In addition to the general background of understanding, there are
many levels, represented by the clues present in speech or
writing, or in other forms of expression and communication. For
example, a question is identified by some vocal expression
accepted as interrogation. In writing, the question is denoted by
a particular sign, depending on the particular language. But
other clues, no less important, are more deeply seated. They
refer to such things as intention, who is talking-man, woman,
child, policeman, priest-the context of the talk,
hierarchies-social, sexual, moral-and many other clues. Much
extra-language background knowledge goes into human language and
directs understanding from experience to language use. Dialogue
is more than two persons throwing sentences at each other. It is
a pragmatic situation requiring as much language as
understanding of the context of the conversation because each
partner in the dialogue constitutes himself or herself for the
other. Dialogue is the elementary cell of communication
experience. Within dialogue, language is transcended by the many
other sign systems through which human self-constitution takes
place. Dialogues make it clear that understanding language
becomes a supra- (or para-) linguistic endeavor. It requires the
discovery of the clues, in and outside language, and of their
relationship. But more importantly, it requires the
reconstruction of experience as it is embodied in background
knowledge.
By contrasting primitive orality to incipient writing, we can
understand that the process of establishing conventions is
motivated by the need to overrule concreteness and to access a
new cognitive realm that a different pragmatic context
necessitates. By understanding how experience affects their
relation, we can consider orality and writing in successive
moments of human pragmatics, i.e., within a concrete scale of
humankind. Indeed, when writing emerged, elements of orality
corresponding to a reduced scale of experience were reproduced
in its structure because they were continued at the cognitive
level. In our days, there is a far less pressing need to mimic
orality in written signs. Some will argue that 4 Sale, 4-Runner,
While-U-Wait, and Toys 'R' Us, among other such expressions, are
examples to the contrary. These attempts to compress language
represent ways of establishing visual icons, of achieving a
synthetic level better adapted to fast exchange of information.
We see many more examples in interactive multimedia, or in the
heavy traffic of Internet-based communication. There is no
literacy involved here, and no literacy is expected in decoding
the message. There is a strong new orality, with characteristics
reminiscent of previous orality. But the dominant element is the
visual as it becomes a new icon. The international depiction of
a valentine-shaped heart to represent the word love is one
example in this sense; the icons used in Europe on clothing care
labels are others.
Time reference in texts today is made difficult by the nature of
processes characteristic of our age: numerous simultaneous
transactions, distributed activity, interconnection, rapid
change of rules. These cannot be appropriately expressed in a
written text. In the global world, Now means quite a different
thing for individuals connected over many time zones. Sunrise
experienced on the Web page of the city of Santa Monica can be
immediately associated to poetic text through a link. But the
implicit experience of time (and space) carried by language and
made instrumental in literacy does not automatically refresh
itself.
It took thousands of years before humans became acquainted with
the conventions of writing. It is possible that some of these
conventions were assimilated in the hardware (brain) supporting
cognitive activity and progressively projected in new forms of
self-constitution. The practice of writing and the awareness of
the avenues it opened led to new conventions. Practical
endeavors, originating in the conventions of space and time,
implicit in the written (and the subsequent reading), resulted in
changed conventions. For instance, the discovery that time and
space could be fragmented, a major realization probably not
possible in the culture of orality, resulted in new practical
experiences and new theories of space and time.
Once writing became a practical experience and constituted a
legitimate reality, at a level of generality characteristic of
its difference from gestures, sounds, uttered words or
sentences, associations became possible at several levels of the
text. Some were so unexpected or unusual that understanding such
associations turned into a real challenge for the reader. This
challenge regarding understanding is obviously characteristic of
new levels, such as the self-referential, omnipresent in the
wired world of home pages. In some ways, language is becoming a
medium for witnessing the relation between the conscious,
unconscious, or subconscious, and language itself. The brain
surgery mentioned some pages ago suppressed the patient's
conscious recognition of objects or actions by inhibiting
certain neurons.
The unnatural, nonlinguistic use of language is studied by
psychologists, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence
researchers in order to understand the relation between language
and intelligence. This need to touch upon the biological aspects
of the practical experiences of speaking, writing, or reading
results from the premise pursued. Self-constitution of the human
being takes place while the biological endowment is projected
into the experience. Important work on what are called split-
brain patients-persons who, in order to suppress epileptic
attack, have had the connection between the two brain
hemispheres severed-shows that even the neat distinction
left-right (the left part of the brain is in charge of language)
is problematic. Researchers learned that in each practical
experience, our biological endowment is at work and at the same
time subject to self-reflection. Projecting a word like laugh in
the right field of vision results in the patients' laughing,
although in principle they could not have processed the word.
When asked, such patients explain their laughter through
unrelated causes. If a text says "Scratch yourself," they
actually scratch themselves, stating that it is because
something itches. Virtual reality practical experiences take full
advantage of these and other clinical observations. The absent
in a virtual reality environment is very often as important as
the present. On the back channels of virtual reality
interactions, not only words but also data describing human
reactions (turning one's head, closing the eyes, gesturing with
the hand) can be transmitted. Once fed back, such data becomes
part of the virtual world, adapted to the condition of the
person experiencing it. This is why interest in cognitive
characteristics of oral communication-of the primitive stages or
of the present-remains important.
Background information is more readily available in oral
communication. In orality, things people refer to are closer to
the words they use. Human co-presence in conversation results in
the possibility to read and translate the word under the guise of
a willingness by others to show what a particular word stands
for. In orality, the experience pertinent to the word is shared
in its entirety. This is possible because the appropriate world
of experience (corresponding to the circular scale of human
praxis) is so limited that the language is in a one-to-one
relation with what it describes. In some ways, the parent-child
relation is representative of this stage in the childhood of
humankind.
In the new orality of the civilization of illiteracy the same
one-to-one relation is established through strategies of
segmentation. The speaker and listener(s) share space and
time-and hence past, present, and, to a certain degree, future.
And even if the subject is not related to that particular space
and moment, it already sets a reference mechanism in place by
virtue of the fact that people in dialogue are people sharing a
similar experience of self-constitution. Far is far from where
they speak; a long time ago is a long time ago from the moment
of the verbal exchange. The acquisition of far, long (or short)
time ago is in itself the result of practical circumstances
leading to a more evolved being. We now take these distinctions
for granted, surprised when children ask for tighter qualifiers,
or when computer programs fail because we input information with
insufficient levels of distinction.
The realization of the frame of time and space occurred quite
late in the development of the species, within the scale of
linear relationships, and only as a result of repeated practical
experiences, of sequences constituting patterns. Once the
reference mechanism for both time and space was acknowledged and
integrated in new experiences, it became so powerful that it
allowed people to simplify their language and to assume much
more than what was actually said. In today's world, space and
time are constituted in experiences affected by the experience of
relativity. Accordingly, the orality of the civilization of
illiteracy is not a return to primitive orality, but to a
referential structure that helps us better cope with dynamism.
The space and time of virtual experiences are an example of
effective freedom from language, but not from the experiences
through which we acquired our understanding of time and space.
Computers able to perform in the space of human assumptions are
not yet on the horizon of current technological possibilities.