Mediation also implies breaking the immediate connection, to
escape the domination of the present-shared time and space-and
to discover relations characteristic of adjacency, i.e.,
neighboring in time and space. Adjacency can be in respect to
the past, as expressed through the practice of keeping burial
records. It can also be in respect to the future. The magic
dimension of the ritual focused on desired things-weather, game,
children-exemplifies this aspect. The notion of adjacency can
pertain also to neighboring territories, inhabited by others
involved in similar or slightly different practical forms of
experience. Regardless of the type of adjacency, what is
significant is the element that separates the immediate from the
mediated. The expanding horizon of life required means to
assimilate adjacency in the experience of continuous human
self-constitution. Language was among such means and became even
more effective when a medium for storing and
disseminating-writing-was established. In orality-dominated
social life, opinion was the product of language activity, and
it had to be immediate. In writing, truth was sought and
preserved. Accordingly, logic centered around the true-false
distinction.
Literate societies are societies which accept the value of
speaking, writing, and reading, and which operate under the
assumption that literacy can accomplish a unifying function.
Mediation and the associated strategy of integration relied on
language for differentiation of tasks and for coordination of
resulting activities and products. Language projects both a
sense of belonging to and living in a context of life. It
embodies characteristics of the individuals sharing perceptions
of space and time integrated in their practical experiences and
expressed in vocabulary, grammar, and idioms, and in the logic
that language houses.
Language is simultaneously a medium of uniformity and a means of
differentiation. Within continuously constituted language,
individual expression and various non-standard uses of language
(literary and poetic, probably the most notorious of these) are
a fact of life. In the practical constitution of language for
religious or judicial purposes, or in order to give historic
accounts of scientific phenomena, expression is not uniform.
Neither is interpretation. As we know from early attempts at
history, there is little difference between languages used to
describe relations of ownership (of animals, land, shelter) and
texts on astronomy or navigation, for instance. The lunar
calendar and the practical experience of navigation determined
the coherence of writings on the subject. There is very little
difference in the work of people who accounted for numbers of
animals and numbers of stars. Once differentiation of work took
place, language allowed for expressions of differences. Behind
this change of language is the change of the people involved in
various aspects of social life, i.e., their projection into a
world appropriated through practical experiences based on the
human ability to differentiate-between useful and harmful,
pleasant and unpleasant, similar and dissimilar.
In order to distinguish the level at which a language is
practiced, people become aware of language's practical
consequences, of its pragmatic context. Plato's dialogues can be
read as poetry, as philosophy, or as testimony to the state of
language-based practical experiences in use at the time and
place in which he was active. What is not clear is how a person
operating in and constituting himself in the language identifies
the level of an oral or written text, and how the person
interprets it according to the context in which it was written.
The question is of more than marginal importance to our
understanding of how Plato related to language or how people
today relate to language: either by overstating its importance
or by ignoring it to the extent of consciously discarding
language, or certain aspects of it.
Here is where the issue of mediation becomes critical. The
inserted third- person, text, image, theory-should understand
both the language of the reader and the language of the text.
More generally, the third should at any instance understand the
language of the entities it mediates between. States, as
political entities, are constituted on this assumption; so are
legal systems, religion, and education. Each such mediating
entity introduces elements into the social structure that will
finally be expressed in language and assimilated as accepted
value. They will become the norm. The process is sometimes
extremely tight. Retroaction from mediating function to
language and back to action entails progressive fine-tuning,
never-ending in fact, since human beings are in continuous
biological and social change.
Mediations lead to segmentation. The coordination of mediations
is necessary in order to recover the integrality (wholeness) of
the human being in the output of the practical experience.
Mediations, although coordinated by language or other mediating
means, and subject to integration in the outcome of activity,
introduce elements of tension, which in turn require new
mediation and thus progressive specialization. When the sequence
of mediations expands, the complexity of integration can easily
exceed the degree of complexity of the initial task. The
efficiency reached is higher than that of direct action or of
low levels of labor division. With each new mediation, the human
being constitutes a body of practical knowledge that can be used
again and again. The necessary integrative dimension of
mediations makes the strategy of using mediating entities, along
with the appropriate coordination mechanism, socially relevant
and economically rewarding. One can speak of mediation between
rational and emotional aspects of human life, between thought
and language, language and images, thought and means of
expression, communication and signification. Regardless of its
particular aspect, mediation is an experience of cognitive
leverage.