The history of culture has recorded numerous attacks against
writing, culminating, probably, in Marshall McLuhan's philosophy
(1964): alphabetic cultures have uniformized, fragmented, and
sequentialized the world, generating an excessive rationalism,
nationalism, and individualism. Here we have, in a succinct list,
the indictment made of Gutenberg's Galaxy. Commenting on E. M.
Forster's A Passage to India, McLuhan remarked: "Rational, of
course, has for the West long meant uniform and continuous and
sequential. In other words, we have confused reason with
literacy, and rationalism with a single technology." That
McLuhan failed to acknowledge the complementary language of
design and engineering, with its own rationality, is a
shortcoming, but does not change the validity of the argument.
The consequences of these attacks-as much as they can be judged
from the historical perspective we have since gained-have
nevertheless not been the abatement of writing or of its
influence. In the same vein, the need to proceed to an
oral-visual culture has been idealistically suggested (Barthes'
well known plea of 1970 can be cited).
There is no doubt that all the plans devised by architects,
artisans, and designers of artifacts belong to a praxis uniting
oral (instructions to those transposing the plan into a product)
and visual cultures. Many such plans, embodying ideas and
concepts probably as daring as those we read in manuscripts and
later in books, vanished. Some of the artifacts they created did
withstand the test of time. Even if the domination of the
written word somehow resulted in a relatively low awareness of
the role drawings played over time, experiences were shaped by
them and knowledge transmitted through them. Drawings are
holistic units of a complexity difficult to compare to that of a
text.
The meaning conferred by the intermediary of writing is brought
about through a process of generalization, or
re-individualization: What is it for the individual reading and
understanding it? It inversely travels the route that led from
speech to writing, from the concrete to the abstract, from the
analytic to the synthetic function of language. At any given
time, it looks as though we have, on the one hand, the finite
reality of signs (alphabet, words, idiomatic expressions) and,
on the other, the practically infinite reality embodied in the
language sequences or ideas expressed. In view of this, the
question arises regarding the source of ideas and the relation
between signs (words, in particular) and their assigned
meanings, or the content that can be communicated using the
language. Meaning is conjured in Western culture through additive
mechanisms, similar to those of mixing pigments. In Eastern
culture, meaning is based on subtractive mechanisms, similar to
those of mixing light.
Alphabetic writing, although more simple and stabilized, is
really more difficult than ideographic writing. The experience
from which it results is one of abstraction. Henceforth, it
subjects the readers of the alphabetic text to the task of
filling the enormous gap separating the graphic sign from its
referent with their own experience. The assumption of the
literate practical experience is that literacy can substitute for
the reference through history or culture. Readers of ideographic
texts have the advantage of the concreteness of the
representation. Even if Chinese characters stand for specific
Chinese words, as John DeFrancis convincingly showed, the
experience of that writing system remains different from that of
Western alphabets. Since every language integrates its own
history as the summary of the practical activity in which it was
constituted, reading in a language of a foreign experience means
that one must step- by-step invent this writing.
Research undertaken in the last 15 years shows that at a certain
stage, aphasia brings on a regression from alphabet to image
reading as design, as pictographic, iconic reading. Letters lose
their linguistic identity. The aphasic reader sees only lines,
intersections, and shapes. Ideas expressed in writing crumble
like buildings shaken by an earthquake. What is still perceived
is the similarity to concrete things. The decline from the
abstract to the concrete can be seen as a socio-cultural accident
taking place against the background of a natural (biological)
accident.
In our days we encounter symptoms similar to those described
above, testifying to a sort of collective aphasia in reverse.
Indeed, writing is deconstructed and becomes graffiti notation,
shorthand statements freed of language, and defying literacy. For
a while, graffiti was criminalized. Later on it was framed as
art, and the market absorbed the new product among the many
others it negotiates. What we probably refused to see is how
deep the literacy of graffiti goes, where its roots are, how wide
the extensions, and how much aphasia in its writing and reading.
