Chapter 10

The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the Age of the Web

Collapse and catastrophe as opposed to hope and unprecedented possibilities- these are the party lines in the heated discussions centered on the dynamics of ongoing changes in which the whole world is involved. Paul Virilio is quite expressive in his formulation of the problem: "An accompanying evil...is the end of writing, as it unfolds through image technology, cinema/film, and television screen. [...] We don't read anymore, we hardly write each other, since we can call each other on the phone. Next, we will no longer speak! I'd really like to say: this will indeed be the silence of the lambs!" No less powerful in their assertions are those who see chances for social renewal in interactions not embodied in the rules of literacy. The electronic forum of the European Commission, involved in Project Information Society, lists Ten Bones of Contention from which I chose the following: "The system we are stuck with and frantically trying to fix comes from another time and an entirely different set of circumstances. It is changing massively in front of our noses and needs to be completely rethought and radically overhauled." The statement is less expressive than Virilio's, but no less intolerant.

As discussions continue to bring up extremely important aspects of the conflict marking this time of discontinuity, the billions of people populating our world today constitute themselves through a broad variety of practical experiences. A list of these experiences-from primitive patterns of hunting and gathering food to eye movement command of remote systems and applications driven by voice recognition in the world of nanotechnological synthesis-would only augment the confusion. Given this broad pragmatic spectrum, no one could seriously project the future as one of virtual communities, or of an electronic democracy, without sounding overly naive or directly stupid. We know how far we have come, but we do not really know where we are.

In advancing a comprehensive pragmatic perspective, I chose to undertake an elaboration well beyond the short-breathed argumentation peculiar to this moment in time. The advantage of this approach deserves to be shared. Endorsing one perspective or another, such as the California Ideology-defined by its critics as "global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology, and politics"-or alternatives-the so-called European model, or the transactional structure, or neo- Marxian solutions, to name a few-is not an option. Indeed, the argument of this book is that answers cannot result from infatuation with technology, cultural self-replication, models based on biological mechanisms, unfocused bionomic elaborations, or incessant criticism of capitalism. Affirmations of a deep nature, above and beyond the rhetoric of intellectual controversy and political discourse, must originate from those affirmative actions through which our identity as individuals, communities, and society are established. The metaphor of the interactive future is the expression of a simple thesis: At the global scale, human interaction, as the concrete form of engaging infinitely diverse cognitive resources, is the last available resource on which the future of the species can depend.

Transcending literacy

Transcending literacy takes place in the practical experiences of the pragmatics of high efficiency corresponding to the global scale of humankind. This scale affects the constitution of human communities and the interaction between individuals and community. As has already been mentioned, Bedouins in the Sahara Desert and Indians in the Andes Mountains are no less hooked up to television than people living in technologically highly developed countries. More important, the identities of peoples in less developed societies on the global map of economic and political interdependencies are already subject to the most advanced processing techniques. In the ledgers of the global economy, their existence is meticulously entered with respect to what they can contribute and through what they need and can afford. People constituting virtual communities, in Silicon Valley, Japan, France, Israel, and any other place on this globe, are subject to integration in the global scale through different means and methods.

The expansion of non-literacy based human practical experiences of self- constitution raises legitimate concern regarding the social status of the individual and the nature of community interdependencies. Children, for example, are subjected to more images than language. They have the tendency to perceive time as a continuous present and expect gratification to be as instantaneous as it appears on television, or as easy to achieve as connecting to exciting Web sites. They wind up experts in interactive games and in controlling extremely fast processes. Disconnected from culture and tradition, they are extremely adaptable to new circumstances and in a hurry to ascertain their version of independence. Sex, drugs, rap music, and membership in cults or gangs are part of their contradictory profile. These adolescents are the pilots of the Nintendo wars, but also the future explorers of outer space, the physicists, biologists, and geneticists who create new materials and subject machines of breathtaking complexity to tasks in which every millionth of a second is essential to the outcome. They are also the future artists and record-breaking athletes; they are computer programmers and designers of the future. And they will be the service providers in an economy where change, predicated by the need to swiftly match outcome to ever-increasing demand, cannot be met by means burdened by the inertia and heavy-handedness of literacy.

As data make clear, such individuals are bound to be less involved in community life and less committed to the ethics of the past. Moral absolutes and concern for others do not play a major role in their lives, which are shaped by practical experiences tending towards self-sufficiency, sometimes confused with independence. In view of all these characteristics, which reflect the decreasing role of literacy-based human experiences, the question often asked is how will the relation between the community and extremely efficient individuals, constituted in relatively insular experience, be shaped? Moreover, what will the status of community be? In this respect, it is important to know what forces are at work, and to what extent our own awareness can become a factor in the process.

In our day, many people and organizations deplore the state of urban life (in the USA and around the world), high unemployment, the feeling of disenfranchisement that individuals, and sometimes whole communities, have. Immigrants of all the countries they landed in; guest workers in the European Community; the young generation in Asia, Africa, and the countries that once made up the Eastern Block; the minorities in the USA; the unemployed around the world-each of these groups faces problems reflecting the relation between them as a different entity and the society as a whole. Immigrants are not necessarily welcome, and when accepted, they are expected to integrate. Guest workers are required to work at tasks with which citizens of the host country do not want to dirty their hands. The young generation is expected to follow in their parents' footsteps. One minority group will have problems with another, and with society at large, in which they are supposed to integrate. The unemployed are expected to earn their benefits and eventually to accept whatever job is available. Literacy implied expectations of homogeneity. Immigrants were taught the language of their new homeland so they could become like any other citizen. Guest workers, defined by their status in the labor market, were expected to gradually become unnecessary and to peacefully return to their native countries. Young people, processed through education, and the unemployed, after being offered some short retraining, would be absorbed in the machine called national economy.

In respect to community, the historic sequence can be summarized as follows: individuals loosely connected to their peers; individuals constituting viable entities for survival; transfer of individual attributes (self-determination, choice) to the community; integration in centralized community; distribution of tasks; decentralization. Each step is defined by the extent of an individual's optimal performance: from very high individual performance, essential to survival, to distributed responsibility, until society takes over individual responsibility. Liberal democracy celebrates the paradox of socialized individualism. In this respect, it ends the age of political battles (and, as we hear, the age of history), but opens the age of increased access to abundance. Commercial democracy is neither the result of political action nor the expression of any ideology. Within its sphere of action, the boundaries between the individual and the very unsettled community represent the territory of conflict. Moral individualism succeeds or fails within a framework of adversarial human relations. Since moral individualism is actually the underpinning of liberalism-"Do what's best for yourself"-the liberty it advances is that of competitive access to abundance. Socialized individualism accepts the state only as purveyor of rights and possibilities (when the Hegelian notion of the priority of the state over the individual is accepted de facto), not as moral instance.

The transition to a pragmatics in which individual performance becomes marginal, in view of the many coordinating mechanisms ensuring redundancies that obliterate personal participation, is definitive of this process. The relative significance of malfunctions-breakdown in the legal and social system, for example-as instances of self-awareness and new beginnings, prompted by the need to remedy past practices, is different in each of the stages mentioned. So is the possibility of change and renewal. Creativity in current pragmatics is less and less an issue of the individual and more the result of orchestrated efforts in a large network of interactions. The underlying structure of the civilization of illiteracy supports a pragmatics of heterogeneity, distributed tasks, and networking. Human practical experiences of self-constitution no longer generate uniformity, but diversity. There is no promise of permanency, even less of stable hierarchies and centralism. We face new problems. Their formulation in literate form is deceptive; their challenge in the context of illiteracy, in which they emerge, is unprecedented. This is what prompts concerns about the civilization of illiteracy.

Being in language

The two aspects of human self-constitution through language-individual and community (society)-derive from the basic issue of social interrelationships. One's language is not independent of the language of the society, despite the fact that, in a given society, people identify themselves through noticeable peculiarities in the way they speak, write, read, and carry on dialogue. Elements pertaining to language are integrated in the human's biological structure. Still, language does not emerge, as the senses do, but is progressively acquired. The process of language acquisition is at the same time a process of projecting human abilities related to language's emerging characteristics. Regardless of the level of language acquired, language overwrites the senses. It projects integrated human beings-a unity of nature and language-prone to identify themselves in the culture that they continuously shape.

While nature is a relatively stable system of reference, culture changes as humans change in the process of their various activities. To be within a language, as all human beings are, and in a community means to participate in processes of individual integration and social coordination. Individual language use and social use of language are not identical. Individuals constitute themselves differently than communities do. That in each community there are elements common to the individuals constituting it only says that the sum total of individual practical experiences of language is different from the language characteristic of the social experience. The difference between the language of the individual and the language of a community is indicative of social relationships. A more general thesis deserves to be entertained: The nature and variety of human interactions, within and without practical experiences of self-constitution in language, describe the complexity of the pragmatic framework. These interactions are part of the continuous process of identification as individuals and groups in the course of ascertaining their identity as a particular species.

Acknowledged forms of relationships in work, family life, magic, ritual, myth, religion, art, science, or education are evinced through their respective patterns. Such patterns, circumscribed by human self-constitution in the natural and cultural context, are significant only retroactively. They testify to the human being's social condition and express what part of nature and what part of culture is involved in this condition. The primordial significance of these two phenomena lies in the expression of practical experiences followed, not preceded, by cognition. Active participation of individuals in practical experiences of language acknowledges their need to identify themselves in the patterns of interrelation mentioned. People do not get involved with other people because either party may be nice. Involvement is part of the continuous definition of the individual in contexts of conflict and cooperation, of acknowledging similarity and difference. Any dynamics, in biology or in culture, is due to differences.

People take language for granted and never question its conventions. As a natural, inherited (in Chomsky's view) attribute, rather like the human senses, language is not reinvented each time practical experiences of constitution through language take place. Neither is its usefulness questioned-as happens with artifacts (tools in particular)-each time our practical experience reaches the limits of language. The breakdown of an artifact-i.e., its inappropriateness to the task at hand-suggests the possible experience of crafting another. The breakdown of language points to limits in the human experience, not in its accessories. Malfunctioning of language points to the biological endowment and the ways this is projected in reality through everything people do. This is not true in respect to other, less natural, sign systems: symbols, artificial languages, meta-languages.

What changes from one scale of humankind, i.e., from one situation of matching needs to means for satisfying them, to another is the coefficient of the linear equation, not the linearity as such. A small group of people can survive by combining hunting, fruit gathering, and farming. The effort to satisfy a relatively bigger group increases only in proportion to the size of the group. In the known moments when a critical mass, or threshold, was reached (language acquisition, agriculture, writing, industrial production, and now the post-industrial), the expectation of higher efficiency corresponding to each scale of human experiences triggered changes in the pragmatic framework. The awareness of language's failure derives from practical experiences for which new languages become necessary.

Miscommunication is an instance of language not suitable to the experience. Lack of communication points to limitations of the humans involved in an activity. Miscommunication makes people question (themselves, others) about what went wrong, why, and what, if anything, can be done to avoid practical consequences affecting the efficiency of their activity. Other forms of language malfunction can affect people as individuals or as members of a community in ways different from those peculiar to communication. The failure of political systems, ideologies, religion(s), markets, ethics, or family is expressed in the breakdown of patterns of human relations. We keep alive the language of those political systems, ideologies, religions, and markets even after noticing their failure, not by accident or through oversight but because all those languages are us, as we constitute ourselves as participants in a political process, subjects of ideological indoctrination, religious believers, commodities in the market, family members, and ethical citizens. The inefficiency of these experiences reflects our own inefficiency, more difficult to overcome than poor spelling, etymological ignorance, or phonetic deafness.

The wall behind the Wall

An appropriate example of the solidarity between language experience and the individual constituted in language is provided by the breakdown of the East European block, and even more pointedly by the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Nobody really suspected that once the infamous Berlin Wall came down, the people who lived to the east of it, trained and educated in and for a pragmatic framework whose underlying structure was reflected in their high degree of literacy, would remain captive to it as their legal, social, and economic conditions changed. Despite the common language- German is the language through which national unity was ascertained-East Germans are prisoners of the structural characteristics of the society projected on them through literacy: centralism, clear-cut distinctions, determinism, strong hierarchical structures, and limited choice. The invisible but powerful inner conditioning of the East Germans' literacy-categorically superior to that of their Western brothers and sisters-is not adequate to the new pragmatics attained in West Germany and raises obstacles to East Germany's integration in a dynamic society. The illiterate pragmatics of high efficiency, associated with high expectations that seem to outpace actual performance, was foisted on East Germans by the well intentioned, though politically opportunistic, government from across a border that should never have existed.

Things are not different in other parts of the world-Korea, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, etc., where the rhythms of pragmatic developments and social, political, economic, national, and cultural developments are totally desynchronized. The best poetry was written in East Europe; most of the books ever written were read by its people. It is impossible to ignore that the best theater in the world, the most elaborate cinematography, the best choirs and dance ensembles, and even the highest level of mathematical theory, physics, and biology became possible in a context of restriction, oppression, and disregard of individuals and their creativity. It is also impossible not to finally realize that the strength built on literacy-based structures was deceiving and self-deceiving.

In the not-too-distant past, the people of these countries read books, attended concerts and operas, and visited museums. Now, if they are not in misery, they are as obsessed with indulging in everything they could not have before, even if this means giving up their spiritual achievements. Consumption is the new language, even before a basis for efficient practical experiences is put in place, and sometimes instead of it. The old relation between the language of the individual and the language of society displayed patterns of deception and cowardice. The new emergent relation expresses patterns of expectation well beyond the efficiency achieved, or hoped for, in this integrated world of extreme competitive impact. The wall behind the Wall is embodied in extremely resistant patterns of human interaction originating in the context of literacy- based pragmatics. With this example in mind, it is critical to question whether there are alternatives to the means of expression people use and to the social program they are committed to-democracy. The experience of language today is very different from that of the time when the Jacobins asserted a notion of democracy as the general will (1798), under the assumption of a literate background shared by all people.

The message is the medium

Language is a form of social memory. When saying something or listening to some utterance, we assume a uniform use of words and of higher level linguistic entities. As stored testimony to similar practical experiences, language, stabilized in literacy, became a medium for averaging them. The patterns of human relations captured in language make people aware, in retrospect, of the relevance of these patterns to human efficiency. So it seems that we constitute ourselves as our own observations about how we interact. These observations are identified as cognition, because it is through interaction that we know each other and know how, what, and when our immediate and less immediate needs are satisfied. The paradigm of literacy asserts that human self-constitution takes place in language, moreover that it could effectively happen only in language, expressed in written forms and made available through reading. Indeed, knowledge was derived from praxis implying human interaction that integrated language-based exchanges of information. This knowledge shaped political, ideological, religious, and economic experiences, as well as efforts to improve the technology used, and even broaden the scientific perspective. The dimension of future is intrinsic to life, from where it extends to language and literacy, as it extends to artifacts, work, and pragmatic expectations.

