a sign, especially for a language.
Tools, cave paintings, primitive forms of notation, and rituals
addressed collective memory, no matter how limited this
collective was. Words addressed individual memory and became
means of individual differentiation. Individual needs and
motivations need to be understood in their relation to those of
groups. Signs and tools are elements that were integrated in
differentiation. To understand the interplay between them, we
could probably benefit from modern cognitive research of
distributed and centralized authority. Tools are of a
distributed nature. They are endlessly changed and tested in
individual or cooperative efforts. Signs, as they result from
human interaction, seem to emanate from anything but the
individual. As such, they are associated with incipient
centralized authority. These remarks define a conceptual
viewpoint rather than describe a reality to which none of us has
or can have access. But in the absence of such a conceptual
premise, inferences, mine or anybody else's, are meaningless.
The distinctions introduced above point to the need to consider
at least three stages before we can refer to language: 1.
integration in the group of one's kind in direct forms of
interaction: touching, passing objects from one to another,
recognition through sounds, gestures, satisfying instinctual
drives; 2.
awareness of differences and similarities expressed in direct
ways: comparison by juxtaposition, equalization by physical
adjustment; 3.
stabilization of expressions of sameness or difference, making
them part of the practical act.
From the time same and different were perceived in their degree
of generality, directness and immediateness was progressively
lost. Layers of understanding, together with rules for
generating coherent expressions, were accumulated, checked
against an infinity of concrete situations, related to signs
still used (objects, sounds, gestures, colors, etc.), and freed
from the demand of unequivocal or univocal meaning. All these
means of expression were socialized in the process of production
(the making of artifacts, hunting, fishing, plowing, etc.) and
self-reproduction until they became language. Once they became
language-talked about things and actions-this language removed
itself from the objects and the making or doing. This removal
made it appear more and more as a given, an entity in itself, a
reality to fear or enjoy, to use or compare one's actions to the
actions of others. The time it took for this process to unfold
was very long-hundreds of thousands of years (if we can imagine
this in our age of the instant). The process is probably
simultaneous to the formation of larger brains and upright
posture. It included biological changes connected to the self-
constitution of the species and its survival within a framework
different from the natural. It nevertheless acknowledged the
natural as the object of action and even change.
The functional need for distinctions explains morphological
aspects; the pragmatic context suggests how the shift from the
scale of one-to-one direct interaction to one-to-many by the
intermediary of language takes place. Concreteness, i.e.,
closeness to the object, is also symptomatic of the limited
shared universe. These languages are very localized because they
result from localized experiences. They externalize a limited
awareness, and make possible a very restricted development of
both the experience and the language associated with it. As we
shall see later on, a structurally similar situation can be
identified in the world today, not on some island, as the reader
might suspect, but on the islands of specialized work as we
constitute them in our economies. Obsessed with (or driven by)
efficiency, and oriented towards maximizing it, we use
strategies of integration and coordination which were not
possible in the ages of language constitution.
But let us get back to the place of the spoken (before the
emergence of notation and the written) and its cultural function
in the lives of human communities. The memory before the word
was the memory of repeated actions, the memory of gestures,
sounds, odors, and artifacts. Structuring was imposed from
outside-natural cycle (of day and night, of seasons, of aging),
and natural environment (riverside, mountainside, valley, wooded
region, grassy plains). The outside world gave the cues.
Participants acted according to them and to the cues of
previous experience as this was directly passed from one person
to another. Long before astrology, it was geomancy (association
of topographical features to people or outcomes of activity) that
inhabited people's reading of the environment and resulted in
various glyphs (petroglyphs, geoglyphs). Initially remembering
referred to a place, later on to a sequence of events. Only with
language did time come into the picture. Remembrance was dictated
minimally by instinct and was only slightly genetic in nature.
With the word, whose appearance implied means for recognizing
and eventually recording words, a fundamental shift occurred.
The word entered human experience as a relational sign. It
associated object and action. Together with tools, it constituted
culture as the unity between who we are (identity), what our
world is (object of work, contemplation, and questioning), and
what we do (to survive, reproduce, change). At this moment,
culture and awareness of it affected practical experiences of
human self-constitution. Simultaneously, an important split
occurred: genetic memory remained in charge of the human being's
biological reality, while social memory took over cultural
reality. Nevertheless, they were not independent of each other.
The nature of their interdependence is characteristic of each of
the changes in the scale of humankind that interests us here.
If we could describe what it takes for individuals to
congregate, what they need to know or understand in order to
hunt, to forage, to begin herding and agriculture, we would
still not know how well they would have to perform. In
retrospect, it seems that there was a predetermined path from the
stage of primitive development to what we are today. Assuming
the existence of such a path, we still do not know at what
moment one type of activity no longer satisfied expectations of
survival and other paths needed to be pursued. Once we involve
the notion of scale in our cognitive modeling, we get some
answers important for understanding not only orality and
writing, but also the process leading to literacy and the
post-literate.