Within the civilization of literacy, recollection and the logic
attached to it are predominantly made through quoting. In the
literate framework, to know something means to be able to write
about it, thus reconfirming the logic of writing. Lives are
subject to memories, and diaries are our interpreted life,
written with some reader in mind: the beloved, one's children, a
posterity willing to acknowledge or understand. The literate
means of sharing in successive practical experiences contain the
expected logic and affect both the experience and its
communication. Everything seems to originate in the same
context: to know means to re-live the experience. The literate
gnoseology, with its implicit logic, is based on continuously
remaking, reconstituting the experience as a language
experience. This is why every form of writing based on the
structure embodied in literacy-literary or philosophic,
religious, scientific, journalistic, or political-is actually
rewriting.
The civilization of illiteracy is one of sampling, a concept
originating in genetics. To understand what this means, it is
useful to contrast quotation and sampling. Literate
appropriation in the form of quotation takes place in the
structure of literacy. Sequences are designed to accept someone
else's words. A quote introduces the hierarchy desired or
acknowledged by invoking authority or questioning it. Authorship
is exercised by producing a context for interpretation and
maintaining literate rules for their expression. Interpretations
are determined by the implicit expectation of reproducing the
deterministic structure of literacy, i.e., its inner logic. The
quote embodies centralism by establishing centers of interest
and understanding around the quoted.
Illiterate appropriation corresponds to a dissolution of
hierarchy, to an experience of dissolving it and doing away
with sequence, authorship, and the rules of logical inference.
It questions the notion of elementary meaningful units, extending
choices beyond well formed sentences, beyond words, beyond
morphemes or phonemes (which always mean a lot to linguists, but
almost nothing to the people constituting themselves in literate
language experiences), and beyond formal logic. These
techniques of sampling lead to actual undoing. Rhythms of words
can be appropriated, as writers did long before the technology
of musical sampling became available. So can the structure of a
sentence be appropriated, the feel of a text, or of many other
forms of expression that are not literacy-based (the visual
arts, for instance). Anything pertaining to a written
sentence-and for that matter to music, painting, odor, texture,
movement (of a person, of images, leaves on a tree, stars,
rivers, etc.)-can be selected, decomposed into units as small as
one desires, and appropriated as an echo of the experience it
embodies. Genetic configurations, as they apply to plants and
other living entities, can be sampled as well. Genetic splicing
maintains the relations to the broader genetic texture of plants
or animals. Spliced, a word, a sentence, or a text still
maintains relations to the experience in which it was
constituted.
These relations are enormously relativized, subjected to a logic
of vagueness. When they relate to what we write, they are
empowered by emotional components that the literate experience
expelled from literate expression. There is room for variation,
for spontaneity, for the accidental, where before the rigor and
logic of good writing stood guard against anything that might
disturb. When they relate to a biological structure, they
concern specific characteristics, such as composition or
perisability. Within the culture of sampling, the expectation of
a shared body of literacy and its attached logic are quite out
of touch with the dynamics of discarding the past as having no
other significance than as an extended alphabet from which one
can choose, at random or with some system, letters fitting the
act. The letters are part of a sui generis alphabet, changing as
practical experiences change, interacting with many logical rules
for using them or for understanding how they work. In this new
perspective, interpretation is always another instance of
constituting the language, not only using it. Biological
sampling, along with the associated splicing, also regards the
living as a text. Its purpose is to affect some components in
order to achieve desired qualities related to taste, look,
nutritional value, etc. This is the core of genetic engineering,
a practical experience in which the logic of life, expressed in
DNA sequences and configurations, takes precedence over the
logic of language and literacy, even if the text metaphor, so
prominent in genetics, plays such a major role. It is worth
recalling that the word text derives from the Latin word for to
weave, which was later applied to coherent collections of
written sentences.