The practical experience of language, as any other semiotic practical experience, embodies agreements regarding the nature and condition of whatever is constituted in language, human identity included. The projection of the biological and cultural characteristics on the world of our life and action establishes elements of reference. The ability to see, hear, and smell, and the ability to use tools are acknowledged as humans interact. Ability and performance differ widely. Self-evaluation and evaluation by others in the process of defining and achieving goals of common interest are quite distinct. Language mediates, hence it makes commitments part of the experience. When these are not carried through, language can become a substitute medium for confrontation.

Experiences of agreement and experiences of confrontation are part of the patterns of interrelationship that define how the language of individuals and the language of the community are related. Socialization of language leads to paradoxical situations: humans self-constituted in the language experience perceive their own language as though confrontation is not among themselves, but among their languages. Only a few years ago, we heard about how much Americans and Russians liked each other, although the language of politics and ideology was one of conflict. Now we hear how Ossies (East Germans) and Wessies (West Germans) have strong feelings about each other (one side is described as lazy, the other as arrogant; one side as cultivated, the other as ignoramuses; some as honest, the others as corrupt) although the language they both share is the same (though not quite). Iranians and Arabs, Armenians and Georgians, and Serbs and Croats could add to this subject more than we want to know about the language of prejudice.

Shortly before Malthus issued his equation of population growth in relation to the growth of subsistence means, Rousseau stated a law of the inverse proportion between size of population and political freedom. Rousseau ascertained that the strength of those exercising power over others increases as the number of those subjected to power increases. The inverse proportion has to do with the influence each individual has in the political process-the more people, the weaker each voice. Scale is critical, but so is understanding the relation between the underlying structure of the pragmatics that defines the role of language and how this role is carried out. Practical experiences of power concentration are supported by literacy, whose implicit structure and expectation is centralism and representation. Literacy generates instances of conflict as well as institutions that regulate the nature of agreements and disagreements. Bureaucracy, the expression of these institutions, is the offspring of the incestuous relation between literacy and democracy.

A new scale of humankind, for which literacy-based practical experiences are not adequate, and within which democracy-the power of the people-can no longer be exercised (as Rousseau pointed out), poses many challenges. Among them: What, if anything, should replace literacy? What could replace democracy? How do we free ourselves from the choking grip of bureaucracy? Even before attempting an answer, the notion that the cultural experience of literacy and the social experience of democracy have reached their potential and are due for replacements has to be understood.

In a different vein, the understanding that literacy participates in power, of which people become aware in a given cultural and social context, triggers another reaction: means of expression and communication different from those originating under the aegis of literacy participate in pragmatic processes that result in access to power. It is not what a political leader says, but how. Powerful images, sophisticated directing, and inspired stage design or selection of backdrops become the message itself. This is why "The message is the medium," a not irreverent reversal of McLuhan's famous formula, phrases the altered nature of the relation between language and the world. Interactions in the networked world exemplify this rephrasing even better. The redefined relationship between the many languages of our new practical experiences and reality is expressed in the means and values of the civilization of illiteracy.

Written into the pompous architecture of Mitterand's palaces and monuments in Paris, and into the "new" Berlin reflecting the medieval notion of centralized power-to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars-the message of literacy is turned into the medium of brick-and-mortar. In an age of task distribution and decentralization, the appropriate alternative is virtual environments and an advanced infrastructure for access to cognition. "The message is the medium" translates into the requirement of overcoming infatuation with the past, never mind trying to reinvent it. The statement demands that we create alternative media that support the empowerment of individuals, not the further consolidation of power structures that were relevant in the past but which prevent the unfolding of the future.

From democracy to media-ocracy

Democracy is a domain of expectations. Humans constitute themselves as members of a democracy to the extent that their practical experiences acknowledge equality, freedom, and self-determination. The concept of democracy has varied enormously over time. In ancient societies, it acknowledged equality of the demos, and that free men-not slaves, not women-were entitled to vote. Subject to many emancipations, democracy denotes the right of people to elect their government (based on the general will set forth by the Jacobins, as mentioned above). How this self- government actually works-through direct or indirect representation, in forms of government based on the division of power between the executive and legislative, or under monarchies-is itself a matter of practical experiences pertinent to democracy. The democracy of human misery and neglect is quite different from the democracy of affluence. Equal access to work, education, health care, and art, and equal access to drugs, murder, joblessness, ignorance, and disease are far from being similar. A small town-meeting in Vermont or one in a Swiss canton, effectively governing life in town, is quite different from the forms of political self-governance in countries where the central power effectively overrides any self-governance. The same can be said of the overriding power of other factors-the economy, for instance.

Democracy is a major form of social and political experience. The power of the majority, expressed in votes, is only one of its possible manifestations. When only a minority of the population votes, the so-called majority ceases to be representative, no matter what the formal rules say. We live by democratic practices of delusion, and multiply, enthusiastically, their effect through the literate discourse of democracy. As a domain of expectations, mirroring hope implicit in literacy, democracy conjures meaning only if it is paralleled by democratic participation in social and political experiences. When one of the two terms of this critical equation diminishes-as is the case with participation-democracy diminishes in the same proportion. There are many reasons for decreasing participation. In countries where effective democracy was replaced by democratic demagoguery, changes, such as those brought about by revolutions, revolts, and reforms, initially mobilize the people, almost to the last citizen. We are still observing a phenomenon symptomatic of democracy in East Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union. From the almost unanimous enthusiasm over renewal, leading to formal conditions for democracy, individual participation in government is slowly diminishing. What are the causes of this phenomenon, which is paralleled by diminishing interest in religion, art, and solidarity?

Many answers are given, and even more hypotheses are advanced: psychological fatigue, lack of democratic tradition, egotism, desire to catch up with affluent societies. From the perspective of the relationships characteristic of an individual's literate language and literacy programs of societies claiming to be democratic, the answer should be sought in the conflict between literacy-based values and the expectations of efficiency characteristic of the new scale of humankind. Efficiency made possible by a pragmatics emancipated from the structural characteristics reified in literacy converted democracy into commercial democracy. People can buy and sell whatever they want. Their equality is one of access to the market of affluence; their freedom is sealed in the mutually acknowledged right to plenty. Democratization, which people believe is taking place all over the world, is a process of absorbing newer and newer groups of people into prosperity, into the superficial culture of entertainment (including sports competition), and into a government that guarantees the right to wealth and consumption.

This description can easily become suspect of moralizing instead of tight analysis. Literacy embodies certain expectations from democratic institutions. Like other institutions, this type is also subjected to the test of efficiency. When the institutions of democracy fail this test, they are, in the language of democracy, diverted to consolidating not democracy, as a practical experience of the people, but the institution. Bureaucracies are generated as a diversion of democracy from its social and political focus in an incestuous love with the language in which its principles are enunciated. Mediation insinuates itself between the people and the institutions of democracy.

Media generalize the role of the literate system of checks and balances and, as mass-media, becomes a participant in the equation of power. Taking full advantage of means that characterize the civilization of illiteracy-the power of images, instantaneous access to events, the power of networking, communicative resources of new technologies-the media play a double role: representative of the people and representative of power. Since their own domain of experiences is representation, the media depend on the efficiency of the practical experiences of people's self-constitution in productive activities. Mass media activity is carried not by its own motivations, but by those of the market, whose locus it becomes. Consequently, the equation of democracy becomes the equation of competition and economic success. The media select and endorse causes and personalities appropriate to the process of marketing democracy. Instead of government, and the responsibilities associated with it, democracy becomes the people's right to buy, among other things, their government and the luxury of transferring their democratic responsibilities to its institutions.

Media bashing is a favorite sport of politicians whenever things don't work the way they expect. It is also practiced by the public, especially in times of economic uncertainty or during political developments that seem out of control (wars, violent mass demonstrations, elections). Bashing or not, criticism of the media reflects the fact that media expanded their participation in power. The practical experience of public relations, an outgrowth of media participation in power, uses the methods of the media to promote causes and personalities as products best suited for a certain need: support hungry children, elect a sheriff, endorse a tax hike or reduction, etc., etc. The domains of competence and ability are effectively disconnected from the domain of representation. Literacy-based methods of establishing hierarchies and influencing choices are enforced by new technologies for reaching targets, even in the most saturated contexts of information dissemination. Advisers committed only to the success of their endeavors use the discriminating tools of the market in order to adapt the message to all those who care to play the muddled game of democracy.

Information brokerage, feedback strategies, symbolic social engineering, mass media, psychology, and event design form an eclectic practical experience. Calling it by a certain name-media-ocracy-is probably tendentious. But the shoe seems to fit. From all we know, the effort of this activity does not go towards promoting excellence or persuading communities that democracy entails quality and defending self-government from corruption. It rather focuses on what it takes to convince that mediocrity adequately reflects the quest for equality, and is the most people can expect if they are not dedicated to the exercise of their rights. The literate and illiterate means used to defend democracy, and the entire political system built on the democratic premise, make it only more evident that democracy, an offspring of language-based practical experiences, is far from being the eternal and universal answer, the climax of history. Indeed, the scale of humankind renders impossible participation in power through the definition of ideals and goals, as well as awareness of the consequences of human actions. Alternative forms of participating in democracy need to be found in the characteristics of the pragmatics corresponding to the new scale. Such alternatives have to embody the distributed nature of work, better understanding of the connection (or lack thereof) between the individual and the community, awareness of change as the only permanence, and strategies of co-evolution, regarding equally all other people and the nature to which humans still belong. Democracy is the offspring of human experiences based on the postulate of sameness. The alternatives derive from the dynamics of difference.

Self-organization

Time, energy, equipment, and intellect have been invested in the research of artificial life. Knowledge derived from this research can be used to advance models of individual and social life. This knowledge tells us that diversity and self-organization, for instance, prompted by structural characteristics and externalized through emerging functions, maintain the impetus of evolution in a living system. Obviously, humans belong to such a system. In the past, we used to focus on social forms of variable organization. Within such forms, iterative optimization and learning take place as an expression of internal necessities, not as a result of adopted or imposed rules of functioning.

The entire dynamics of reproduction that marks today's states and organizations in the business of population control, needs to be reconnected to the pragmatic context. As a result, we can expect that communities structured on such principles are endowed with the equivalent of social immune systems, able to recognize themselves and to counteract social disease. Reconnection to the pragmatic context needs to be understood primarily as a change of strategy from telling people what has to be done to engaging them in the action. All the promises connected to the fast-growing network of networks are based on this fundamental assumption. A social immune system ought to be understood as a mechanism for preventing actions detrimental to the effective functioning of each and every member of the community. Social disease entails connotations characteristic of a system of good and bad, right and wrong. What is meant here is the possibility that individual effort and pragmatic focus become disconnected. Reconnection mechanisms are based on recognition of diversity and definition of unity, means, goals, and ideals.

Adaptability results from diversity; so does the ability to allocate resources within the dynamic community. More than in the past, and more than today, individuals will partake in more than one community. This is made possible by means of interaction and by shared resources. Today's telecommuting is only a beginning when we think of the numbers of people involved and the still limited scope of their involvement. The old notion of community, associated mainly with location, will continue to give way to communities of interests and goals. Virtual communities on the Internet already exemplify such possibilities. The major characteristic of such self-organizing social and cultural cells is their pattern of improvement in the course of co-evolution, which reflects the understanding that political and social aspects of human interaction change as each person changes.

The model described, inspired by the effort to understand life and simulate properties pertinent to life through simulations, applies just as much to the natural as to the artificial. Global economy, global political concerns, global responsibility for the support system, global vested interests in communication and transportation networks, and global concern for the meaningful use of energy should not lead to a world state- not even Boorstin's Republic of Technology will do-but to a state of many worlds. Complexities resulting from such a scale of political practical experiences are such that self-destruction, through social implosion, is probably what might happen if we continue to play the game of world institutions. The alternative corresponds to decentralization, powerful networking associated with extreme distributions of tasks, and effective integrating procedures.

In more concrete terms, this means that individuals will constitute their identity in experiences through which their particular contribution might be integrated in different actions or products. They will share resources and use communication means to optimize their work. Access to one another's knowledge through means that are simultaneously open to many inquiries is part of the global contract that individuals will enter, once they acknowledge the benefits of accessing the shared body of information and the tools residing on networks. Self-organizing human nuclei of diverse practical experiences will allow for the multiplicity of languages of the civilization of illiteracy, freedom from bureaucracy, and more direct co-participation in the life of each social cell thus constituted.

Advanced specialized knowledge, empowering people to pursue their practical goals with the help of new languages (mathematical notation, visualization, diagramming, etc.), usually insulates the expert from the world. If circumstances are created to meaningfully connect practical experiences that are relevant to each other, fragmentation and synthesis can be pursued together. We are very good at fragmentation-it defines our narrow specialties. But we are far less successful in pursuing synthesis. The challenge lies in the domain of integration.

Since human activity reflects the human being's multi-dimensionality, it is clear that nuclei of overlapping experiences, involving different perspectives, will develop in environments where resources are shared and results constitute the starting point for new experiences. The identity of people constituting themselves in the framework of a pragmatics that ensures efficiency and diversity reflects experiences through many literacies, and survival skills geared towards co-evolution, not domination. Co-evolving technology is only an example. From the relatively simple bulletin boards of the early 1960's to the Internet and Web of our day, co-evolution has been a concrete practical instance of the constitution of the Netizen. Michael Hauben, who coined the term, wanted to describe the individuals working towards building a cooperative and collective activity that would benefit the world at large. Conflicts are not erased. The Net community is not one of perfection but of anticipated and desired diversity, in which imperfection is not a handicap. Its dynamics is based on differences in quantity and quality, and its efficiency is expressed in how much more diversity it can generate.

The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?

The inadequacy of literacy and natural language, undoubtedly the main sign system of the human species, is brought more forcefully to light against the background of new forms of practical experiences leading to human self-constitution through many sign systems. Extremely complex pragmatic circumstances, predicated by needs that long ago surpassed those of survival, make the limits of literacy-based language experiences stand out. This new pragmatics demands that literacy be complemented with alternative means of expression, communication, and signification. The analysis of various forms of human activity and creativity can lead to only one conclusion: the patterns of human relationships and the tools created on the foundation of literacy no longer optimally respond to the requirements of a higher dynamics of human existence.

Misled by the hope that once we capture extensions in language-everything people do in the act of their practical self-identification-we could infer from these to intensions-how a particular component unfolds-we have failed to perceive the intensional aspects of human actions themselves. For instance, we know of the diverse components of the practical experience of mathematics-analytic effort, rationality, symbolism, intuition, aesthetics. But we know almost nothing about each component. Some simply cannot be expressed in language; others are only reduced to stereotype through literate discourse. Does the power of a mathematical expression rely on mathematical notation, or on aesthetic quality? How are these two aspects integrated? Where and how does intuition affect mathematical thinking?

