Language signs and other signs are mediating devices between the
object represented in the market and the interpretant-the human
beings constituting themselves in the process of interpretation,
including satisfaction of their needs and desires. No matter
what type of market we refer to, it is a place and time of
mediations. What defines each of the known markets (barter,
farmers' markets and fairs, highly regulated markets, so-called
free markets, underground markets) is the type of mediation more
than the merchandise or the production process. Of significance
is the dynamic structure involved. It is obvious that if
anything anticipated our current experience of the market, it
was the ritual.
Objects (things, money, ideas, process), the language used to
express the object, and the interpretation, leading or not to a
transaction, constitute the structural invariable in every type
of socio-economic environment. In the so-called free market
(more an abstraction than a reality) and in rigidly planned
economies, the relation among the three elements is the
variable, not the elements themselves. Interpretation in a given
context can be influenced in the way associations are made
between the merchandise and its representations.
The history of language is rich in testimony to commerce, from
the very simple to the very complex forms of the latter.
Language captures ownership characteristics, variations in
exchange rates, the ever-expanding horizon of life facilitated
through market transactions. It is within this framework that
written records appear, thus justifying the idea that, together
with practical experiences of human self-constitution, market
processes characteristic of a limited scale of exchange of values
are parents to notation, to writing and to literacy.
Expectations of efficiency are instantiated, within a given scale
of human activity, in market quantities and qualities. Nobody
really calculates whether rice production covers the needs of
humankind at any given instance, or if enough entertainment is
produced for the billions living on Earth today. The immense
complexity of the market machine is reflected in its dynamics,
which at a certain level of its evolution could no longer be
handled by, or made subject to the rules and expectations of
literacy. Market processes follow a pattern of self-organization
under the guise of many parameters, some of which we can
control, others that escape our direct influence upon them.
Languages of extreme specialization are part of market dynamics
in the sense that they offer practical contexts for new types of
transactions. Netconomy started as a buzzword, joining net,
network, and economy. In less than one year, the term was used
to describe a distributed commercial environment where extremely
efficient transactions make up an increasing part of the global
economy. But the consequences of the Netconomy are also local:
distribution channels can be eliminated, with the effect of
accelerating commercial cycles and lowering prices. Computers,
cars, software, and legal services are more frequently acquired
through the virtual shops of the Netconomy.
To see how the practical experience of the market freed itself
from language and literacy, let us now examine the market
process as semiosis in its various aspects. As already stated,
in trading products, people trade themselves. Various qualities
of the product (color, smell, texture, style, design, etc.), as
well as qualities of its presentation (advertising, packaging,
vicinity to other products, etc.), and associated characteristics
(prestige, ideology) are among the implicit components of this
trade. Sometimes the object per se-a new dress, a tool, wine, a
home-is less important than the image it projects. Secondary
functions, such as aesthetics, pleasure, conformity, override the
function of fulfilling needs. In market semiosis, desire proves
to be just as important, if not more so, than need. In a large
part of the world, self-constitution is no longer just a
question of survival, but also one of pleasure. The higher the
semiotic level of the market in a context of decadent plenty-the
number of sign systems involved, their extent and variety-the
more obvious the deviations from the rule of merely satisfying
needs.
Human activity that aims at maintaining life is very different
from the human activity that results in surplus and
availability for market transaction. In the first case, a
subsistence level is preserved; in the second, new levels of
self-constitution are made possible. Surplus and exchange,
initially made possible through the practical experience of
agriculture, constituted a scale of human activity that required
human constitution in signs, sign systems, and finally language.
Surplus can be used in many ways, for which sign and later
language differentiation became progressively necessary.
Rituals, adornment, war, religion, means of accumulation, and
means of persuasion are examples of differentiations. All these
uses pertained to settled patterns of human interaction and led
to products that were more than mere physical entities to be
consumed. To repeat, they were projections of individual
self-constitution.
Behind each product is a cycle of conception, manufacture, and
trade, and an attached understanding of utility and permanence.
With the advent of writing and reading, from its rudimentary
forms to the forms celebrated in literacy, and its
participation in the constitution of the market, the avenue was
opened towards using what was produced in surplus to cover the
need to maintain life, so that more surplus could be generated.
The market of merchandise, services, slaves, and ideas was
completed by the market of salaried workers, earning money for
their life's salt, as Roman soldiers did. These belong to the
category of human beings constituting themselves in the
pragmatic framework of an activity in which production (work) and
the means of production separated. The language through which
workers constituted themselves underwent a similar
differentiation. As work became more alienated from the product,
a language of the product also came into being.