With the risk of breaking the continuity of the argument, I would
like to continue by suggesting the implications of this argument
for the reality to which this book refers: the present. First, a
general thesis derived from the analysis so far: The market of
direct exchange, as well as the market of mediated forms,
reflect the general structure of human activity-direct work vs.
mediated forms of work-and are expressed in their specific
languages. From a certain moment in human evolution, tools, as an
extension of the human body and mind, are used, some directly,
some indirectly. Today we notice how, through the intermediary
of commands transmitted electronically, pneumatically,
hydraulically, thermally, or in some other way, the mediation of
mediation is introduced. Pressing a button, flipping a switch,
punching a keyboard, triggering a relay-seen as steps preparing
for entirely programmed activities-means to extend the sequence
of mediations. Between the hand or another body part and the
processed material, processing tools and sequences of signs
controlling this process are introduced. Accordingly, language,
as related to work, religion, education, poetry, exchange in the
market, etc., is restructured. New levels of language and new,
limited, functionally designed languages are generated and used
for mediating. The language of drawings (more generally the
language of design) is one of them. Relations among these
different levels and among the newly designed languages are
established.
But how is this related to the innate heuristic condition of the
human being and to the working hypothesis advanced regarding the
change in the scale of humanity? Or is it only another way of
saying that technology, resulting from engineering
interpretations of science, defines the path to higher levels of
efficiency, and to the relative illiteracy of our time? The
increase in population and the dynamics of diversification (more
choices, more resources) at this new scale assume a different
dimension. It is irrelevant that resources of one type or
another are exhausted in one economy. As a matter of fact,
Japan, Germany, England, and even the USA (rich in the majority
of resources in demand) have exhausted whatever oil, copper,
tin, diamonds, or tungsten was available. Due to many factors,
farmland in the western world is decreasing, while the
quantities and different types of food consumed per capita have
increased substantially. Faced with the challenge posed by the
national, linear, sequential, dual, deterministic nature of the
pragmatic framework that generated the need for literacy, humans
discover means to transcend these limitations-globality,
non-linearity, configuration, multi-valued logic,
non-determination-and embody them in artifacts appropriate to
this condition.
The new scale necessitated creative work for multiplying
available resources, for looking at needs and availabilities
from a new perspective. Those who see globality in the Japanese
sushi restaurant in Provence or in the Midwest, in the McDonalds
in Moscow or Beijing, in multinational corporations, in foreign
investments mushrooming all over, miss the real significance of
the term. Globality applies to the understanding that we share
in resources and creative means of multiplying them independent
of boundaries (of language, culture, nations, alliances, etc.),
as well as in high efficiency processing equipment. This
understanding is not only sublime, it has its ugly side. The
world would even go to war (and has, again and again) to secure
access to critical resources or to keep markets open. But it is
not the ugly side that defines the effective pragmatics. Nor
does it define the circumstances of our continuous
self-definition in this world of a new dynamics of survival
needs and expectations above and beyond such needs.
Where literacy no longer adequately supports creative work based
on higher levels of efficiency, it is replaced by languages
designed and adapted to mediation, or to work destined to
compensate for an exhausted resource, or by machines
incorporating our literacy and the literacies of higher
efficiency. Hunting and fishing remain as mere sport, and
foraging declined to the level at which people in a country
like the USA no longer know that in the woods there are
mushrooms, berries, and nuts that can be used as food. Even
agriculture, probably the longest standing form of practical
experience, escapes sequentiality and linearity, and adds
industrial dimensions that make agriculture a year-round, highly
specialized, efficient activity. We share resources and even
more in the globality of the life support system (the ecology);
in the globality of communication, transportation, and
technology; and, last but not least, in the globality of the
market. The conclusion is that, once again, it is not any
recent discovery or trend that is the engine of change, from
local to national to global, but the new circumstances of human
experience, whose long-lasting effect is the altered
individual.
Freed from the human operator and replaced by technology that
ensures levels of efficiency and security for which the living
being is not well adapted to provide, many types of work are
simultaneously freed from the constraints of language, of
literacy in particular. There is no need to teach machines
spelling, or grammar, or rules of constructing sentences. There
is even less of a need to maintain between the human being and
the machine a mediating literacy that is awkward, inefficient,
stamped by ambiguity, and burdened by various uses (religious,
political, ideological, etc.). The new languages, whether
interfaces between machines or between humans and machines, are
of limited scope and duration. In the dynamics of work, these new
languages are appropriately adapted to each other. Our entire
activity becomes faster, more precise, more segmented, more
distributed, more complex. This activity is subordinated to a
multi-valued logic of efficiency, not to dualistic inferences or
truth or falsehood.
Some might read into the argument made so far a vote against the
many kinds of activists of this day and age: the ecologists who
warn of damage inflicted on the environment; Malthusians
tireless in warning of upcoming famine; the zero-population-
growth movement, etc. Some might read here a vote for
technocracy, for the advocates of limitless growth, the
optimists of despair, or the miracle planners (free marketers,
messianic ideologists, etc.). None is the case. Rather, I submit
for examination a model for understanding and action that takes
into account the complexity of the problem instead of explaining
complexities away and working, as literacy taught us to, on
simplified models. Mapping out the terrain of the descriptive
level of the relation between language and work under current
pragmatic circumstances will assist in the attempt to plot, in
some meaningful detail, the position so far described.