The same criteria apply, but more critically, to social activities. Interactions among people involve their physical presence; their appearance as beautiful, or fit, or appropriate; their capability to articulate thoughts; their power of persuasion; and much more. Each component is important, but we know very little about the specific impact each one has. Surprised at how dictators come to power, and even more by mass delusion, with or without television as part of the political performance, we still fail to focus on what motivates people in their manifestations as racists, warmongers, hypocrites, or, for that matter, as honest participants in the well-being of their fellow humans. When the argument is rotten but the mass follows, there is more at work than words, appearance, and psychology. Language has projected the experience involved in our cultural practice, but has failed to project anything particularly relevant to our natural existence. Thus patterns of cultural behavior expressed in language seem quite independent of the patterns of our biological life, or at least appear to have acquired a strange, or difficult to explain, independence.

We must give serious thought to our obsession with invulnerability, easy to conceptualize and express in language. It is, for instance, embodied in the medicine of the civilization of literacy. The abrupt revelation of AIDS, marking the end of the paranoia of invulnerability, might help us understand the ramifications of the uncoupling of our life in the domain of culture-where human sexuality belongs-and our life in the domain of nature-where reproduction belongs. Magic reflected the attempt to maintain a harmonious relation with the outside world. It has not yet been decided whether it is medicine-the reified experience of determinism applied in the realm of individual well being-or a parent's embrace that calms a baby's colic; or whether the psychosomatic nature of modern disease is addressed by the technology of healthcare in our days. What we already know is that populations were decimated once new patterns of nourishment and hygiene were imposed on them. When an attained balance was expelled by a foreign form of balance, life patterns were affected. This happened not only to populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also in the native populations of the American continents. Medical concepts resulting from analytic practical experiences of self-constitution-many reified in the medicine of the civilization of literacy-defy the variety of possible balances and embody the suspicion that "The solution is the problem."

Literacy, when applicable, works very well, but it is not the universal answer to humankind's increasingly complex pragmatics. In the fortunate position of not having totally abandoned experiences with sign systems other than language, people have been able to change the patterns of training, instruction, industrial production, modern farming, and healthcare. Patterns of practical understanding of domains which for a very long time were concealed by literacy are also affected: pattern recognition, image manipulation, design. As a result, new methods for tackling new areas of human experience are becoming possible. Instead of describing images through words, and defining a course of action or a goal through a text, and then having the text control the use of visual elements, people use the mediating power of design systems with integrated planning and management facilities. A new product, a new building, and concepts in urban planning are generated while the pertinent computer program computes data pertinent to cost, ecological impact, social implications, and interpersonal communication. The practice of transcending literacy, while still involving literacy, also resulted in the development of new skills: visual awareness, information processing, networking, and new forms of human integration, far less rigid than those characteristic of integration exclusively through verbal language.

There is no need to eliminate literacy, as there is no need to reduce everything to literacy. Where it is still applicable, literacy is alive and well. On the Internet and World Wide Web, it complements the repertory of means of human interaction characteristic of computer-mediated communication. Television holds a large audience captive in one-way communication. The ambition of the World Wide Web is to enable meaningful one-to-one and one-to-many interactions.

The civilization of illiteracy is one of diversity and relies on the dynamics of self- organization. But in order to succeed, several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yet developed in appropriate practical experiences of human self- constitution the ability to think in media other than natural language. Like many beginners in a new language, people still translate from one language to another. When this does not work, they look for help in the language they know, instead of formulating questions in the alternative language in which they suspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated by rationality and system, only minor effort is made towards understanding how intuition comes about, whether in mathematics, medicine, sports, the arts, market transactions, war skills, food preparation, and social activities.

In the civilization of literacy, people were, and to a great extent still are, able to ignore some forms of human relationships without affecting the general outcome of human practice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilization relies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved in integrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplish through literacy-based methods, even though timing is critical to the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level of relations. New practical experiences of higher efficiency require finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomena for dealing with the parallel processes involved in the self- constitution of individuals and of society.

From possibilities to choices

If the multiplication of possibilities were not to be met by effective ways of making choices, we would be sucked into the whirlwind of entropy. In practice, this translates into an obvious course of events: allowing for new possibilities, which sometimes take the appearance of alternatives, means to disallow certain known and practiced options of confirmed output. For example, where democracy is taken over by bureaucracy, the town meeting fulfills only a decorative function. There is nothing of consequence in the American President's State of the Union address, or in the conventions where political parties nominate candidates for the Presidency. With the choice of local and national political representation, the possibility to directly participate in power is precluded.

The possibility of using sign systems other than language is far from being a novelty. Even the possibility of achieving some form of syncretism is not new by any means. What is new is the awareness of their potential malfunctioning and of the potential for losing control over forms of praxis that become highly complex. From among the many ways the relation between the individual and the community is manifested, the condition of the legal system is probably the best example. Whether independent, constituting a domain of regulations and checks with its own motivations, or part of other components of social and political life, the institution of justice encodes its typologies, classifications, and rules in laws. This domain parallels one of human interactions where expected values are permanently subjected to the scrutiny of the pragmatic activity. Integrity of the individual and his lawfully acquired goods, the binding nature of commitments, and prohibition of misrepresentation or of rules essential to the well being of the community are rules on which legal experience developed. Right and wrong, once identified under circumstances of direct practical experience through consequences for the community's well being, are now constituted in a domain with a life and rules of its own. Killing, stealing, and misrepresentation are actions well defined in the written texts of the law. But the law itself, anchored in literacy, consequently detached itself from the real world and now constitutes its own reality and motivations. Since this is the case, it is no surprise that legal practice turns out to be nothing more than interpretations of texts and attempts to use language to bring about an outcome based on chimera, not reality.

The legal system reacts to innovation by forcing rules originating in other pragmatic frameworks-the strong evidence of DNA analysis is only one example-to fit its own criteria of evaluation. Instead of constituting a proactive context for the unfolding of the human genius, legal praxis ends up defending only its own interests. The jury system in the USA might appear to many people as an expression of democracy. In the pragmatic context in which the jury system originated, even the notion of peer made sense, since it applied to a reduced and relatively homogeneous community. Today, the jury has become part of the odious equation of the dispute between lawyers. The jury is selected to reflect the lowest common denominator so that its members, mostly incompetent, can be manipulated in the adversarial game of the performance produced under the generic label of justice.

As an extension of literate language, the experience of legal language builds on its own rules for efficient functioning and establishes criteria for success that corrupt the process of justice. It is a typical example of malfunctioning, probably as vivid as the language of politics. Judicial and political praxes document, from another angle, how democracy fails once it reaches the symbolic phase manifested in the bureaucracy of the legal system and of reified power relations.

Coping with choice

Self-definition implies the ability to establish a domain of possibilities. But possibilities do not present themselves alone. In the transition from the civilization of literacy to the new civilization of illiteracy, the global domain of possibilities expands dramatically, but the local, individual domains probably narrow in the same proportion. This happens because what at the global level looks like a multiplication of choices, at the level of the individual appears as a matter of effective selection procedures. As long as there is little to choose from, selection is not a problem.

The primitive family had few choices regarding nourishment, self-reproduction, and health. Choices increased as the practical experiences of self-constitution diversified. Migrating populations chose from among selections different from those available to settled human beings. The first known cities embodied a structure of relations for which written language was appropriate. The megalopolis of our day embodies a universe of choices on a different scale. Within such a domain of possibilities, there are no effective selection procedures. Reduction from practically infinite choices to a finite number of realizations is at best a matter of randomness and exposure. Inversely, the slogan "Act locally, think globally" can easily lead to failure. Many accomplishments that are successful on a local scale would fail if applied globally if they do not integrate awareness of globality from the beginning.

Within literacy, the expectation that literate people receive, by virtue of knowledge of language, good selection procedures-considered as universal and permanent as literacy itself-was part of its multi-layered self-motivation. In the civilization of illiteracy, this expectation gives way to pursuing consecutive choices, all short-term, all of limited scope and value-free, which even seem to eliminate one's own decision. It appears that choices grab individuals. This explains why one of the main drives in the world today is towards greater numbers of people seeking to live in cities. Once a choice is exhausted, the next follows as a consequence of the scale, not as a result of searching for an alternative. This applies as well to professional life, itself subject to the shorter cycles of renewal and change.

The powerful mechanism of social segmentation, the result of the many mediating mechanisms in place, makes the problem of coping with choice look like another instance of democracy at work. Let's consider some of these choices: to distribute, or not to distribute, condoms to high school and junior high school students; to confirm or deny the right to end one's life (pro-choice or pro-life); to expand heterosexual family privileges to homosexual cohabitation; to introduce uniform standards of testing in education. These examples are removed from the broader context of human self-constitution and submitted, through the mechanism of media- ocracy, more to market validation than to a responsible exercise of civic responsibility.

Mediation mechanisms characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy cause the choices that a community faces to become almost irrelevant on the individual level. In the new universe of possibilities, expanding as we speak, human beings are giving up autonomy and self-determination, as they participate in several different communities. They share in the apparent choices of society insofar as these match their own possibilities and expectations. But they often have the means to live outside a society when their choices (regarding peace, war, individual freedom, lifestyle, etc.) are different from those pursued by states. Citizens of the trans-national world partake in the dynamics of change to a much higher degree than do people dedicated to the literate ideals of nationalism and ethnicity.

We can fly to the moon (and people will, either as participants in the space program or as paying passengers). We can afford partaking in unique events- concerts, contests, auctions-some in person, others through the electronic means they can afford. Each individual can become president or member of some legislative body; but only some can afford applying for these positions. Whether through wealth, intelligence, sensitivity, race, gender, age, or religion, we are not equal in our possibilities, although we are equal in our rights. Coping with choice involves matching goals and means of achieving them. Literacy is a poor medium for this operation, which takes place between individuals and the many communities to which they belong. The various languages of the pragmatic identification of all those involved in coping with choice operate more effectively.

The network of interrelations that constitute our practical existence and the patterns of these relations will continue to change and become globally more complex and locally more confined. While we gain global freedom, we lose local dynamics. At the particular level at which we input our mediating performance, we are in almost total control of our own efficiency. Each of the many service providers for industry, physicians, lawyers, or writers is an example of local choices reflected in the increased productivity of those they service and of their own output. At higher levels, where these services are integrated-regardless of whether they provide rust control, X-ray processing, graphic design, or accounting-choices become more limited. Consequently, coordination becomes critical. The strategy of outsourcing is based on the notion that maximum efficiency requires specialization that companies cannot achieve. If the process continues in the same direction, coordination will soon be the most difficult problem of practical experience. This is due to the complexity that integration entails, and to the fact that there are no effective procedures for simplifying it. The simpler each task, the more complex the integration. Short of submitting a law that reflects this situation, another thesis can be formulated: Overall complexity is preserved regardless of how systems are subdivided, or tasks distributed. Complexity is transferred from the task to the integration.

Trade-off

Awareness of possibilities is more direct than that of complexities. Trading choice and self-determination for less concern and higher rewards in terms of satisfying needs and desires is not an exciting alternative. Language has not brought the promised awareness of the world, but has made possible a strategy of confinement. The loss of language seems to trouble mainly people who work at language dissemination, maintenance, and awareness. However, after taking language for granted for a long time, people notice those instances when, in need of a word or trying to function in a world of language conventions, language is not up to the task. Faced with unprecedented experiences in scientific experimentation, large-scale communication, radical political change, and terrorism, people observe that they do not have the language for these phenomena. They look for words and ultimately realize that those words, assumed to exist, cannot be found because the pragmatic framework requires something other than language. In contrast to tools, like the ones we keep around the house or see mechanics and plumbers using, language is not taken away or lost because we are our language. What is lost from language is a certain dimension of human being and acting, of appropriating reality and producing and exchanging goods, of acknowledging our experience and sharing it with others.

Cultural, historical, economic, social, and other developments contribute to our notion of literacy. Its crisis is symptomatic of everything that made literacy necessary and is based on the particular ways in which literate societies function. This statement does not suggest that the crisis of literacy implies a cultural or economic crisis. For instance, women's emancipation did not start with the emancipation of language. In Japanese, in which the man-woman distinction goes so far as to require that women use a different vocabulary than men, women's emancipation could hardly be considered. As an expression of a specific type of social relations, this distinction in language maintains a status against which women might feel entitled to react.

Many other patterns of human interaction, which prompt practical action for change, are deeply seated in language. Watching our children, upon whom we impose literacy, grow, we almost always count the words they learn and evaluate their progress in articulating desires, opinions, and questions. What we neglect to ask is what kind of world does language bring to them in the process of learning language? What kind of practical experiences does language make possible? When children break loose of our language, it is almost too late to understand the problem. Language use seems so natural that its syntactic and value-loaded conventions are not questioned. We accept language as it is projected on us. It comes with gods or God, goodness, right, truth, beauty, and other values, as well as distinctions (sexual, racial, generational) that are held to be as eternal as we were taught that language itself is. We project language on our children only in order to be challenged by them through their own language, pretty much attuned to their different pragmatic frame of reference.

As a framework within which parents, and ultimately society, want children to think, communicate, and act, language appears to have two contradictory characteristics: liberty and constraint. The all-encompassing change we are witnessing concerns both. In order to function effectively in a society of very specialized patterns of interaction, people realize that a trade-off between liberties and constraints is inescapable. On the level of social and cultural life, people realize that constraints, represented by accepted prejudices and ideologies, impinge upon their limited space of decision-making and infringe upon individual integrity. Language turned out to be not only the medium for expressing liberating ideals, but also a stubborn embodiment of old and new prejudices. It is also the instrument of deception, and bears in its ideal of literacy the most evident deception of all-literacy as a panacea for every problem the human species faces, from poverty, inequity, and ignorance to military conflict, disease, starvation, and even the inability to cope with new developments in science and technology. Interestingly enough, Netizens believe the same thing regarding the Internet! In their campaign for free choice of literacy, they are just as dogmatic about their type of literacy as the Modern Language Association, for example, is about the old-fashioned kind.

We can accept that this world of enormously diversified forms of human practice (corresponding to the diversity of human beings) requires more than one type of literacy. But this is not yet sufficient condition for changing the current premise of education if the avenues of gaining knowledge are not developed. The assumption that language is a higher level system of signs is probably correct, but not necessarily significant for the inference that in order to function in a society, each member has to master this language. To free ourselves of this inference will take more than the argument founded on the efficiency of illiterate and aliterate individuals who constitute their identity in realms where literacy does not dominate, or ceased being entirely necessary.

Learning from the experience of interface

The exciting adventure of artificially replicating human characteristics and functions is probably as old as the awareness of self and others. Harnessing tools and machines in order to maximize the efficiency of praxis was always an experience in language use and craftsmanship. So far, the most challenging experience has been the use of computers to replicate the ability to calculate, process words and images, control production lines, interpret very complex data, and even to simulate aspects of human thinking.

