The term alienation requires a short explanation. Generally, it
is used to describe the estrangement, through work, of human
beings from the object of their effort. Awareness of having
one's life turned into products, which then appear to those who
made them as entities in themselves, open to anybody to
appropriate them in the market, is an expression of alienation.
There are quite a number of other descriptions, but basically,
alienation is a process of having something that is part of us
(our bodies, thoughts, work, feelings, beliefs, etc.) revealed
as foreign. Rooting the explanation of this very significant
process of alienation (and of the concept representing it in
language) in the establishment and use of signs, makes possible
the understanding of its pragmatic implications.
Awareness of signs is awareness of the difference between who we
are and how we express our identity. In the case of signs
representing some object (the drawing of the object or of the
person, the name, social security number, passport, etc.), the
difference between what is represented and the representation is
as much an issue of appropriateness (why we call a table table
or a certain woman Mary) as it is one of alienation. The
conscious use of signs most probably results from the observation
people make that their thoughts, feelings, or questions are
almost always imperfectly expressed. Two things happen, probably
at the same time: 1.
No longer dealing directly with the object, or intended action,
but with its representation, makes it more difficult to share
with others experiences pertinent to the object. 2.
The interpretation being no longer one of the direct object, or
the intended action, but of its representation, it leads to new
experiences, and thus associations-some confusing, and others
quite stimulating. The image was still close to the object; the
confusion regarded actions. Writing is remote from objects,
though actions can be better described since differentiation of
time is much easier. We know by now that moving images, or
sequences of photographs of the action, are even better for this
purpose.
With the written word, even in the most primitive use of it,
events become the object of record. Relations, as well as
reciprocal commitments among community members, can also be put
in the records. Norms can be established and imposed. A
fundamental change, resulting from the increased productivity of
the newly settled communities, is accounted for in writing.
People no longer deal with work in order to live (in order to
survive, actually), but with life dedicated to work. Writing,
more than previously used signs (sounds, images, movements,
colors), estranges human beings from the environment and from
themselves. Some feelings (joy, sadness), some attitudes (anger,
mistrust) become signs and, once expressed, can be written down
(e.g., in letters, wills). In order to be shared, thoughts go
through the same process, and so does everything else pertaining
to life, activity, change, illness, love, and death.
It was stated many times that writing and the settlement of human
beings are related. So are writing and the exchange of goods, as
well as what will become known as labor division. While the use
of verbal language makes possible the differentiation of human
praxis, the use of written language requires the division
between physical and non-physical work. Writing requires skills,
such as those needed for using a stylus to engrave in wax or
clay, quill on parchment, later the art of calligraphy. It
implies knowledge of language and of its rules of grammar and
spelling. There is a great difference between writing skills and
the skills needed for processing animal skins, meat, various
agricultural products, and raw materials. The social status of
scribes proves only that this difference was duly acknowledged.
It should be added here that the few who mastered writing were
also the few who mastered reading. Nevertheless, some historic
reference points to the contrary: in the 13th century,
non-reading subjects were used as scribes because the accuracy
of their undisturbed copying was better than that of those who
read. This reference is echoed today in the use of non-English
speaking operators to key-in texts, i.e., to transfer accumulated
records into digital databases. And while the number of readers
increased continuously, the number of writers, lending their
hands as scribes to real writers, remained small for many
centuries.
Literacy started as an elitist overhead expenditure in primitive
economies, became an elitist occupation surrounded by prejudices
and superstition, expanded after technological progress (however
rudimentary) facilitated its dissemination, and was finally
validated in the marketplace as a prerequisite for the higher
efficiency of the industrial age. Primitive barter did not rely
on and did not require the written word, although barter
continued even after the place of written language became
secure. In barter, people interact by exchanging whatever they
produce in order to fulfill their immediate needs within a
diversified production.
The alienation peculiar to barter and the alienation
characteristic of a market relying on the mediating function of
written language are far from being one and the same. In short,
exchanging is fundamentally different from selling and buying.
Products to be exchanged still bear the mark of those who sweat
to produce them. Products to be sold become impersonal; their
only identity is the need they might satisfy or sometimes
generate. Myth, as a set of practical programs for a limited
number of local human experiences, no longer satisfied
exigencies of a community diversifying its experience and
interacting with communities living in different environments.
This contrast of market forms characteristic of orality and of
incipient writing is related to the contrast between myth
transmitted orally and mythology, associated with the
experience of writing. Language in its written form appeared as a
sui generis social memory, as potential history.
