A visit to a small neighborhood store used to be primarily a way
of satisfying a particular need, but also an instance of
communication. Such small markets were spaces where members of
the community exchanged news and gossip, usually with an
accuracy that would put today's journalism to shame. The
supermarket is a place where the demands of space utilization,
fast movement of products, and low overhead make conversation
counterproductive. Mail-order markets and electronic shopping
practically do away with dialogue. They operate beyond the need
for literacy and human interaction. Transactions are brought to
a minimum: selection, confirmation, and providing a credit card
number, or having it read automatically and validated via a
networked service.
Literacy-based transactions involved all the characteristics of
written language and all the implications of reading pertinent
to the transaction. Literacy contributed to the diversification
of needs and to a better expression of desires, thus helping
markets to diversify and reach a level of efficiency not
possible otherwise. With required education and laws prohibiting
child labor, the productive part of people's lives was somehow
reduced, but their ability to be more effective within modes
adapted to literacy was enhanced. Thus market cycles were
optimized by the effects of higher productivity and diversified
demands. From earliest times (going back to the Phoenician
traders), writing and the subsequent literacy contributed to
strategies of exchange, of taxation- which represents the most
direct form of political intervention in the market-and
regulations regarding many aspects of the constitution of human
beings in and through the market. Written contracts expressed
expectations in anticipation of literacy- supported planning.
There are many levels between the extraction and processing of
raw material and the final sale and consumption of a product. At
each level, a different language is constituted, very concrete
in some instances, very abstract in others. These languages are
meant to speed up processing and transaction cycles, reduce risk,
maximize profits, and ensure the effectiveness of the
transaction on a global level. Literacy cannot uniformly
accommodate these various expectations. The distributive nature
of market transactions cannot be held captive to the centralism
of literacy without affecting the efficiency of market
mediation. The ruin left after 70 years of central planning in
the Soviet Union and its satellite countries-highly literate
societies-is proof of this point. The expected speed of market
processes and the parallelism of negotiations require languages
of optimal functionality and minimal ambiguity. Sometimes
transactions have to rely on visual arguments, well beyond what
teleconferencing can offer. Products and procedures are modified
during negotiations, and on-the-fly, through interactive links
between all parties involved in the effort of designing,
manufacturing, and marketing them. As fashion shows become
prohibitively expensive, the fashion market is exploring
interactive presentations that put the talent of the designer and
the desire of the public one click away from each other.
The expectation of freedom results in the need to ignore national
or political (and cultural and religious) allegiances, which,
after all, means freedom from the literate mode of a national
language, as well as from all the representations and definitions
of freedom housed in literate discourse. Indeed, since sign
systems, and language in particular, are not neutral means of
expression, one individual has to specialize in the signs of
other cultures. There are consulting firms that advise businesses
on the cultural practices of various countries. They deal in
what Robert Reich called symbol manipulation, semiotic activity
par excellence. These firms explain to clients doing business in
Japan, for instance, that the Japanese have a penchant for
exchanging gifts. Business cards, more symbolic than functional,
are of great importance. These consultants will also advise on
customs that fall outside values instilled through literacy,
such as in which countries bribery is the most efficient way to
do business.
Whose market? Whose freedom?
A market captive to moral or political concepts expressed in
literate discourse soon reaches the limits of its efficiency. We
face these limits in a different way when ideals are proclaimed
or negotiations submitted to rules reflecting values attached to
expectations-of a certain standard of living, fringe
benefits-frozen in contracts and laws. Many European countries
are undergoing the crisis of their literate heritage because
outdated working relations have been codified in labor laws.
Contracts between unions claiming to represent various types of
workers are not subject to criteria for efficiency at work in
the market.
On the other hand, the freedom and rights written into the U.S.
Constitution are totally forgotten in the global marketplace by
people who take them for granted. An American-even a member of a
minority group-who buys a pair of brand-name sneakers is totally
ignorant of the fact that the women, and sometimes the children,
making those sneakers in faraway countries earn less than
subsistence wages. It is not the market that is immoral or
opportunistic in such cases, but the people who constitute their
expectations for the most at the lowest cost. Would literacy be a
stronger force than the demand for efficiency in bringing about
the justice discussed in tomes of literature? To read morality
in the market context of competition, where only efficiency and
profit are written, is a rather futile exercise, even though it
might alleviate pangs of conscience. Markets, the expression of
the people who constitute them, are realistic, even cynical;
they call things by their names and have no mercy on those who
try to reinvent an idealized past in the transaction of futures.
For reasons of efficiency only, markets are frameworks for the
self-constitution of human beings as free, enjoying liberties
and rights that add to their productive capabilities. It will
probably irk many people to read here that markets, instances of
terrible tension and amorality, are the cradle of human freedom,
tolerance (political, social, religious, intellectual), and
creativity. To a great extent, it was a fight over market
processes that led to the American Revolution. Now that
Soviet-style communism has fallen, the flow of both goods and
ideas is slowly and painfully taking place, in ways similar to
that in the West, in the former Soviet Bloc. Democratic ideals
and the upward distribution of wealth are on a collision course.
But the compass is at least set on more freedom and less
regulation. Only mainland China remains in the grip of
centralized market control. The struggle between open markets
and the free flow of ideas going on there today can have only
one outcome. It may take time, but China, too, will one day be
as free as its neighbors in Taiwan. Market interaction is what
defines human beings, facilitating the establishment of a
framework of existence that includes others.
Some people would prefer a confirmation of culture as the more
encompassing framework, containing markets but not reducible to
them. Culture itself is an object in the market, subjected to
transactions involving literacy, but not exclusively. Here new
languages are used to expedite the exchange of goods and values.
When literacy reaches the limits of its implicit capabilities,
new transaction languages emerge, and new forms of freedom,
tolerance, and creativity are sanctioned through the market
mechanism. There is a price attached here, too. New constraints,
new types of intolerance, and new obstacles come about. An
example is the preservation of wildlife at the expense of jobs.
Efficiency and wide choice entail a replacement of what are
known as traditional values (perceived as eternal, but usually
not older than 200-300 years) with what many would have a hard
time calling value: mediocrity, the transitory, the expedient,
and the propensity for waste.
The market circumvents literacy when literacy affects its
efficiency and follows its own course by means appropriate to
new market conditions. In the quest for understanding how
markets operate, the further cultivation of explanations
originating from previous pragmatic circumstances is pointless.
The time-consuming detour might result in nostalgia, but not in
better mastery of the complexities implicit in the practical
experience of human self-constitution in the market.