Programming languages serve as mediating entities. Using a limited vocabulary and very precise logic, they translate sequences of operations that programmers assume need to be executed in order to successfully compute numbers, process words, operate on images, and even carry out the logical operations for playing chess and beating a human opponent at the game. A programming language is a translation of a goal into a description of the logical processes through which the goal can be achieved. Computer users do not deal with the programming language; they address the computer through the language of interface: words in plain English (or any other language for which interface is designed), or images standing for desired goals or operations. The entire machine does not speak or understand an interface's high-level language. The interaction of the user with the machine is translated by interface programs into whatever a machine can process. Providing efficient interfaces is probably as important as designing high level abstract programming languages and writing programs in those languages. Without such interfaces, only a limited number of people could involve themselves in computing. The experience of interface design can help us understand the direction of change to which the new pragmatics commits us. At the end of the road, the computer should physically disappear from our desks. All that will be needed is access to digital processing, not to the digital engine. The same was true of electricity. Once upon a time it was generated at the homes or workplaces where the people who needed it could use it. Now it is made available through distribution networks.

Natural language accomplished the function of interface long before the notion came into existence. Literacy was to be the permanent interface of human practical experiences, a unifying factor in the relation between the individual and society. Ideally, interface should not affect the way people constitute themselves; that is, it should be neutral in respect to their identity. This means that people can change and tasks can vary. The interface would account for the change and would accommodate new goals. Even in their wildest dreams, computer scientists and researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, who work with intelligent interfaces, do not anticipate such a living interface. Interfaces affect the nature of practical experiences in computing. As these become more complex, a breakdown occurs because interfaces do not scale up. Instead of supporting better interactions, an interface can hamper them and affect the outcome of computing. Language has performed quite well under the pressure of scaling up. It grows with each new human practical experience and can adapt to a variety of tasks because the people constituted in language adapt. In the intimate relation between humans and their language, language limits new experiences by subjecting them to expectations of coherence. Language's expressive and communicative potential reaches its climax as the pragmatics that made it possible and necessary exhausts its own potential for efficiency. Literate language no longer enhances human abilities in practical experiences outside its pragmatic domain. Literacy only ends up limiting the scope of the experience to its own, and limits human growth.

Many impressive human accomplishments, probably the majority of them, are testimony to the powerful interface that literate language is. But these accomplishments are equal testimony to what occurs when the interface constitutes its own domain of motivations, or is applied as an instrument for pursuing goals that result in a forced uniformity of experiences. If literacy had been a neutral mediating entity, it would have scaled up to the new scale of humankind and the corresponding efficiency expectations, once the threshold was reached. Successive forms of religious, scientific, ideological, political, and economic domination are examples of powerful interface mechanisms. To understand this predicament, we can compare the sequence of interfaces connected to the experience of religion to the sequence of computer-user interfaces. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between these two domains of practical experience, a striking similarity has to be acknowledged. Both start as limited experiences, open to the initiated few, and expand from a reduced sign system on interactions to very rich multimedia environments. From a limited secretive domain to the wide opening afforded by a trivial vocabulary, both evolve as double-headed entities: the language of the initiated individuals interfaced with the language of the individuals progressively integrated in the experience. No one should misconstrue this comparison, meant only to illustrate the constitutive nature of the experience of interfacing. We could as well focus on the experiences of economics, politics, ideology, science, fashion, or, even better, art.

The experience of literacy resulted in some consistency, but also in lost variety. Every language of interaction (interface) that disappeared took with it into oblivion experiences impossible to resuscitate. The relation between the individual and community, once very rich at various levels, grew weaker the more literacy took over. Literacy norms this relation, shaping it into a multiple-choice quiz. Information processing techniques applied on literacy-controlled forms of social interaction require even further standardization in order to be efficient. As a result, the individual is rationalized away, and the community becomes a locus for data management instead of a place for human interaction. The process exemplifies what happens when interface takes over and interacts with itself.

The various concerns raised so far only reiterate how important it is to understand the nature of interface processes. But experience gained in computational research of knowledge points to other aspects critical to the relation between the individual and society. Humans constitute themselves in a variety of practical experiences that require alternatives to language. Powerful mathematical notations, diagrams, visualization techniques, acoustics, holography, and virtual space are such alternative means. Non-linear association and cognitive paths, until now embodied in hypertext structures that we experience on the World Wide Web, belong to this category, too. Processing language is not equivalent to integrating these alternative means.

Cognitive requirements put severe restrictions on experiences grounded in means different from language, on account of the intensity and nature of cognitive processes, as well as of memory requirements. The genetic endowment formed in language-based practical experiences of self-constitution is not necessarily adapted to fundamentally different means of expression. Communication requires a shared substratum, which is established in an acculturation process that takes many generations. Enhanced by the new media, communication does not become more precise. Programs are conceived to enable the understanding of language. Everything ever written is scanned and stored for character recognition. Images are translated into short descriptions. A semantic component is attached to everything people compute. Hopes are high for using such means on a routine basis, though the compass might be set on some elusive direction. Even when machines will understand what we ask them to do-that is, when they integrate speech and handwriting recognition functions in the operating system-we will still have to articulate our goals. A technology capable of automating many operations that human beings still perform will increase output, and thus the efficiency of the effort applied. But the real challenge is to figure out ways to optimize the relation between what is possible and what is necessary. Procedures that will associate the output to the many criteria by which humans or the machine determine how meaningful that output is, are more important than raw technological performance. Until now, literacy has not proven to be the suitable instrument for this goal.

People and language change together. Individuals are formed in language; their practical experiences reshape language and lead to the need for new languages. If we cannot uncouple language and the human being, especially in view of the parallel evolution of genetic endowment and linguistic ability, we will continue to move in the vicious cycle of expression and representation. The issue is not language per se, but the claim that representation is the dominant, one might say exclusive, paradigm of human activity. Neither science nor philosophy has produced an alternative to representation.

There is more to physical reality than what language can lay claim to. And there is much more to the dynamics of our existence in a world whose own dynamics integrates it while extending far beyond it. Skills needed to function in the physical world-skills which children and newborn animals display-are only partially represented in language. The entire realm of instinctive behavior belongs here. This includes coordination and the very rich forms of relating to space, time, and other living beings. Advanced biological and cognitive research (Maturana's work leads in this area) shows that various organisms survive without the benefits of representation. Very personal human experiences-among them, pain, love, hate, and joy-happen without the benefits and constraints of language representation.

There are skills for which we have no representation in language. Various tags are used to name them under the heading of parapsychology, magic, and non-verbal communication. Once these are described through their results only, they cause reactions ranging from doubt to ridicule. The unusual and inexplicable performances of individuals called idiots savants belong to this category. An idiot savant hears a piano concerto and replays it masterfully, although he or she cannot add two and two. A matchbox falls and the idiot savant can state, without looking at the box, the exact number of matches that fell out. These are feats that are on record. Some idiots savants are able to go through long sequences of phone numbers, produce complete listings of prime numbers, and execute incredible multiplication and division. Researchers can only observe and record such accomplishments. For other inexplicable phenomena, we simply have no concept available: the amazing last moments before death, the power of illusion, and the visualization aptitudes of some individuals. Researchers have accumulated data on the power of prayer and faith, and on paranormal manifestations. It is not the intention of this book to venture explanations of these phenomena, but to point out the great variety of experiences which could be integrated into human praxis but are not, merely because they still defy explanation in language. Functioning in a world that we read through the glasses of literacy makes us often blind to what is different, to what literacy does not encompass. A realm of fact and possible abstraction, difficult to compare with the world of existence that language reports about, remains to be explored. When the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported on a difference in machine and human computation, this report pointed to aspects for which language was not prepared to serve as a useful interface, and to a realm different from representation.

Crises, catastrophes, and breakdowns testify to the borders of a given pragmatic context. They are references as to how far such a context can extend. Beyond the context begins the universe of fundamental change and revolution, constitutive of a new framework. The really interesting level of language, and of any other sign system, is not the referential level but the level of constituting new worlds. These worlds do not necessarily extend the old one. Telecommuting is an extension of the previous pattern of work. Cooperative real-time practical experiences are more than the sum of individual contributions. They are constitutive of non-linear forms of complementarity. The virtual office is but another form of office. Virtual community is a constitutive experience. Nothing of what we have learned in experiences of broadcasting is pertinent to the participatory aspect of human self-constitution in an environment of fluidity and unsettled patterns of interaction. The goal is not to inform, but to enable and empower. The elaborate combinations of chemicals concocted to increase the effectiveness of medicine, of construction materials, or of electronic components continues earlier patterns. Atomic manipulation, intended to synthesize intelligent materials and self-repairing substances and devices, constitutes a new domain of practical experiences.

Each of these examples belongs to a pragmatic framework different in nature from the one that defined literacy and which literacy embodies and forces upon our experience. Centrism-Euro-, ethno-, techno- or any other kind-as well as dualism- good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly-and hierarchy have exhausted their potential. The attempt to measure the emergent pragmatics against ideals that do not originate from within them can only result in empty slogans firmly entrenched in the avatars of machine-age ideologies. As we experience it at the juncture between literacy and illiteracy, the legacy of language is not only accomplishments but also the diversion from what the world is to descriptions that stand for it in our minds, books, and social concerns. The networks of objects and their properties (qualifiers of objects) exist in the civilization of literacy only through language: things are real insofar as they are in language. To overcome this perception is a challenge well beyond the power of most individuals. What emerges in the new pragmatic framework of distributed practical experience and of cooperative, parallel human interactions is a human being self-constituted in a plurality of interconditioning means of expression, communication, and signification. We might just be on the verge of a new age. A Sense of the Future

Beyond literacy begins a realm which for many is still science fiction. The name civilization of illiteracy is used to define direction and to point out markers. The richness and diversity of this realm is indicative of the nature of our own practical experiences of self-constitution. The landscape mapped out by these experiences is simultaneously its own Borgesian map. One marker along the road from present to future leaves no room for doubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. But this does not mean that the current dynamics of change can be reduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology, in general.

Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-language and in its literate experience-we suggested that a multitude of various sign processes effectively override the need for and justification of literacy in a context of higher efficiency expectations. We could alternatively define the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in the sense that human practical experiences become more and more subject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in final analysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs. Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences extends beyond computers and symbolic processing.

As we have seen, in all human endeavors, semiotic awareness is expressed in choices (of means of expression and communication) and patterns of interaction. Successive fashion trends, no less than the new media, global interaction through networks, cooperative work, and distributive configurations are semiotic identifiers. Interfaces are semiotic entities through which difficult aspects of the relation between individuals and society are addressed. More precisely, to interface means to advance methods and notions of a new form of cultural engineering, that has the same condition as genetic engineering, although not necessarily based on its mechanism, as the proponents of memetics would like us to believe.

No matter how spectacular new technologies are, and how fast the rate of their adoption, pragmatic characteristics that make the quantum leap of efficiency possible within the new scale of humankind remain the defining element of the dynamics of change. To make this point clear no argument is superfluous, and no stone of doubt or suspicion should be left unturned. Our concern is not with the malignant rhetoric against technology of a probably insane Unabomber, for example. It is with a false sense of optimism focused on fleeting embodiments of human creativity, not on its integration in meaningful experiences. Whether a spectacular multimedia program, a virtual reality environment, genetically based medicine, broadband human interaction, or cooperative endeavors, what counts are the human cognitive resources, in the form of semiotic processes irreducible to language and literacy, at work under circumstances of globality.

Cognitive energy

It is impossible to tire of acknowledging applications from which many will people benefit, but which many resent even before these applications become available. They all become possible once they transcend the pragmatic framework of the civilization of literacy because they are based on structurally different means of expression, communication, and signification. We have all witnessed some of these applications: sensors connected to unharmed nervous terminals allow the quadriplegic to move. A child in a wheelchair who exercises in virtual reality can be helped to function independently in the world that qualifies his condition as a handicap. Important skills can be acquired by interpolating patterns of behavior developed in the physical world in the rough draft of the simulated world. People are helped to recover after accidents and illness, and are supported in acquiring skills in an environment where the individual sets the goals. In Japan, virtual reality helps people prepare for earthquakes and tests their ability to cope with the demand for fast response. Interconnected virtual worlds support human interactions in the space of their scientific, poetic, or artistic interest, or combinations thereof, stimulating the hope, as naive as it may sound, for a new Renaissance.

Not everything need be virtual. Active badges T transmit data pertinent to an individual's identification in his or her world. Not only is it easier to locate a person, but the memory of human interaction, in the form of digital traces, allows people and machines to remember. You step into a room, and your presence is automatically acknowledged. The computer lets you know how many messages are waiting for you, and from whom. It evaluates how far you are from the monitor and displays the information so you can see it from that distance. It reminds you of things you want to do at a certain time. Details relevant to our continuous self-constitution through extremely complex practical experiences play an important role in making such interactions more efficient. A personal diary of actions, dialogues, and thinking out loud can be automatically recorded. Storing data from the active badge and from images captured during a certain activity is less obtrusive than having someone keep track of us. This is a new form of personal diary, protected, to the extent desired, from intrusion or misuse. This diary collects routine happenings that might seem irrelevant-patterns of movement, dialogue, eating, reading, drawing, building models, and analyzing data. The record can be completed by documenting patterns of behavior of emotional or cognitive significance, such as fishing, mountain climbing, wasting time, or dancing- according to one's wish. At the end of the day, or whenever requested, this diary of our living can be e-mailed to the writer. One can review the events of a day or search for a certain moment, for those details that make one's time meaningful.

In the world beyond literacy and literacy-based practical experiences, we can search for artistic events. A play by Shakespeare can be projected onto the screen of our eyes, where the boundary between reality and fiction starts. The play will feature the actors of one's choosing. The viewer can even intercalate any person in the cast, even himself or herself, and deliver a character's lines. Sports events and games can be viewed in the same way. In another vein, we can initiate dialogues with the persons we care for, or get involved in the community we choose to belong to. Belonging, in this new sense, means going beyond the powerless viewing of political events that seem as alien as almost all the mass-media performances they are fed with. Belonging itself is redefined, becoming a matter of choice, not accident. Belonging goes beyond watching the news and political events on TV, beyond the impotence we feel with respect to the huge political machine. All these can happen as a private, very intense experience, or as interaction with others, physically present or not. To see the world differently can lead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint. How does a recent immigrant, or a visitor from abroad, perceive the people of the country he has landed in? What do human beings look like to a whale, a bee, an ant, a shark? We can enter the bodies of the handicapped to find out how a blind person negotiates the merciless world of speeding cars and people in a hurry. The empathy game has been played with words and theatrics in many schools. But once a person assumes the handicapped body in a simulated universe, the insight gained is no longer based on how convincing a description is, but on the limits of self-constitution as handicapped. People can learn more about each other by sharing their conditions and limitations. And, hopefully, they will ascertain a sense of solidarity beyond empty expressions of sympathy.

That all these semiotic means-expression in very complex dynamic sign systems-change the nature of individual practical experiences and of social life cannot be emphasized enough. Everything we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt, sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actually produced. The active badge can be attached to a simulated person- an avatar-let loose to walk through the plans for a new building, or on the paths of an expedition through mountains. The diary of space discovery is at least as important as the personal diary of a person working in a real factory, research facility, or at home. Before another tree is cut, before another riverbed is moved, before a new housing development is constructed, before a new trail is opened, people can find out what changes of immediate and long-term impact might result.