Sampling does not necessarily transform everything into the gray
mass of information. In their practical experiences, people
sample emotions and feelings as they sample foods in
supermarkets, sample entertainment programs (television sampling
included), sample clothing, and even partners (for special
occasions or as potential spouses, partners in business, or
whatever else). As opposed to quoting, sampling- periodic,
random, or sequential-results in the severing from what literacy
celebrated as tradition and continuity. And it challenges
authorship. With increased sampling as a practical experience of
diversification, the human being acquires a very specific
freedom not possible within boundaries of the literate
experience. Tradition is complemented by forms of innovation
impossible within a pragmatic framework of progression and
dualistic (true-false) experience. This becomes even more clear
when we understand that sampling is followed by synthesis, which
might be neither true nor false, but appropriate (to some
degree). In the case of music, a device called a sequencer is
used for this purpose. The composite is synthetic. A new
experience, significant in itself at formal levels corresponding
to the constitution of ad hoc languages and their consumption in
the act, becomes possible. The mixmaster is a machine for
recycling arbitrarily defined constitutive units such as notes,
rhythms, or melodic patterns freed from their pragmatic
identity. What is significant is that the same applies to the
biological text, including the biology of the human being. In
some ways, genetic mutation acquires the status of a new means
for synthesizing new plants and animals, and even new materials.
The artistic technique of collage is based on a logic of choices
beyond those of realistic representations. Logical rules of
perspective are negated by rules of juxtaposition. Collage, as a
technique, anticipates the generalized stage of sampling and
compositing. It changes our notion of intellectual property,
trademark, and copyright, all expressions of a logic firmly
attached to the literate experience. The famous case of Dr.
Martin Luther King's plagiarism reflected aspects of primitive
culture carried over to the civilization of illiteracy: there is
no authorship; once something becomes public, it is free to be
shared. In the same vein, there is no Malcolm X left in the
poetry resulting from sampling his speeches, or anyone else's for
that matter.
Post-modern literature and painting result from sampling
exercises governed by an ear or eye keen to our day's vernacular
of machines and alienation. The same applies to plants, fruits,
and microbes insofar as sampling does not preserve previous
identities, but constitutes new ones, which we integrate in new
experiences of our own self-constitution. From the perspective
of logic, the procedure is of interest to the extent that it
establishes domains of logical appropriateness. Logical identity
is redefined from a dynamic perspective. From a pragmatic
viewpoint, certain experiences might be maximized by applying a
certain logic to them. Moreover, within some experiences,
complementary logics-each logic assigned to a precise aspect of
the system-can be used together in strategies of layered
management of the process, or in parallel processes, checked
against each other at defined instances. Strategies for
maximizing market transactions, for instance, integrate various
decision-making layers, each characterized by a different
logical assumption. We experience a process of replacing the
rigid logical framework of literate condition with many logical
frameworks, adapted to diversity.
In conclusion, one more aspect should be approached. Is it enough
to say that language expresses the biological and the social
identity of the human being? To deal with language, and more
specifically with the embodiment of language in literacy, means
to deal with everything that makes the human being the
bio-socio-politico- cultural entity that defines our species. The
logical appears to be an underlying element: bio-logical,
socio-logical, etc. The hierarchy will probably bother some,
since it seems that language assumes a higher place among the
many factors participating in the process of human
self-constitution. Indeed, in order for the human being to
qualify as zoon politikon, as Homo Sapiens, or Homo Ludens
(playful man) or Homo Faber, he or she must first qualify for
the interactions which each designation describes: on the
biological level, with other human beings, within structures of
common interest, in the realm of a human being's own nature.
This is why humans define themselves through practical
experiences involving signs.
At the various levels at which such signs are generated,
interpreted, comprehended, and used to conceive new signs, human
identity is ascertained. This is what prompted Felix Hausdorf to
define the human being as zoon semeiotikon- semiotic animal,
sign-using animal. Moreover, Charles Sanders Peirce considered
semiotics as being the logic of vagueness. Signs-whether
pictures, sounds, odors, textures, words (or combinations),
belonging to a language, diagram, mathematical or chemical
formalism, new language (as in art, political power, or
programming), genetic code, etc.-relate to human beings, not in
their abstraction but in the concreteness of their participation
in our lives and work.