Exchanging goods pertinent to survival corresponds to a scale of
human praxis that guarantees coherence and homogeneity. People
who have excess grain but need eggs, people who offer meat
because they need fruit or tools, do not require instructions
for using what they obtain in exchange for what they offer. Small
worlds, loosely connected, constitute the universe of their
existence. The rather slow rhythm of production cycles equals
that of natural cycles. A relatively uniform lifestyle results
from complementary practical experiences only slightly
differentiated in structure. Together, these characteristics
constitute a framework of direct sharing of experience. This
market, as limited as it is, forms part of the social mechanism
for sharing experience.
Today's markets, defined by a complexity of mediations, are no
longer environments of common or shareable experience. Rather,
they are frameworks of validation of one type of human
experience against another. This statement requires some
explanation. Products embody not only material, design, and
skills, but also a language of optimal functioning. Thus they
project a variety of ways through which people constitute
themselves through the language of these products. Accordingly,
the market becomes a place of transaction for the many languages
our products speak. The complexity of everything we produce in
the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy is the
result of expectations made possible by levels of human
efficiency that literacy can only marginally support.
This comes at a cost, in addition to the dissolution of literacy:
the loss of a sense of quality, because each product carries
with itself not only its own language, but also its own
evaluation criteria. The product is one of many from which to
choose, each embodying its own justification. Its value is
relative, and sometimes no value at all dictates the urge to
buy, or the decision to look for something else. Rules of
grammar, which gave us a sense of order and quality of literate
language use, do not apply to products. Previous expectations of
morality were anchored in language and conveyed through means of
literacy. The morality of partial literacies embodied in
competing products no longer appears to participants in the
market as emanating from high principles of religion or ethics,
but rather as a convenient justification for political
influence. Through regulation, politics inserts itself as a
self-serving factor in market transactions.