The obsession with genealogies (in China, India, Egypt, among the
Hebrews, and in oral culture in general) was an obsession with
human sequences stored in a memory with social dimensions. It
was also an obsession with time, since each genealogical line is
simultaneously a historic record-who did what, when and where;
who followed; and how things changed. Most of these aspects are
only implicit in genealogy. In oral culture, genealogies were
turned into mnemonic devices, easily adjustable to new
conditions of life, but still circular, and just as easily
transformable from a record of the past into a command for the
future. In its incipient phases as notation and record,
genealogy still relied on images to a great extent (the family
tree), but also on the spoken, maintaining a variability similar
to that of the oral. Nevertheless, the possibility for more
stabilized expression, for storing, for uniformity, and
consistency was given in the very structure of writing. These
were progressively reached in the first attempts to articulate
ideas, concepts, and what would become the corpus of theoria-
contemplation of things translated into language-on which the
sciences and humanities of yesterday, and even some of today,
are based. Theories are in some ways genealogies, with a root
and branches representing hypotheses and various inferences.
Written language extended the permanence of records
(genealogies, ownership, theories, etc.) and facilitated access
through relatively uniform codes.
In the city-states of ancient Greece, writing alerted people
working within the pragmatic constraints of orality to the
dangers involved in a new mechanism of expression and
communication. Writing seemed to introduce its own inaccuracies,
either because of a deliberate attitude towards certain
experiences, or as a result of systematic avoidance of
inconsistency, which ended up affecting the records of facts. As
we know, facts are not intrinsically consistent in their
succession. Therefore, we still use all kinds of strategies to
align them, even if they are obliquely random. In the oral mode,
as opposed to procedures later introduced through writing,
consistency was maintained by a succession of adaptations in the
sequence of conversations through which records were
transmitted. Within oral communication, there is a direct form of
criticism, i.e., the self-adjusting function of dialogue.
Completeness and consistency are different in conversation
(open-ended) than in written text, and even more different in
formal languages.
Memory itself was also at issue. Reliance on the written might
affect memory- which was the repository of a people's tradition
and identity in the age of orality- because it provided an
alternative medium for storage. The written has a different
degree of expression and leaves a different impression than the
oral. Writing, confined to those who read, could also affect
constitution and sharing of knowledge. Writing was characterized
as superficial, not reaching the soul (again, lacking
expressiveness), interfering between the source of knowledge and
the receiver of any lesson about knowledge. Spoken words are the
words of the person speaking them. A written text seems to take
on a life of its own and appears as external, alien. The written
is given and does not account for differences among human
beings; the spoken can be adapted or changed, its coherence
dependent upon the circumstances of the dialogue. There are
societies today (the Netsidik, the Nuer, the Bassari, to name a
few) that still prefer the oral to the written. Within their
pragmatic framework, the live expression of the human uttering
the words in the presence of others conveys more information than
the same words can in writing.
The memory of a literate society becomes more and more a
repository of the various mediations in social life and loses
its relation to direct experience. Things said (what the Greeks
called legomena) are different from things done (dromena). The
written word connects to other words, not to things done. And so
does the sentence, when it acquires its status as a relatively
complete unit of language. But the real change is brought about
by the written, whether on papyrus, clay, scroll or tablet, or in
stone or lead. Such a page connects to other written pages and
to writing in general. Thus, things done disappear in the body
of history, which becomes the collection of writings,
eventually stored on bookshelves. The meaning of history is
expressed in the variability of the connections ascertained from
one text to another. When the here and now of dromena are
expurgated, we remain only with the consciousness of sequences.
This is a gain, but also a loss: the holistic meaning of
experience vanishes.
How much of this kind of criticism, opposing the oral to the
written, is relevant to the phenomena of our time cannot be
evaluated in a simple statement. Language has changed so much
that in order to understand texts originating at the time of this
criticism, we have to translate and annotate them. Some are
already reconstituted from writings of a later time (i.e., of a
different pragmatic framework), or even from translations. There
is no direct correspondence between the literacy of emergent
writing and that of automated writing and reading. In some cases
we have to define a contextual reference in the absence of which
large parts of these recuperated texts make little sense, if
any, to people constituted in literacy and in a pragmatic reality
so different from that of thousands of years ago. Even written
words are dependent on the context in which they are used. In
other words, although it seems that written language is less
alive than conversation, and less bound to change, it actually
changes. We write today, using technologies for word processing,
in ways different from any other practical experience of
writing.
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 They
Understand 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.