It is possible to go even a step beyond the integrated world of digital processing and to entrust extremely complicated processes to neural networks trained to perform functions of command, control, and evaluation. Unexpected situations can be turned into learning experiences. Where individuals sometimes fail-for instance under emotional stress-neural networks can easily perform as well as humans do, without the risks associated with the unpredictability of human behavior. The active badge can be connected, through a local area network of wall-mounted sensors that collect information, to a neural network-based procedure designed to process the many bits and pieces of knowledge that are most of the time wasted. People could learn about their own creativity and about cognitive processes associated with it. They can derive knowledge from the immense amount of their aborted thoughts and actions. Ubiquity and unobtrusiveness qualify such means for the field of medical care, for the support of child development, and for the growing elderly population. With the advent of optical computers, and even biological data processing devices, chances will increase for a complete restructuring of our relation to data, information processing, and interhuman relationships. Individuals will ascertain their characteristics more and more, thus increasing their role in the socio-political network of human interaction.

Some people still decide for others on certain matters: How should children play? How should they study? What are acceptable rules of behavior in family and society? How should we care for the elderly? When is medical intervention justified? Where does life end and biological survival become meaningless? These people exercise power within the set of inherited values that originated in a pragmatic context of hierarchy associated with literacy. This does not need to be so, especially in view of the many complexities hidden in questions like the ones posed above. Our relation to life and death, to universality, permanence, non-hierarchical forms of life and work, to religion and science, and last but not least to all the people who make up our world of experiences, is bound to change. Once individuality is redefined as a locus of interaction through rich sign systems, not just as an identity to be explained away in the generality that gnoseologically replaces the individual, politics itself will be redefined.

Literacy is not all it's made out to be

Enthusiasm over technology is not an argument; and semiotics, obfuscated by semiologues, is not a panacea. George Steiner pointed out that scientists, who "have been tempted to assert that their own methods and vision are now at the center of civilization, that the ancient primacy of poetic statement and metaphysical image is over." This is not an issue of criteria based on empirical verification, or the recent tradition of collaborative achievement, correctly contrasted to the apparent idiosyncrasy and egotism of literacy. The pragmatic framework reflects the challenge of efficiency in our world of increased population, limited resources, and the domination of nature. This framework is critical to the human effort to assess its own possibilities and articulate its goals. Let us accept Steiner's idea-although the predicament is clearly unacceptable-that sciences "have added little to our knowledge or governance of human possibility." Let us further accept that "there is demonstratably more insight into the matter of man in Homer, Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky than in the entire neurology of statistics." This, if it were true, would only mean that such an insight is less important to the practical experience of human self-constitution than literacy-based humanities would like us to believe.

Literary taste or preference aside, it is hard to understand the epistemological consequence of a statement like "No discovery of genetics impairs or surpasses what Proust knew of the spell or burden of lineage." All this says is that in Steiner's practical experience of self-constitution, a pragmatics other than genetics proves more consequential. Nobody can argue with this. But from the particular affinity to Proust, one cannot infer that consequences for a broader number of people, the majority of whom will probably never know anything about genetics, are not connected to its discoveries. We may be touched by the elegant argument that "each time Othello reminds us of the rust of dew on the bright blade, we experience more of the sensual, transient reality in which our lives must pass than it is the business or ambition of physics to impart." After all the rhetoric that has reverberated in the castle of literacy, the physics of the first three minutes or seconds of the universe proves to be no less metaphysical, and no less touching, than any example from the arts, literature, or philosophy that Steiner or anyone else can produce. Science only has different motivations and is expressed in a different language. It challenges human cognition and sentiment, and awareness of self and others, of space and time, and even of literature, which seems to have stagnated once the potential of literacy was exhausted. The very possibility of writing as significantly as the writers of the past did diminishes, as the practical experience of literate writing is less and less appropriate to the new experiences of self-constitution in the civilization of illiteracy.

The argument can go on and on, until and unless we settle on a rather simple premise: The degree of significance of anything connected to human identity-art, work, science, politics, sex, family-is established in the act of human self-constitution and cannot be dictated from outside it, not even by our humanistic tradition. The air, clean or polluted, is significant insofar as it contributes to the maintenance of life. Homer, Proust, van Gogh, Beethoven, and the anonymous artist of an African tribe are significant insofar as human self-constitution integrates each or every one of them, in the act of individual identification. Projecting their biological constitution into the world- we all breathe, see, hear, exercise physical power, and perceive the world-humans ascertain their natural reality. The experience of making oneself can be as simple as securing food, water, and shelter, or as complex as composing or enjoying a symphony, painting, writing, or meditating about one's condition. If in this practical experience one has to integrate a stick or a stone, or a noise, or rhythm in order to obtain nourishment, or to project the individual in a sculpture or musical piece, the significance of the stick or stone or the noise is determined in the pragmatic context of the self-constitutive moment.

Many contexts confirm the significance of literacy-based practical experiences. History, even in its computational form or in genetic shape, is an example. Literacy made quite a number of practical experiences possible: education, mass media, political activism, industrial manufacture. This does not imply that these domains are forever wed to literacy. A few contexts, such as crafts, predated literacy. Information processing, visualization, non-algorithmic computation, genetics, and simulation emerged from the pragmatics that ascertained literacy. But they are also relatively independent of it. Steiner was correct in stating that "we must countenance the possibility that the study and transmission of literature may be of only marginal significance, a passionate luxury like the preservation of the antique." His assertion needs to be extended from literature to literacy.

The realization that we must go beyond literacy does not come easy and does not follow the logic of the current modus operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in literacy and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in the experience of written language that it is only natural to extend it to the inference that without literacy the human being loses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch, however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience of language is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not the case. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majority are aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writing system, supports human existence in a universe of extreme expressive richness and variety.

Many arguments, starting with those against writing enunciated in ancient times and furthered in various criticisms of literacy, point to the many dimensions of language that were lost once it started to be tamed and its regulated use enforced upon people. Again, Steiner convincingly articulates a pluralistic view: "...we should not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies, such as the icon or the musical note." He correctly describes how mathematics, especially under the influence of Leibniz and Newton, became a dynamic language: "I have watched topologists, knowing no syllable of each other's language, working effectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech common to their craft."

Networks of cognitive energy

Chemistry, physics, biology, and recently a great number of other practical experiences of human self-constitution, formed their own languages. Indeed, the medium in which experiences take place is not a passive component of the experience. It is imprinted with the degree of necessity that made such a medium a constitutive part of the experience. It has its own life in the sense that the experience involves a dynamics of exchange and awareness of its many components. The cuneiform tablets could not hold the depth of thinking of the formulas in which the theory of relativity is expressed. They probably had a better expressive potential for a more spontaneous testimony to the process of self-identification of the people who projected themselves in the act of shaping damp tablets, inscribing them, and baking them to hardness. Ideographic writing may well explain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism and Buddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal from speech and writing, or the phonetic subtleties at work when more than 2000 ideographs were reduced to the standard 600 signs now in use. The historic articulation of the Torah, its mixture of poetry and pragmatic rules, is different in nature from the writings, in different alphabets and different pragmatic structures, reflected in the language of the New Testament or of the Koran.

Writing under the pragmatics of limited human experiences, and writing after the Enlightenment, not to mention today's automated writing and reading, are fundamentally different. Gombrich recalls that Gutenberg earned a living by making amulet mirrors used by people in crowds to catch the image of sacred objects displayed during certain ceremonies. The animistic thought marks this experience. It is continued in the moving type that Gutenberg invented, yet another mirror to duplicate the life of handwriting, which type imitated. Printed religious texts began their lives as talismans. After powerful printing presses were invented, writing extends a different thought- machines at work-in the sequence of operations that transform raw materials into products.

All the characteristics associated with literacy are characteristics of the underlying structure of practical experiences, values, and aspirations embodied in the printing machines. The linear function, replicated in the use of the lever, was generalized in machines made of many levers. It was also generalized in literacy, the language machine that renders language use uniform. Writing originated in a context of the limited sequences of human self-constitutive practical experiences embodied in the functioning of mechanical machines. The continuation of the sequential mode in more elaborate experiences, as in automated production lines, will be with us for quite a while. Nevertheless, sequentiality is increasingly complemented by parallel functioning. Similar or different activities carried through at the same time, at one location or at several, are qualitatively different from sequential activities. Self-constitution in such parallel experiences results in new cognitive characteristics, and thus in new resources supporting higher efficiency. The deterministic component carried over from literacy- based practical experiences reflects awareness of action and reaction. Its dualistic nature is preserved in the right/wrong operational distinctions of the literate use of language, and thus in the logic attached to it.

Pragmatic expectations of efficiency no longer met by conceptual or material experiences based on the model embodied in literacy have led to attempts to transcend determinism, as well as linear functions, sequentiality, and dualism. A new underlying structure prompts a pragmatics of non-linear relations, of a different dynamics, of configurations, and of multi-valued systems. A wide array of methods and technologies facilitates emancipation from the centralism and hierarchy embodied in literacy-based pragmatics. The pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy requires that the centralism of literacy be replaced through massive distribution of tasks, and non- hierarchic forms of human interactions. Augmented by worldwide networking, this pragmatics has become global in scope. Probably just as significant is the role mediation plays in the process. As a specific form of human experience, mediation increases the effectiveness of praxis by affording the benefits of integration to human acts of self-constitution. Mediation replaces the analytic strategy inherited through literacy, opening avenues for reaching a sense of the whole in an experience of building hypotheses and performing effective synthesis. In order to realize what all this means, we can think of everything involved in the conception, design, manufacturing, distribution, and integration of computers in applications ranging from trivial data management to sophisticated simulations. The effort is, for all practical purposes, global.

The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas to new concepts of computation. The design of computers involves a large number of creative professionals from fields as varied as mechanical engineering, chip design, operating systems, telecommunications, ergonomy, interface design, product design, and communication. The scale of the effort is totally different from anything we know of from previous practical experiences. Before such a new computer will become the hardware and software that eventually will land on our desks, it is modeled and simulated, and subjected to a vast array of tests that are all the expression of the hypothesis and goals to be synthesized in the new product.

Some people might have looked at the first personal computers as a scaled- down version of the mainframes of the time. Within the pragmatics associated with literacy, this is a very good representation. In the pragmatics we are concerned with, this linear model does not work, and it does not explain how new experiences come about. Chances are that the mass-produced machines increasingly present in a great number of households reach a performance well above those mainframes with which the PC might have been compared.

Representing the underlying structure of the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, the digital becomes a resource, not unlike electricity, and not unlike other resources tapped in the past for increasing the efficiency of human activity. In the years to come, this aspect will dominate the entire effort of the acculturation of the digital. Today, as in the Industrial Age of cars and other machines, the industry still wants to put a computer on every desk. The priority, however, should be to make computation resources, not machines, available to everyone. Those still unsure about the Internet and the World Wide Web should understand that what makes them so promising is not the potential for surfing, or its impressive publication capabilities, but the access to the cognitive energy that is transported through networks.

Bumps and potholes

Expectations stemming from the civilization of literacy differ in their condition from those of the cognitive age. Infinitely more chances open continuously, but the risks associated with them are at least of the same order of magnitude as the changes. Walking along a road is less risky than riding a horse, bicycling, or driving a car. Flying puts the farthest point from us on the globe within our reach, but the risks involved in flight are also greater. Cognitive resources integrated in our endeavors contribute to an efficiency higher than that provided by hydropower, steam engines, and electric energy. With each new step in the direction of their increased participation in our praxis, we take a chance.

There is no reason to compare simulations of the most complex and daring projects to successful or failed attempts to build new cities, modify nature, or create artifacts conceived under cognitive assumptions of lesser complexity than that achieved in our time. A failed connection on today's Internet, or a major scam on the Web, should be expected in these early stages of the pragmatic framework to which they belong. But we should at no moment ignore the fact that cognitive breakdowns are much more than the crash of an operating system or the breakdown of a network application.

We learn more about ourselves in the practical experiences of constituting the post-literate languages of science, art, and the humanities than we have learned during the entire history of humankind. These languages-very complex sign systems indeed- integrate knowledge accumulated in a great variety of experiences, as well as genetically inherited and rationally and emotionally based cognitive procedures. Changes in the very fabric of the human being involved in these practical experiences are reflected in the increased ability to handle abstraction, refocus from the immediate to the mediated, and enter interhuman commitments that result from the practice of unprecedented means of expression, communication, and signification.

During the process, we have reached some of our most critical limitations. Knowledge is deeper, but more segmented. To use Steiner's words once again, there is a "gap of silence" between many groups of people. Our own efficiency made us increasingly vulnerable to drives that recall more of the primitive stages of humankind than all that we believed we accumulated through the humanities. The new means are changing politics and economic activity, but first of all they are changing the nature of human transactions. And they are changing our sense of future.

Let us not forget Big Brother, not to be brushed away just because the year 1984 has come and gone, but to be understood from a viewpoint Orwell could not have had. If the means in question are used to monitor us, too bad. In the emerging structures of human interaction, to exercise control, as done in previous societies, is simply not possible. It is not for the love of the Internet that this constitutes a non-regulated domain of human experiences. Rather it is because by its nature, the Internet cannot be controlled in the same way our driving, drinking, and social behavior are controlled. The opportunity for transparency afforded by systems that replace the domination of literacy is probably too important to be missed or misused. The dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy results from its implicit condition. We can affect some of its parameters, but not its global behavior. For instance, the integration required by parallelism and the massive distribution of tasks cannot take place successfully if the network of interactions is mined by gates, filters, and veils of secrecy, by hierarchic control mechanisms, and by authorization procedures. Imagine if a person's arms, eyes, ears, or nostrils had to obtain permission to participate in the self-constitution of the whole human being. Individuals in the new pragmatic context are the eyes, arms, brains, and nostrils of the complex human entity involved in an experience that integrates everyone's participation. It is an intense effort, not always as rewarding as we expect it to be, a self-testing endeavor whose complexity escapes individual realization. Feedback loops are the visible part of the broader system, but not its essential part.

The authenticity of each and every act of our self-making contributes to the integrity of the overall process-our ascertainment through what we do. Relative insularity and a definite alienation from the overall of the system's goals-meeting higher demands by higher performance-are part of the picture described. Complemented by a sense of empowerment-the ability to self-determine-and a variety of new forms of human interaction, the resulting human pragmatics can be more humane than the pragmatics of the huge factories of industrial society-commuters rushing from home to job to shopping mall, to entertainment. It is not Big Brother who will be watching. Each and every individual is part of the effort, entitled to know everything about it, indeed wanting to know and caring. Without transparency that we can influence, the effort will not succeed. We are our own active badge. The record is of interest in order to justify the use of our time and energy, but foremost to learn about those instances when we are less faithful to ourselves than our newly acquired liberty affords. It is much easier to submit to outside authority, as literacy educates us to do. But once self-control and self-evaluation, as feedback mechanisms under our own control become the means of optimization, the burden is shifted from Big Brother, bureaucracies, and regulations to the individual.

It is probably useful at this point to suggest a framework for action in at least some of the basic activities affected by the change brought about in the civilization of illiteracy. The reason for these suggestions is at hand. We know that literate education is not appropriate, but this observation remains a critical remark. What we need is a guide for action. This has to translate into positive attitudes, and into real attempts to meet the challenge of present and shape the future in full awareness of forces at work.

The University of Doubt

Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences, assumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human being can and must be literate. Just as the goal of industry was to turn out standardized products, education assumes the same task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates testify how like the mold the product is. To those who have problems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic and dyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to the inability to cope with numbers. The question of why we should expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes, and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to means different from literacy.

In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of high efficiency leading to the civilization of many literacies, education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, and his or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I use the word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of education and training, which were more on a one-to- one or one-to-few basis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of a universal common denominator, based on the industrial model of standardization. Rather than taming and sanitizing the minds of students, education has not only to acknowledge differences in aptitudes and interests, but also to stimulate them. Every known form of energy is the expression of difference and not the result of leveling.

During this process of re-evaluation, the goals of education will have to be redefined, methods of education rethought, and content reassessed. A new philosophy, embodied in a dynamic notion of education, has to crystallize as we work towards educational alternatives that integrate the visual, the kinetic, the aural, and the synesthetic. In the spirit of the pragmatic context, education ought to become an environment for interaction and discovery. Time taken with reiterations of the past deserves to be committed to inferences for the present, and, to the extent possible, for the future.

Some of the suggestions to be made in the coming lines might sound utopian or have the ring of techno-babble. Their purpose is to present possibilities, not to conjure up miraculous solutions. The path from present to future is the path of human practical experiences of self-constitution. To achieve goals corresponding to the requirements and expectations of the civilization of no dominant literacy, education needs to give up the reductionist perspective that has marked it since generalized education became the norm. Education has to recognize its students as the individuals they are, not as some abstract or theoretic entity. Basic education should be centered around the major forms of expression and communication: language, visual, aural, kinetic, and symbolic. Differences among these systems need to be explored as students familiarize themselves with each of them, as well as combinations. Concrete forms of acculturation should be geared towards using these elements, not dispensing instructions and assigning exercises. Each student will discover from within how to apply these systems. Most important, students will share their experiences among themselves. There will be no right or wrong answer that is not proven so by the pragmatic instance.

Fundamental to the educational endeavor is the process of heuristic inquiry, to be expressed through programs for further investigation. These programs require many languages: literate inquiry, mathematics, chemistry, computation, and so on. By virtue of the fact that people from different backgrounds enter the process, they bear the experience of their respective languages. Relevance to the problem at hand will justify one approach or another. Frequently, the wheel will be re-invented. Other times, new wheels will emerge as contributions of authentic ingenuity and inventiveness. In their interaction, those involved in the process share in the experience through which they constitute themselves at many levels. One is to provide access to the variety of perspectives reflecting the variety of people.

Interactive learning

Education has to become a living process. It should involve access to all kinds of information sources, not only to those stored in literate formats. These resources have their specific epistemological condition-a printed encyclopedia is different from a database. To access a book is different from accessing a multimedia knowledge platform. Retrieval is part of the practice of knowledge and defines a horizon for human interaction. All these differences will become clear through use, not through mere assertion or imitation. The goal of education cannot be the dissemination of imitative behavior, but of procedures. In this model of education, classes are groups of people pursuing connected goals, not compartments based on age or subject, even less bureaucratic units. A class is an expression of interest, not the product of statistical distribution based on birth and zoning. The physical environment of the class is the world, and not the brick and mortar confined room of stereotyped roles and interactions. This might sound hollow, or too grandiose, but the means to make this happen are progressively becoming available.

Here is one possible scenario: Students approach centers of interactive education after the initial phase of acculturation. Perhaps the word center recalls one of the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy. By their own nature, though, these centers are distributed repositories of knowledge stored in a variety of forms- databases, programs pertinent to various human practical experiences, examples, and evaluation procedures. With such a condition, such centers lend themselves to making refreshable knowledge available in all imaginable formats. On request, its own programs (known as intelligent agents) search for appropriate sources through the guidance of those in need, independent of them, or parallel to them. Requests are articulated in voice command: "I would like to know ...." Or the requests can be handwritten, typed, or diagrammed. Such interactive education centers are simultaneously libraries of knowledge, heuristic environments, laboratories, testing grounds, and research media. The hybrid human-machine machine that constitutes their nucleus alters as the individual involved in the interaction changes.

As we all know, the best way to learn is to teach. Students should be able to teach their neural network partners subjects of interest to their own practical experiences. In many cases, the neural networks, themselves networked with others, will become partners in pursuing practical goals of higher and higher complexity. The fact that students interact not based on their address and school district, not based on homogeneity criteria of age or cultural background, but on shared interests and different perspectives gives this type of education a broader social significance: There is nothing we do that does not affect the world in its entirety. Repeating these words ad nauseam will not affect the understanding of what this means, as one practical endeavor of global consequential nature can.

In the model suggested, interests are identified and pursued, and results are compared. Questions are widely circulated. What students appropriate in the process are ways of thinking, procedures for testing hypotheses, and means and methods for ascertaining progress in the process. Professional educators, aware of cognitive processes and freed from the burden of administrative work, no longer rehash the past but design interactive environments for students to learn in. Teachers involve themselves in this interaction, and continue to evolve as knowledge itself evolves. Instead of inculcating the discipline of one dominant language, they leave open choices for short and long-term commitments, their own included.

Not having to force themselves to think in an imposed language, students are freed from the constraints of assigned tasks. They are challenged by the responsibility to make their own choices and carry them through. In the process, differences among students will become apparent, but so will the ability to understand how being different, in a context of cooperative interactions, is an asset and not a liability. Motivation is seeded in the satisfaction of discovery and the ability to easily integrate in a framework of practical experiences that are no longer mimicked in education, but practiced in discovery.

Footing the bill

Instead of an education financed by the always controversial redistribution of social resources, interactive learning will be supported by its real beneficiaries. That a biogenetics company, for instance, can do this better than an organization engaged in bureaucratic self-perpetuation is a fair assumption. Freed from the costs associated with buildings and high administrative overhead, education should take place in the environment of interactions characteristic of the pragmatic framework. As extensions of industries and services, of institutions and individual operations, education would cease to be training for a hypothetical employer. Like the practical experience for which it is constituted, education points to the precise reward and fulfillment, not to vague ideals that prove hollow after the student has paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn them. Vested in the benefits of a company whose potential depends on their future performance, students can be better motivated. Will business cooperate? As things stand now, business is in the paradoxical situation of criticizing the inadequacies of an education that has many of the same characteristics as outmoded ways of doing business.

Once students reach a level of confidence that entitles them to attempt to continue on their own or to associate with the company, the alumni of such educational experiences have better control over their destinies and can follow the cognitive path of their choosing. There will be analytically oriented and synthetically oriented individuals, many embracing the experience of articulating hypotheses and testing them. Some will follow cognitive inclinations to induction, to making observations and drawing generalizations. Others will follow the path of deduction, noticing general patterns and seeing how they apply in concrete cases. Others will follow abductions, i.e., applying knowledge about a representative sample in order to infer for a broader collection of facts or processes.

No cognitive path should be forbidden or excluded, as long as human integrity, in all aspects, is maintained and human interaction supported in the many possible forms it can assume. Motivation reflected in integrity is the element that will bring individual direction into focus. As it is practiced today, education cultivates motivations that exclude integrity and the development of skills appropriate to understanding that you can cheat your teacher but not yourself without affecting the outcome. In the current system of education, integrity appears as something incidental to the experience. Collaboration on a project of common interest introduces elements of reciprocal responsibility in respect to the outcome. Since outcome affects everyone's future, education is no longer a matter of grades, but of successful collaboration in pursuing a goal.

In order to accomplish these goals-obviously in a greater number of manifestations than the ones just described-we need to free education from its many inherited assumptions. Progress can no longer be understood as exclusively linear. Neither can we continue to apply a deterministic sequence of cause and effect in domains of non-deterministic interdependencies, characteristic of distributed cooperative efforts. Neither hierarchy nor dualism can be cultivated in the educational environment because the dynamics of association and interaction is based on patterns of changing roles within a universe focused on optimal parameters, not threatened by the radical disjunction of success vs. failure. Complexity must be acknowledged, not done away with through methods that worked in the Industrial age but which fail in the new pragmatic context.

Unless and until one discovers through practical experience the need for a different viewpoint, for values outside the immediate object of interest, nothing should be imposed on the individual. Shakespeare and Boole are neither loved, nor understood, nor respected more by those who were forced to learn how to spell their names, learn dates by heart, or learn titles of works, fragments of plays or logical rules. The very presence of art and science, sport and entertainment, politics and religion, ethics and the legal system in educational forms of interactive media, books, artworks, databases, and programs for human interaction opens the possibility for discoveries. As serious as all these matters are, no education will ever succeed without making its students happy, without satisfaction. In each instance of education, good or bad, the human being, as a natural entity, is broken in. Tension will always be part of education, but instead of rewarding those more adept at acculturation, education should integrate complementary moments. No, I do not advocate interactive study from the beach or from a remote mountain ski resort; and I am not for extending human integration in the world of practical experiences around the clock. But as education frees itself from the industrial model-factory-like buildings, classes that correspond to shifts, holidays and vacation time-it should also let students make choices that are closer to their natural rhythms. Instead of physical co-presence, there should be interactive and cooperative creativity that does not exclude the playful, the natural, and the accidental.

If all this sounds too far-fetched to bring about, that is because it is. Even if the computer giants of the world were to open interactive learning centers tomorrow, it would be to little avail. Students will bring with them attitudes rooted in traditional expectations. There is more consensus in our world for what is right with the current system of education than for what can or should be done to change it. But with each nucleus of self-organization, such as on-line classes on subjects pertinent to working on the network, seeds are sown for future development. In our time, when the need for qualified people surges in one field or another-computational genetics, nanotechnology, non-linear electronic publishing-the model I presented is the answer. Waiting for the educational system to process students and to deliver them, at no cost to the corporations that will employ them, is no longer an acceptable strategy. Instead of endowing university chairs dedicated to the study of the no longer meaningful, corporations should invest in training and post-academic life-long learning.

To preach that in order to be a good architect one has to know history and biology and mathematics, and to know who Vitruvius was, equals preaching the rules of literacy in a world that effectively does not need them. To create an environment for the revelation of such a need, if indeed it is acknowledged as humans discover new ways to deal with their questions, is a very different task. How much reading, how much writing, mathematics, drawing, foreign language, or chemistry an architect needs is the wrong question. It assumes that someone knows, well in advance of the changing pragmatic context, what is the right mixture and how future human practical experiences will unfold. The ingredients change, the proportions change, and the context changes first of all.

As opposed to the current hierarchy, which proclaims drawing or singing as extraneous but orthography and reading as necessary, education needs to finally acknowledge complementarity. It has to encourage self-definition in and through skills best suited to practical experiences of self-constitution in a world that has escaped the cycle of repetition, and pursues goals unrelated to previous experiences. Instead of doing away with or rationalizing intuition, or being suspicious of irrationality, education will have to allow the individual to pursue a search path that integrates them. Students should be able to define goals where intuition, and even irrationality and the subconscious, are applicable. They should be freed from the constraints and limitations of the paradigm of problem solving, and engaged in generating alternatives.

A wake-up call

All this relies heavily on the maturity of the student and the ability of educators to design environments that stimulate responsibility and self-discipline. The broad-stroke educational project sketched up to here will have to address the precise concerns connected to how and when education actually starts, what the role of the family should be-if the family remains a valid entity-and how variety and multiplicity will be addressed. In today's words and expectations, even in today's prejudices, education is of national interest in one main respect: to equip students with skills so they can contribute to the national coffers in the future. But the arena of economic viability is the global economy, not an economy defined by national boundaries. The trans-national marketplace is the real arena of competition. Re-engineering, far from being finished, made it quite clear that for the sake of efficiency, productive activities are relocated without any consideration for patriotism or national pride, never mind human solidarity and ethics.

In today's world, and to some extent in the model described so far, the unfolding of the individual through cultivation of the mind and spirit is somehow lost in the process of inculcating facts. It is its own reward to enjoy subtleties, or to generate them, to partake in art, or be part of it, to challenge the mind, or indulge in the rich world of emotions. Prepared for work that is usually different from what educators, economists, and politicians anticipate, people face the reality of work that becomes more and more fragmented and mediated. On the assembly line, or in the "analysis of symbols" (to use Robert Reich's term), work is, in the final analysis, a job, not a vocation. Physicians, professors, businessmen, carpenters, and burger flippers perform a job that can be automated to some degree. Depriving work of its highest but often neglected motivation-the unfolding of individual abilities, becoming an identity in the act- negates this motivation. Replaced by external rationale-the substance of commercial democracy-the decline of inner motivation leads to lack of interest, reduced commitment, and declining creativity. Education that processes humans for jobs promises access to abundance, but not to self-fulfillment. The decline of family, and new patterns of sexuality and reproduction, tell us that expectations, sublime on their own merit, of improved family involvement will be the exception, not the rule. Accordingly, the challenge is to understand the nature of change and to suggest alternatives, instead of hoping that, miraculously or by divine intervention of the almighty dollar (or yen, franc, mark, pound, or combinations thereof), families will again become what literacy intended they should be. If the challenge is not faced, education will only become a better machine for processing each new generation.

Many scholars of education have set forth various plans for saving education. They do not ignore the new pragmatic requirements. They are unaware of them. Therefore, their recommendations can be classified as more of the same. The sense of globality will not result from taking rhymes from Mother Goose (with its implicit reference and culturally determined rhythm) and adding to them the Mother Goose of other countries. The Victorian and post-Victorian vision transferred upon children, the expectation of "everything will be fine if you just do as you're told," reflects past ideals handed down through the moralizing fiction of the Industrial Age.

The most ubiquitous presence in modern society is the television set. It replaced the book long ago. Notwithstanding, TV is a passive medium, of low informative impact, but of high informative ability. Digital television, which extends the presence of computers, will make a difference, whether it is implemented in high resolution or not. Television in digitally scalable formats is an active medium, and interactivity is its characteristic. Education centers will integrate digital television, and open ways to involve individuals regardless of age, background and interests. We can all learn that there are several ways of seeing things, that the physics of time and music report on different aspects of temporal characteristics of our experience in the world. The movement of a robot, though different from the elegant dance of a ballerina, can benefit from a sense and experience of choreography, considered by many incompatible with engineering. The new media of interaction that are embodied in educational centers should be less obsessed with conveying information, and more with allowing human understanding of instances of change.

But these are only examples. What I have in mind is the creation of an environment for exploration in which knowledge of aesthetic aspects is learned parallel to scientific knowledge. The formats are not those of classes in the theory or history of art, or of similar art oriented subjects. As exploration takes place, aesthetic considerations are pursued as a means of optimizing the effort. It is quite clear that as classes dynamically take shape, they will integrate people of different ages and different backgrounds. Taking place in the public domain of networked resources, this education will benefit from a sense of creative competition. At each moment in time, projects will be accessible, and feedback can be provided. This ensures not only high performance from a scientific or technological viewpoint, but also aesthetic relevance.

The literacy-based educational establishment will probably dismiss the proposals set forth as pie-in-the-sky, as futuristic at best. Its representatives will claim that the problem at hand needs solutions, not a futuristic model based on some illusory self- organizing nuclei supported by the economy. They will argue that the suggested model of education is less credible than perfecting a practice that at least has some history and achievements to report. The public, no matter how critical of education, will ask: Is it permissible, indeed responsible, to assume that a new philosophy of education will generate new student attitudes, especially in view of the reality of metal detectors installed in schools to prevent students from carrying weapons? Is it credible to describe experiences in discovery involving high aesthetic quality, while mediocrity makes the school system appear hopelessly damned? Self-motivation is described as though teenage pregnancy and classes where students bring their babies are the concern of underpaid teachers but not of visionaries. More questions in the same vein are in the air. To propose an analogy, selling water in the desert is not as simple as it sounds.

We can, indeed, dream of educational tools hooked up to the terminals at the Kennedy Space Center, or to the supercomputers of the European Center for Research of the Future. We can dream of using digital television for exploring the unknown, and of on-line education in a world where everyone envisions high accomplishments through the use of resources that until now were open to very few. But unless society gives up the expectation of a homogeneous, obligatory education that forces individuals who want-or do not want-to prepare themselves for a life of practical experiences into the same mold, education will not produce the desired results. Good intentions, based on social, ethnic, or racial criteria, on love of children, and humanistic ideals, will not help either. While all over the world real spending per student in public education and private institutions increased well above the levels of inflation, fewer students do homework, and very few study beyond the daily assignment. This is true not only in the USA but also in countries with high admission standards for college, such as France, Germany, and Japan.

Translated into the language of our considerations, all this means that education cannot be changed independent of change in society. Education is not an autonomous system. Its connections to the rest of the pragmatic context are through students, teachers, parents, political institutions, economic realities, racial attitudes, culture, and patterns of behavior in our commercial democracy. In today's education, parochial considerations take precedence over global concerns. Bureaucratic rules of accumulated imbecility literally annihilate the changes for a better future of millions of students. What appears as the cultivation of the mind and spirit is actually no more than the attempt to polish a store window while the store itself lost its usefulness long ago. It makes no sense to require millions of students to drive daily to schools that can no longer be maintained, or to pass tests when standards are continuously lowered in order to somehow justify them.

Consumption and interaction

In view of the fundamental changes in patterns of human activity, not only students need education, but practically everyone, and probably educators first of all. Connection to education centers needs to be different from the expectation of children sitting in a class dominated by a teacher. On the interactive education networks, age no longer serves as a criterion. Learning is self-paced, motivated by individual interests and priorities and by the perspectives that learning opens. A sense of common interest is expressed through interaction, unfolding through a diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking and doing. Nothing can help generations that are more different and more antagonistic than ours to find a common ground than an experience of education emancipated from hierarchies, freed of authoritarian expectations, challenging and engaging at the same time. Education will be part of the continuous self-definition of the human being throughout one's entire life.

Whether we like it or not, the economy is driven by consumer spending. This does not automatically mean that we can or should let the feedback loop follow a course that will eventually lead to losing the stability of the system to which we belong. If consumption were to remain the driving force, however, we would all end up enjoying ourselves to death. But the solution to this state of affairs is not to be found in political or educational sermonizing. To blame consumption, expectations of abundance, or entertainment will not help in finding answers to educational worries. Education will have to integrate the human experience of consumption and facilitate the acquisition of common sense. A sense of quality can be instilled by pursuing cooperative projects involving not only the production of artifacts, but also self-improvement. Generations that grow up with television as their window to reality cannot be blamed for lack of interest in reading, or for viewing reality as a show interrupted by thirty-second messages. Young minds acquire different skills, and education ought to provide a context for their integration in captivating practical experiences, instead of trying to neutralize them. Television is here for good, although changes that will alter the relation between viewers and originators of messages will change television as well.

The cognitive characteristics and motor patterns of couch potatoes and moderate viewers in the age of generalized TV and interactive networking are very different from those of people educated as literate. These characteristics will be further reshaped as digital television becomes part of the networked world. Where reading about history, or another country, is marginally relevant to praxis in the new context of life and work, the ability to view, understand images, perceive and effect changes, and the ability to edit them and reuse, to complete them, moreover to generate one's own images, is essential to the outcome of the effort. Without engaging the student, education heads into oblivion. As difficult as it is to realize that there are no absolute values, unless this realization is shared by all generations, we will face more inter- generational conflicts than we already face. Television is not the panacea for such conflicts, but a broad ground for reaching reciprocal awareness of what it takes to meet an increasingly critical challenge. Sure, we are focused here on a television that transcended its mass communication industrial society status, and reached the condition of individual interaction.

Understanding differences cannot be limited to education, or reduced to a generalized practice of viewing TV (digital or not). It has to effectively become the substance of political life. While all are equal with respect to the law, while all are free and encouraged to become the best they can be, society has to effectively abandon expectations of homogeneity and uniformity, and to dedicate energies to enhancing the significance of what makes its members different. This translates into an education freed from expectations that are not rooted in the process of self-affirmation as scientists, dancers, thinkers, skilled workers, farmers, sportspeople, and many other pragmatically sanctioned professionals. The direction is clear: to become less obsessed with a job, and more concerned with a work that satisfies them, and thus their friends and relatives. The means and methods for moving in this direction will not be disbursed by states or other organizations. We have to discover them, test, and refine, aware of the fact that what replaces the institution of education is the open-ended process through which we emerge as educated individuals.

Does education henceforth become a generic trade school? For those who so choose, yes. For others, it will become what they themselves make of it through their involvement. Remaining an open enterprise, education will allow as many adjustments as each individual is willing to take upon oneself for the length of one's life. The education of interactive skills, of visualization technologies, of methods of search and retrieval, of thinking in images, sounds, colors, odors, textures, and haptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use, and evaluation which no school or university in the world can provide. But if all available educational resources are used to establish learning centers based on the paradigms of interactivity, data processing, multimedia, virtual reality, neural networks, and genetic engineering, using powerful carriers such as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, we will stop managing a bankrupt enterprise and open avenues for successful alternatives.

As humanity ages, and societies have to cope with a new age structure, education will have to focus also on how to constitute one's identity past the biological optimum. Among the fastest growing segments on the Internet, the elderly represent a very distinct group, of high motivation, and of abilities that can better benefit society.

Access to knowledge in the form of interactive projects, pursued by classes constituted of individuals as different as the world is, is not trivial, and obviously not cheap. The networked world, the many challenges of new means of communication already in place, the new medium of digital TV-closer to reality than many realize- and computers, are already widely available. A major effort to provide support to many who are not yet connected to this world, at the expense of the current bureaucracy of education, will provide the rest. Instead of investing in buildings, bureaucracies, norms, and regulations, instead of rebuilding crumbling schools, and recycling teachers who intellectually died long ago in the absence of any real challenge, we can, and should, design a global education system. Such a system will effect change not only in one country, not only in a group of rich countries, but all over the world. The practice of networking and the competence in integrating work produced independently in functional modules can be attained by tackling real problems, as these are encountered by each person, not invented assignments by teachers or writers of manuals.

Education can succeed or fail only on the terms of efficiency expected in our pragmatic framework. Scores, religiously accounted for in literacy-based political life, are irrelevant. Practical experiences of self-constitution are not multiple-choice examinations. They involve the person in his entirety, and result in instances of personal growth and increased social awareness. A global world requires a live global system of education that embodies the best we can afford, and is driven by the immense energy of variety.

Unexpected opportunities

We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age of knowledge. The statement describes a context of human practical experiences in which the major resources are cognitive in nature. In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisition could take place at a slow pace, over long periods of time. The interlocking factors that defined the pragmatic context were such that no other gnoseological pattern was possible. Knowledge arising from practical experiences of industrial society progressively contributed to making life easier for human beings. Eventually, everything that had been done through the power of human muscle and dexterity-using mainly hands, arms, and legs-was assigned to machines and executed using energy resources found in the environment. Cognition supported the incremental evolution of machines through a vast array of applications. Human knowledge allowed for the efficient use of energy to move machines which executed tasks that might have taken tens, even hundreds of men to perform.

To make this more clear, let us compare some of the tasks of the Machine Age with those of the Age of Cognition we live in. Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted the muscle and the limited mechanical skills needed for processing raw materials, manufacturing cars, washing clothes, or typing. Discoveries of more sources of coal, gas, and oil kept the machine working and led to its extension from the factory to the home. Literacy, embodying characteristics of industrial pragmatics, kept pace with the demands and possibilities of the Machine Age. In our age, computer programs supplant our thinking and the limited knowledge involved in supervising complex production and assembly lines that process raw materials or synthesize new material. Computer programs are behind the manufacture of automobiles; they integrate household functions-heating, washing clothes, preparing meals, guarding our homes. Publishing on the World Wide Web relies on computers. The scale of all these efforts is global. Many languages, bearing the data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the final product or outcome. Older dependencies on natural resources and on a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxis are partially overcome as the focus changes from permanence to transitory communities of interest and to the individual- the locus of the Cognitive Age.

Cognitive resources arise from experiences qualitatively different from those of the Machine Age. Digital engines do not burn coal or gas. Digital engines burn cognition. The source of cognition lies in the mind of each human being. The resources of the Machine Age are being slowly depleted. Alternative resources will be found in what was typically discarded. Recycling and the discovery of processes that extract more from what is available depend more on human cognition than on brute force processing methods. The sources of cognition are, in principle, unlimited. But if the cognitive component of human practical experiences were to stagnate or break down for some unimaginable reason, the pragmatics based on the underlying digital process of the Age of Cognition would break down. To understand this, one need only think of being stuck in a car on an untravelled road, all because the gasoline ran out. Compare this situation with what would happen if the most complex machine, more complicated than anything science fiction could describe, came to a halt because there was no human thought to keep it going.

In the current context, the dynamics of cognition, distributed between processing information and acquiring and disseminating knowledge, stands for the dynamics of the entire system of our existence. Embodied in technologies and processing procedures, cognition contributes to the fundamental separation of the individual human from the productive task, and from a wide variety of non-productive activities. It is not necessary that an individual possess all knowledge that a pragmatic experience requires. This means, simply, that operators in nuclear power plants need not be eminent physicists or mathematicians. Neither do all workers in a space research program need to be rocket scientists. A programmer might be ignorant of how a disk drive works. A brain surgeon does not know how the tools he or she uses are made. Each facet of a pragmatic instance entails specific requirements. The whole pragmatic experience requires knowledge above and beyond what the individuals directly involved can or should master. Instead of limited knowledge uniformly dispensed through literate methods, knowledge is distributed and embodied in tools and methods, not in persons. The advantage is that programs and procedures are made uniform, not human beings. For example, data management does not substitute for advanced knowledge, but a data management system as such can be endowed with knowledge in the form of routines, procedures, operation schemes, management, and self-evaluation.

Just as everyone kept the mechanical engine going, everyone, layperson or expert, contributes to the functioning of the digital engine. The only source of cognition that we can count on is within people self-constituted through practical experiences involving the digital. This does not mean that everyone will become a thinker and everyone will produce knowledge. Two sources of knowledge are relevant in the Age of Cognition within which the civilization of illiteracy unfolds. One source is the advanced work of experts and researchers, in areas of higher abstraction, way beyond what literacy can handle. The other, much more critical, source is to be found in common- sense human interaction, in day-to-day human experience.

We know that the knowledge of experts will continue to be integrated in the pragmatics of this age. The specific motivations of human practical experiences resulting in knowledge have to be recognized and stimulated. And we must also be aware of circumstances that could have a negative effect on these experiences.

We know less about the second source of knowledge because in previous pragmatic contexts it was less critical, and widely ignored. In particular, we do not know how to tap into the infinite reservoir of cognitive resources that are manifested through the routine work and everyday life of the overwhelming portion of the world's population. Taken individually, each person can contribute cognitive resources to the broader dynamics of the world. But these individual contributions are random, difficult to identify, and do not necessarily justify the effort of mining them. In our lives, many decisions and choices are made on the basis of extremely powerful procedures of which we, as individuals, are almost never aware. There is a grain of genius in some of the most mundane ways of doing things. Here the nodal points of integration in the multi-dimensional array that constitutes the globality of humankind are what counts. Delving into the dynamic collective persona makes such an effort worthwhile.

Years ago, in a dialogue with a prominent researcher in education, who used to maintain interactive simulations for youngsters who logged in at his institute, I discussed the then fashionable Game of Life (developed by John Horton Conway). As an open-ended simulation of the rules of birth and death, and based on the theory of cellular automata, the game required quite a bit of thinking. There is no winner or loser in the Game of Life. Although the rules of the game are relatively simple, highly complex forms of artificial life arise on the matrix: a cell going from empty to full describes birth, from full to empty, death. Satisfaction in playing is derived from reaching complex forms of life.

The idea we discussed was to make the game widely available on the network. The hundreds of thousands of players would leave traces of cognitive decisions that, over time, would add up to an expression of the intelligence of the collective body who shared an interest in the game. The cognitive sum total is of a Gestalt nature-much higher than the sum of its parts. That is, the sum has a different qualitative condition, probably comparable to that of the experts and geniuses, or even much higher! Considering all the instances of human application to tasks that range from being frankly useless to highly productive, one can surmise that the second source of knowledge and intelligence is much more interesting than that of the dedicated thinkers. There is more to what we do and how we choose than rationality and thinking, never mind literate rationality.

This collective persona need not comprise the entire population of the world (minus the knowledge professionals). It would help to start with groups formed ad hoc, groups which share an interest in a certain activity, such as playing games, or surfing for a particular piece of information, from the trivial "How do I get from here to there?" to whatever people are looking for-football scores, pornography, crossword puzzles, recipes, investment information, support in facing a certain problem, love, inter- generational conflicts, religion-anything. The challenge comes in capturing the cognitive resources at work, making inferences from the small or vast collective bodies of common focus, and coming up with viable procedures that can be utilized to enhance individual performance-all this without shaping future individual performance into grotesque repetitive patterns, no matter how successful they might be.

If there is validity to the notion that we are in the age of knowledge, we cannot afford to limit ourselves to the knowledge of a few, no matter how exceptional these few are. The civilization of illiteracy transcends the literate model of individual performance considered a guarantee of the performance of society at large.

As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can be avoided only at the expense of more cognitive resources. We know that it took millennia before primitive notation progressed to writing and then to generalized literacy. In the Age of Cognition, we cannot afford such a long cycle for integrating human cognitive resources. Marvin Minsky once pointed out how much mind activity is lost in the leisure of watching football games on TV. While relaxation is essential to human existence, nobody can claim, in good faith, that what has resulted from the enormously increased efficiency of cognition-based practical experiences is not wasted to a great extent. Short of giving up, one has to entertain alternatives. But alternatives to this situation cannot be legislated. It is clear that within the motivations of the global economy, the need to identify and tap more sources of cognition will result in ways to stimulate human interaction. Watching TV probably generates thoughts that only die on the ever larger screens in our homes. Surfing the Web, where millions of hits are counted on the pornography sites-not on mathematics or literature sites-is also a waste and a source of mediocrity. Mouse potatoes are not necessarily better than the couch variety.

If we could derive cognition even from the many experiences of human self- constitution in computer games, we could not only further the success of the industry that changed the way humans play, but gain some insight into motivations, cognitive and emotional aspects of this elementary form of human identity. Above and beyond the speculation on playful man (Homo Ludens), there are quantifiable aspects of competition, satisfaction, and pleasure. And as the Internet effectively maps our journey through a maze of data, information, and sources of knowledge, we can ask whether such cognitive maps are not too valuable to be abandoned to marketing experts, instead being utilized for understanding what makes us tick as we search for a word, an image, an experience. Data regarding how and what we buy is not always representative of what we are. For many people, buying a book or a work of art, a fashionable shirt, a home, or a car is only an experience in mediation performed by the agents of these objects. But there are authentic experiences in which no one can replace us human beings. Games belong to this domain, and so do joking and interactions with friends. No agent can replace us. Within such authentic moments of self-constitution, cognitive resources of exceptional value are at work.

Many people from very different locations and of different backgrounds might simultaneously be present on a certain Web site, without ever knowing it. The server's performance could suggest that there is quite a crowd at a Web site, but it cannot say who the others are, what they are looking for, what kind of cognition drives the digital engine of their particular experiences.

While the medium of networking is more transparent than literacy experiences, it still maintains a certain opaqueness, enhanced by the firewalls meant to protect us from ourselves. Many individuals present at the same time on a Web site is not a situation one can duplicate in literacy, in which the ratio was one reader to one book, or one magazine, or even one videotape (although more than one can watch it on the family TV set, in a class, or on an airplane). Thousands of viewers simultaneously landing on a Web site is a chance and a challenge. We should accordingly think of methods for identifying ourselves, to the extent desired, and declare willingness to interact. This next level of self-constitution and identification is where the potential of rich interactions and further generation of cognition becomes possible. Tapping into cognitive resources in such situations is an opportunity we should not postpone.

Burning cognition, digital engines allow us to reach efficiency that is higher by many orders of magnitude in comparison to the efficiency attained by engines burning coal and oil. But the experience introduces the pressure of accelerated accumulation of data, information processing, and knowledge utilization. To understand the intimate relation between the performance of the digital engine and our own performance, one has only to think of a coal-burning steam engine driving a locomotive uphill. The civilization of illiteracy is a rather steep ascent, facing many obstacles-our physical abilities, limited natural resources, ecological concerns, ability to handle social complexity. To pull the brake will only make the effort of the engine more difficult, unless we want to tumble downhill, head first. Feeding the furnace faster is the answer that every sensible engineer knows. This would sound like a curse, were it not for the excitement of discovery, including that of our own cognitive resources.

Analogy aside, what drives the digital engine is not abstract computing cycles of faster chips, but human cognition embodied in experiences that support further diversification of experiences. It has yet to be the case that we had enough computing cycles to burn and we did not know what to do with the extra computing power available. On the contrary, human practical experiences are always ahead of technology, as we challenge ourselves with new tasks for which the chips of yesterday and the memory available are as inappropriate as the methods and means of literacy.

Bio-electric signals associated with the activity of our minds have been measured for quite a number of years. We learned from such measurements that minds are constituted in anticipation of our practical experience of self-identification as human beings. The idea seemed far-fetched, despite the strong scientific evidence on which it was ultimately founded. Cognition is process, and bio-electric signals are indicative of cognitive processes in our minds. Sensors attached to the skin, such as through a simple finger glove, can read such signals. In effect, they read unfolding mind processes based on our cognitive resources. Feeding digital engines hungry to burn cognition, we arrive not only at mind-controlled prosthetic devices for people with disabilities, but also at a mind-driven painter's brush, or desktop film directing, allowing us to get involved with cinematographic projects of scripting and affecting variations of the plot. From pinball games to tennis and skiing, from virtual bowling to virtual football, our thoughts make new experiences possible. For those affected by disabilities, this is a qualitatively new horizon. Einstein, but many others as well, was quite convinced that only 10 percent of our cognitive abilities are effectively engaged in what we do. As the digital engine burns more and more cognition, this number will change, as probably our physical condition, already marked by forms of degeneration, will change too.

If, by using only one-tenth of our cognitive resources, we reach the level of possibilities open to us, it is not too hard to imagine what only one more tenth might bring. The civilization of illiteracy, with all the dangers and inequities it has to address, is only at its beginning. That its duration will be shorter than the one preceding it is another subject.

1982-1996: Providence RI; Rochester NY; Bexley OH; New York NY; Little Compton RI; Wuppertal, Germany.

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Literacy in a Changing World

During the writing of this book, several articles were published and lectures presented on themes pertinent to the subject. None was taken over in this work. Among these are:

J. Deely and M. Lenhard, editors. The Civilization of Illiteracy, in Semiotics 1981. New York: Plenum, 1983.

H. Stachowiak, editor. Pragmatics in the Semiotic Framework, in Pragmatik, vol. II. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986.

La civilization de l'analphabetisme, in Gazette de Beaux-Arts, vol. iii, no. 1430, March 1988, pp. 225- 228.

Writing is Rewriting, in The American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 5, no. 1, 1987, pp. 115-133.

Sign and Value. (Lecture)Third Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, Palermo, Italy, June 25-29, 1984.

The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Sixth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, October 1-4, 1981.

Philosophy in the Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) XVII World Congress of Philosophy, Montreal, August, 1983.

Values in the Post-Modern Era: The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Institute Forum, Rochester Institute of Technology, November 9, 1984.

A Case for the Hacker. (Lecture) University of Oregon, Oct. 27, 1987.

Communication in a time of integration and awareness. (Lecture) New York University, April, 1989.

De plus ça change... Creativity in the context of scientific and technological change. (Lecture) University of Michigan, January, 1993.

The bearable impertinence of rationality. (Lecture) Multimediale, the1st International Festival of Multimedia, February, 1993.

From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence of writing and early written documents, the following proved useful in defining the position stated in this book:

John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk. Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors. Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee. Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions, 1986.

Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.

Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.

Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1990.

David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind (3rd edition). New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.

Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press,1987.

Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden: Brandsetter, 1963.

R. Hooker. Reading the Past. Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1981.

Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer. Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.

Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic Press, 1976.

Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.

Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY: Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.

Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.

Andrew Sherrat, editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.

Peirce's pragmatic perspective was extracted from his writings. In the absence of a finished text on the subject, various scholars chose what best suited their own viewpoint. A selection from an unusually rich legacy of manuscripts and published articles was made available in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (eight volumes). Volumes 1-6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; volumes 7-8 edited by A. Burks. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-1958.

The standard procedure in citing this work is "volume.paragraph" (e.g., 2.227 refers to volume 2, paragraph 227).

Important references to Peirce's semiotics are found in his correspondence with Victoria, Lady Welby. This was published by Charles Hardwick as Semiotics and Significs. The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Peirce's manuscripts are currently being published in a new edition, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition (E. Moore, founding editor; Max A. Fisch, general editor; C. Kloesel, Director), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984-present.

Peirce's pragmaticism was defined in a text dated 1877, during his return journey from Europe aboard a steamer, "...a day or two before reaching Plymouth, nothing remaining to be done except to translate it into English," (5.526): "Considerer quels sont les effets pratiques que nous pensons pouvoir être produits par l'objet de notre conception. La conception de tous ces effets est la conception complète de l'objet."

In respect to Peirce, his friends William James and John Dewey wrote words of appreciation, placing him "in the forefront of the great seminal minds of recent times," (cf. Morris R. Cohen, Chance, Love, and Logic, Glencoe IL: 1954, p. iii). C. J. Keyser stated, "That this man, who immeasurably increased the intellectual wealth of the world, was nevertheless almost permitted to starve in what in his time was the richest and vainest of lands is enough to make the blood of any decent American boil with chagrin, indignation, and vicarious shame," (cf. Portraits of Famous Philosophers Who Were Also Mathematicians, in Scripta Mathematica, vol. III, 1935).

C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look (An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution). Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965 (first printed in 1955).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). From the few works published during his lifetime, reference is made to Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria (Leipzig, 1666). G.H. Parkinson translated some works in Leibniz Logical Papers (London, 1966). Another edition considered for this book is by Gaston Grua, Leibniz. Textes inédits (Paris, 1948), which offers some of the many manuscripts in which important ideas remained hidden for a long time.

Humberto R. Maturana. The Neurophysiology of Cognition, in Cognition: A Multiple View (P. Garvin, Editor). New York: Spartan Books, 1969.

Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. El árbol del conocimiento, 1984. The work was translated as The Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston/London: Shambala New Science Library, 1987.

Terry Winograd. Understanding Natural Language. New York: Academic Press, 1972.

-. Language as Cognitive Process. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.

George Lakoff. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. (What Categories Reveal about the Mind). Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

"The point is that the level of categorization is not independent of who is doing the categorizing and on what basis" (p. 50).

With his seminal work on fuzzy sets, Lotfi Zadeh opened a new perspective relevant not only to technological progress, but also to a new philosophic perspective.

Fuzzy Sets, in Information and Control, 8 (1965), pp. 338-353.

Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Reasoning (in Memory of Grigore Moisil), in Synthèse 30 (1975), pp. 407- 428.

Coping with the impression of the real world, in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 27 (1984), pp. 304-311.

George Steiner. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

-. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

-. Real Presence: Is There Anything in What We Say? London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989.

-. The End of Bookishness? in The Times Literary Supplement, July 8-14, 1988, p. 754.

Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1962.

Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Illich states bluntly: "Universal education through schooling is not feasible" (Introduction, p. ix).

Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.

Y. M. Lotman. Kul'tura kak Kollektvinji Intellekt i Problemy Iskusstuennovo Razuma (Culture as collective intellect and problems of artificial intelligence). Predvaritel'naya Publicacija, Moskva: Akademija Nauk SSSR (Nauchinyi Soviet po Kompleksnoi Problemi Kibernetika), 1977.

Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Mittelmaß und Wahn. Gesammelte Zerstreuungen. Frankfurt am Main: 1988.

Norbert Wiener. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and Society. 1st ed. New York: Avon Books, 1967.

Wiener was very concerned with the consequences of human involvement with machines and the consequences of the unreflecting use of technology. "Once before in history the machine had impinged upon human culture with an effect of the greatest moment. This previous impact is known as the Industrial Revolution, and it concerned the machine purely as an alternative to human muscle" (p.185).

"It is fair to say, however, that except for a considerable number of isolated examples, this industrial revolution up to present [ca. 1950] has displaced man and beast as a source of power, without making any great impression on other human functions" (p. 209).

Wiener goes on to describe a new stage, what he calls the Second Industrial Revolution, dominated by computing machines driving all kinds of industrial processes. He notes: "Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor" (p. 220).

"What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? In the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely repetitive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninteresting nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the source of leisure necessary for a man's full cultural development. It may also produce cultural results as trivial and wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the radio and the movies" (p. 219).

Nick Thimmesch, editor. Aliteracy. People Who Can Read but Won't. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Policy Research, 1983. Proceedings of a conference held on September 20, 1982 in Washington, DC.

According to William A. Baroody, Jr., President of the American Enterprise Institute, the aliterate person scans magazines, reads headlines, "never reads novels or poetry for the pleasures they offer." He goes on to state that aliteracy is more dangerous because it "reflects a change in cultural values and a loss of skills" and "leads to knowing without understanding."

Marsha Levine, a participant in the conference noted that although educators are concerned with universal literacy, many people read less or not at all: "A revolution in technology is having an impact on education...they [technological means] increase the level of literacy, but they might undermine the practice of what they teach."

At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequence of questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacy hold in terms of helping us to process information? What does reading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot be obtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that we cannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method of communication, where we use television and its still unexploited resources of communication? [...] Is it impossible to conceive of a generation that has received its knowledge of the world and itself through television?" (p. 22).

John Searle. The storm over the university, in The New York Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans. Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe, M.N.] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e. p. 96). (References to Plato include the Stephanus numbers. This makes them independent of the particular edition used by the reader.)

Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1967.

The author continues Socrates' thought: "It [writing] seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment" (p. 298).

From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence of writing and early written documents, the following proved useful in defining the position stated in this book:

John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk. Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors. Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee. Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions, 1986.

Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.

Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.

Dr. Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1990.

David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind. 3rd edition. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.

Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden: Brandsetter, 1963.

Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1981.

Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer. Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.

Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic Press, 1976.

Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.

Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY: Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.

Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York: Knopf, 1970.

C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look. An expanded version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1959.

John Brockman. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

A recent criticism of the book, by Phillip E. Johnson, on the World Wide Web, states that the scientists contributing to the book "tend to replace the literary intellectuals rather than cooperate with them."

Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Antoine de St. Exupéry. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine Woods. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943.

Helmut Schmidt, ex-Chancellor of West Germany, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Edzard Reuter, ex-CEO of Daimler-Benz, along with several prominent German intellectuals and politicians, met during the summer of 1992 to discuss issues facing their country after reunification. In their Manifesto, they insisted that any concept for a sensible future needs to integrate the notion of renouncing (Verzicht) and sharing as opposed to growing expectations and their export through economic aid to Third World countries. See Ein Manifest: Weil das Land sich ändern muß (A Manifesto. Because the country needs to change), Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992

Jean-Marie Guéhenno. La Fin de la Démocratie. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballantine, 1970.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Earth's Holocaust, in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co., 1959.

George Steiner. The end of bookishness? in Times Literary Supplement, July 8-14, 1988.

"To read classically means to own the means of that reading. We are dealing no longer with the medieval chained library or with books held as treasures in certain monastic and princely institutions. The book became a domestic object owned by its user, accessible at his will for re-reading. This access in turn comprised private space, of which the personal libraries of Erasmus and of Montaigne are emblematic. Even more crucial, though difficult to define, was the acquisition of periods of private silence" (p. 754).

Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population, 1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, editors. London: W. Pickering, 1986.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens). The Annotated Huckleberry Finn: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With introduction, notes, and bibliography by Michael P. Hearn. New York: C.N. Potter and Crown Publishers, 1981.

"Twain drives home just how strongly we are chained to our own literacy through Huck's illiterate silence" (p. 101). "Thus Twain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy. They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And yet we must recognize a world rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters" (p. 105).

George Gilder. Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life. New York: Norton, 1992.

Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Knopf, 1992.

America-The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy

John Adams. Letters from a Distinguished American: Twelve Essays by John Adams on American Foreign Policy, 1780. Compiled and edited by James H. