In the contemporary world, communication is progressively reified
and takes place more and more through the intermediary of the
product. Its source is human work. Characteristics of the
languages involved in the work are also projected into them. A
new underlying structure replaces that which made literacy
possible and necessary. In the physical or spiritual reality of
the product, specialized languages are re-translated into the
universal language of satisfying needs, or creating new needs,
which are afterwards processed through the mediating mechanisms
of the market. Reification (from the Latin res: transformation
of everything-life, language, feeling, work-into things) is the
result of the alienating logic of the market and its semiosis.
Markets abstract individual contributions to a product. In the
first place, language itself is reified and consumed. Markets
reify this contribution, turning life, energy, doubts, time, or
whatever else-in particular language-into the commodity embodied
in the product. The very high degree of integration leads to
conditions in which high efficiency-the most possible at the
lowest price-becomes a criterion for survival. The consequence
is that human individuality is absorbed in the product. People
literally put their lives, and everything pertaining to
them-natural history, education, family, feelings, culture,
desires-in the outcome of their practical experiences. This
absorption of the human being into the product takes place at
different levels. In the second place, the individual
constituted in work is also reified and consumed: the product
contains a portion of the limited duration of the lives of those
who processed it.
Each form of mediated work depends upon its mediating entities.
As one form of work is replaced by another, more efficient, the
language that mediated is replaced by other means. Languages of
coordination corresponding to hunting, or those of incipient
agriculture, made way for subsequent practical experience of
self-constitution in language. This applies to any and all forms
of work, whether resulting in agricultural, industrial,
artistic, or ideological products. The metaphors of genetics and
evolutionary models can be applied. We can describe the
evolution of work in memetic terminology, but we would still not
capture the active role of sign processes. Moreover, human
reproduction, between its sexual and its cultural forms, would
become meaningless if separated from the pragmatic framework
through which human self-constitution takes place.
To illustrate how language is consumed, let us shortly examine
what happens in the work we call education. In our day, the need
for continual training increases dramatically. The paradigm of a
once-for-life education is over, as much as literacy is over.
Shorter production cycles require changes of tools and the
pertinent training. A career for life, possible while the linear
progress of technology required only maintenance of skills and
slight changes of knowledge, is an ideal of the past. Efficiency
requirements translate into training strategies that are less
costly and less permanent than those afforded through literacy.
These strategies produce educated operators as training itself
becomes a product, offered by training companies whose list of
clients includes fast food chains, nuclear energy producers,
frozen storage facilities, the U.S. Congress, and computer
operations. The market is the place where products are
transacted and where the language of advertising, design, and
public relations is consumed. Training, too, focused more and
more on non-literate means of communication, is consumed.