After all, it was not only in the New York subway that trains
were literally turned into moving papers or moving books,
issued as often as authority was circumvented. Much of the public
hated graffiti because it obliterated legitimate communication
and a sense of neatness and order that literacy continuously
reinforced. But many also enjoyed it. Rap music is the musical
equivalent of graffiti. Gang rituals and fights are a
continuation of these. Messages exchanged on the data
highways-from e-mail to Web communication-often display the same
characteristics of aphasia. Concreteness is obsessively pursued.
:) (the smiley) renders expressions of pleasure useless, while
(: (the grince) warns of being flamed. On the digital networks
of today's furious exchange of information, collective aphasia
is symptomatic of many changes in the cognitive condition of the
people involved in its practical experiences. Neither
opportunistic excitement nor dogmatic rejection of this
far-reaching experience can replace the need to understand what
makes it necessary and how to best benefit from it. More private
languages and more codes than ever circulate as kilo- and
megabytes among individuals escaping any form of regulation.
On the increasingly rewarding practical experiences of
networking, literacy is challenged by transitory, partial
literacies. Literacy is exposed in its infatuation and
emptiness, although not discarded from among the means of
expression and communication defining the human being. It is
often ridiculed for not being appropriate to the new
circumstances of the practical and spiritual experience of a
humankind that has outgrown all its clothes, toys, books,
stories, tools, and even conflicts.
A legitimate follow-up question is whether the literate
experience of the word contributes to its progressive lack of
determination, or the change of context affects the
interpretation, i.e., the semantic shift from determinate to
vague. Probably both factors play a role in the process. On the
one hand, literacy progressively exhausts its potential. On the
other, new contexts make it simultaneously less suited as the
dominant medium for expression, communication, and signification
of ideas. For instance, the establishment of a vague meaning of
democracy in political discourse leads to the need for strong
contexts, such as armed conflicts, for ascertaining it. In the
last 10 years we have experienced many such conflicts, but we
were not prepared to see them in conjunction with the forces at
work in facilitating higher levels of efficiency according to
the new scale that humankind has reached.
There is also the attempt to use language as context free as
possible-the generalities of all demagogy (liberal,
conservative, left or right, religious or emancipated) can serve
as examples. But so can all the crystal ball readings, palm
readings, horoscopes, and tarot cards, revived in recent years
against the background of illiteracy. None of these is new, but
the relative flourishing of the market of vagueness and
ambiguity, reflective of a deviant functioning of language, is.
Together with illiteracy, they are other symptoms of the change
in pragmatics discussed in this book.
These and other examples require a few more words of explanation
regarding changes in the functions of language. It is known that
the oldest preserved cave drawings are marks (indexical signs)
of an oral context rather than representations of hunting scenes
(even though they are often interpreted as such). They testify
more to those who drew them than to what the drawing is about.
The decadent literacy of mystified messages does the same. It
speaks about their writers more than about their subject, be
this history, sociology, or anthropology. And the increased oral
and visual communication, supported by technology, defines the
post-literate condition of the human cognitive dimension. The
transition from speech to writing corresponds to the shift from
the pragmatic-affective level of human praxis to the
pragmatic-rational level of linear relations among people and
their environment. It takes place in the context of the
evolution from the syncretic to the analytic. The transition from
literacy to literacies corresponds to the pragmatics of
non-linear relations, and results from the evolution from
analytic to synthetic. These affirmations, at least as far as the
civilization of literacy is concerned, apply to the universe of
European cultures and their later extensions. The cultures of
the Far East are characterized by language's tendency to present,
not to explain. The analytical structure of logical thought
(which will be discussed in another chapter) is actually formed
in the sentence structure of speech, which is fundamentally
different in the two cultures mentioned. The imperative energy of
the act of expressing confers on the Chinese language, for
example, a continuous state of birth (speech in the act). The
preeminence of the act in Oriental culture is reflected by the
central position the verb occupies. Concentration around the
verb guides thought towards the relationship between condition
and conditioned.
