Work is a means of self-preservation beyond the primitive
experience of survival. Actually, one can apply the word work
only from the moment awareness of human self- constitution in
practical experiences emerged from these experiences. Awareness
of work and the beginnings of language are probably very close
to one another.
By work we understand patterns of human activity, not the
particulars of one or another form of work. This defines a
functional perspective first of all, and allows us to deal with
replication of these patterns. Interaction, mutation, growth,
spreading, and ending are part of the pattern. For anyone even
marginally informed, it is quite clear that work patterns of
agriculture are quite different from those of the pre-industrial,
industrial, or post-industrial age. Our aim is to examine work
patterns of the civilization of literacy in contrast to those of
the civilization of illiteracy.
That agriculture was determined, in its specific aspects, by
different topography and climatic biological context is quite
clear. Nevertheless, the people constituting their identity in
experiences of cultivating the land accomplished it in coherent
ways, regardless of their geographic location. Their language
experience testifies to an identifiable set of concerns,
questions, and knowledge which is, despite the fragmented
picture of the world, more homogenous than we could expect. If,
by contrast, one considers a chip foundry of today's high
technology, it becomes clear how chip producers in Silicon
Valley and those in Chinese provinces, in Russia, or in a
developing country of Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa share the
same language and the same concerns.
The example of agriculture presents a bottom-up structure of
pre-literate nature, based mainly on reaction. Reaction slowly
but surely led to more deliberate choices. Experience converged
in repetitive patterns. The more efficient experiences were
confirmed, the others discarded. A body of knowledge was
accumulated and transmitted to everyone partaking in survival
activities. In the case of the chip foundry, the structure is
top-down: Goals and reasons are built in, and so is the critical
knowledge of a post-literate nature required for achieving high
efficiency. Skills are continuously perfected through
reinforcement schemes. Activity is programmed. An explicit
notion of the factory's goals-high quality, high efficiency, high
adaptability to new requirements-is built into the entire
factory system.
In both models, corresponding to real-life situations, language
is constituted as part of the experience. Indeed, coordination
of effort, communication, record keeping, and transmission of
knowledge are continuously requested. As a replicative process,
work implies the presence of language as an agent of transfer.
Language pertinent to the experience of agriculture is quite
different from the language pertinent to the modern production
of chips. One is more natural than the other, i.e., its
connection to the human being's natural stage is stronger than
that of the activity in the foundry. In the chip age of the
civilization of illiteracy, languages of extreme precision become
the means for an efficient practical experience. Their functions
are different from those of natural language, which by all means
still constitutes a medium for human interaction.
All these remarks are meant to provide a relatively comfortable
entry to the aspects of the changing relation between language
and work. The terminology is based on today's fashionable lingo
of genetics, and of memetics, its counterpart. Still, I would
suggest more than caution, because memetics focuses on the
quantitative analysis of cultural dynamics, while semiotics,
which represents the underlying conception, is concerned
primarily with qualitative aspects.
As we have already seen, evolutionary biology became a source of
metaphors for the new sciences of economics, as well as for the
acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, or the replication
of ideas. Many people are at work in the new scientific space of
memetic considerations. The majority are focused on effective
procedures, probably computational in nature, for generating
mechanisms that will result in improved human interactions. As
exciting as all this is, qualitative considerations might prove
no less beneficial, if indeed we could translate them in
effective practical experiences. If the purposeful character of
all living organisms can be seen as an inevitable consequence of
evolution, the dynamics of human activity, reflected in
successive pragmatic frameworks, goes beyond the mechanism of
natural selection. This is exactly where the sign perspective of
human interaction, including that in work, differentiates itself
from the quantitative viewpoint. As long as selection itself is a
practical experience-choose from among possibilities-it becomes
difficult to use selection in order to explain how it takes
place.
In the tradition of analogies to machines-of yesterday or of
today-we could look at work as a machine capable of
self-reproduction (von Neumann's concept). In the new tradition
of memetics, work would be described as a replicative complex
unit, probably a meta-meme. But both analogies are focused
ultimately on information exchange, which is only a limited part
of what sign processes (or semioses, as they are called) are.
This is not to say that work is reducible to sign processes or to
language. What is of interest is the connection between work and
signs, or language. Moreover, how pragmatic frameworks and
characteristics of language experiences are interconditioned is
a subject that involves a memetic perspective, but is not
reducible to it.