Among the mediating elements mentioned so far, language performs
its role in a particular way. Tools (such as pulleys, levers,
gears, etc.) extend the arms or the legs, that is, the human
body; language extends the coordinating capability of humans.
Words, no matter how well articulated, will not turn the stone or
lift the trunk of the fallen tree. They can be used to describe
the problem, to enlist help, to discuss how the task can be
accomplished, to render intelligible the sequence of
accomplishing it. Once writing was developed, coordination was
extended to apply from those physically present to people who
could read, or to whom a text could be read if one did not have
reading skills.
Language is in extension and succession of the pragmatic phase
of immediate and direct appropriation of objects. As Leonard
Bloomfield-probably a bit hasty in his generalization-observed,
"...the division of labor (...) is due to language." Although
different in nature from physical tools, language is
instrumental: It is applied on something and embodies
characteristics of human beings constituted in a practical
experience that made language possible and necessary.
The mediating nature of early words and early articulated
thoughts derived from their practical condition: medium for
self-constitution (the voice externalizes the anatomy pertinent
to producing and hearing sounds), and medium of exchange of
experience (pertinent to nature or to others in the group). Early
words are a record of the self-awareness of the human, denoting
body parts and elementary actions. They also reflect the
relational nature of the practical experience of those
constituting viable groups. Researchers infer this from words,
identified in proto-languages, that point to an other, or to
coalitions, or to danger. What distinguished words from animal
sounds was their coherence in extending the practical experience
of appropriating a uniform survival strategy.
Cave paintings, always regarded as a sequence of animal
representations, constitute what can be called a coherent image
of a small universe of human life. They are an inventory of a
sort-of fauna as opposed to humans, and as a reference to
animals different from humans-and a statement regarding the
importance of each kind of animal to human beings. By relating
animals and drawings of man and woman, they also show that there
is a third element to be considered: incipient implied symbolism.
This is not to say that we have language, even less a visual
language, articulated in the Paleolithic. But at Lascaux, Niaux,
Altamira, and at the caves in northern China, in images
preserved in the caves along the Lena River in Russia, there are
some patterns, such as the co-presence of bison and horses, and
the hinted association with male and female, for example, which
show that the visual can go beyond the immediate and suggest a
frame of work with mytho-magical elements.
Indeed, myths are singular mediating entities. They convey
experience and preserve it in oral societies. Magic is also a
mediating element, metaphysical in nature. Magic, in the
pre-literacy context, inserts, between humans and everything they
cannot understand, control, or tame, something (actions, words,
objects) that stands for the practical implications of this
failure. An amulet, for example, stands for the lack of
understanding of what it takes to be protected from evil forces.
Spells and gestures intended to scare away demons belong to the
same phenomenon. Though not without purpose, magic is action
with no immediate practical purpose, triggered by events
language could not account for. Myth is a pre-text for action
with a practical, experiential purpose. Each myth contains rules
for successful activity.
The context in which language, as a complex sign system, was
structured was also the context of social mediation: division of
social functions and integration in a cohesive social structure.
In syncretic forms of social life, with low efficiency, and
limited self-consciousness, there is little need for or
possibility of mediation. Once human nature was constituted in
the reality of practical, mytho-magical relations, both labor
division and mediation became part of the new human experience.
Tools for plowing, processing skins, and sharing experience (in
visual or verbal form) kept the human subject close to the
object of work or human relation. It is probably more in respect
to the unknown and unpredictable that mediation, via priests and
shamans in various rituals, was used in forms of magical
practice. Cave paintings, no less than cuneiform, and later
phonetic writing, constituted intermediaries inserted in the
world in which human beings asserted their presence or
questioned the presence of others.
The centralized state, which is a late form of social
organization, the church, and schools are all expressions of the
same need to introduce in a world of differences elements with
uniformizing and integrating power. What we today call politics
simply belongs to the self-constitution of the individual as
member of the politeia, the community. By extension, politics
means to effectively participate in the life of the community.
The nature of this participation changed enormously over time. It
started as participation in magic and ritual, and it evolved in
participation in symbolic forms, such as mancipatio, conventions
embodied in normative acts. In the framework of participation,
we can mention goal determination and forms of organization and
representation, as well as the payment of taxes to support the
mediators of this activity. At the beginning, participation was
an issue of survival; and survival, of natural condition,
remained the unwritten rule of social life for a very long time.
While in oral language there is no mediating element to preserve
the good and the right, in written language, law mediates and
justice, as much as God (actually a plurality of gods and
goddesses) or wisdom, are inserted in community affairs.