The experience of logic characteristic of European cultures
(under the distinctive mark of classical Greek philosophy) shows
that the main instrument of thinking is the noun. It is freer
than the verb (tied to the forms it specifies), more stable,
capable of reflecting identity, invariance, and the universal.
The logic founded on this premise is oriented toward the search
for unity between species and genus. European writing and
Oriental ideographic writing have each participated in this
process of defining logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics.
From a historic perspective, they are complementary. Recalling
the history of knowledge and history per se, we can say that the
European Occident achieved the meaning of knowledge and world
control, while the Orient achieved self-knowledge and
self-control. It would seem utopian (and with vast historical,
social, ideological, and political implications) to imagine a
world harmoniously uniting these meanings. However, this would
imply, as the reader can easily surmise, changes in the status
of literacy in both cultures. This is exactly the direction of
the changes we witness, as languages function towards
convergence in the two cultures mentioned.
Literacy is not only a medium of exchange between cultures; it
also sets boundaries among them. This holds true for both
Western and Far Eastern (and any other) civilization. Japan, for
instance, despite the spectacular effort of assimilation and
development of new technologies, maintains inside its national
boundaries a framework quite well suited to its traditional
literacy. Outside, it assimilates other literacies. In different
ways, this holds true for China. It is willing to build its
internal network (Intranet) without connecting it to the
all-encompassing net (Internet) through which we experience some
aspects of globality.
The organization of hierarchy, which made the object of many
studies telling the West why Japan succeeds better in economic
terms, is centered around the unity semmai-kohai, i.e.,
senior-junior. Within the pragmatic framework of a literacy
different from that of the Western world, a logic and ethics
pertinent to the distinction mentioned evolved. The moral basis
of the precedence of the senior over the junior is pragmatic in
nature. The Chinese formula (cho-jo-no-jo) results from a
practical experience encoded not only in language but also in
the system of ranking. In fact, what is acknowledged is both
experience and performance, expressed by the Japanese in the
categories of kyu, referring to proficiency, and dau, referring
to cumulative results. The system applies to economic life,
calligraphy, wrestling (sumo), and flower arrangement (ikebana),
as well as to social rank. In the dynamics of current changes,
such systems are also affected.
From the viewpoint of language functions, we notice that national
language can serve for insulation, while adopted
language-English, in particular-can serve as a bridge to the
rest of the world. Nevertheless, Japanese society, like all
contemporary societies, is more and more confronted with the
world in its globality, and with the need to constitute
appropriate means for expression, communication and signification
pertinent to the global world. While Japan is an example of many
literate prejudices at work, rigidly hierarchic, discriminating
against women and foreigners, dogmatic, it also exemplifies the
understanding of changing circumstances for human practical
experiences of self-constitution as Japanese, and as members of
the integrated world community as well. Consequently, new
literacies emerge within its homogeneous cultural environment,
as they emerge in countries such as China, Korea, and Indonesia,
and in the Arab nations. As a result, we experience changes in
the nature of the relations between the cultures of the Far
East, Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the West. The
process expands, probably more slowly than one might expect, to
the African and South American continents.
Global economy requires new types of relations among nations and
cultures, and these relations need to correspond to the dynamics
of the new pragmatic framework that has emerged against the
background of the new scale of human activity. The identity urge
expressed in the multiculturalism trend of our days will find in
the past its most unreliable arguments. The point is proven by
the naive misrepresentation of past events, facts, and figures
through the activists of the movement. Multiculturalism
corresponds to the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy:
from the uniqueness and universality of one dominating mode to
plurality, not limited to race, lifestyle, or cultures. Whoever
sees multiculturalism as an issue of race, or feminism as one of
gender (against the background of history), will not be able to
design a course of action to best serve those whose different
condition is now acknowledged. A different condition results in
different abilities, and thus different ways of projecting one's
identity in the practical experience of self-constitution. The
past is irrelevant; emphasis is always on the future.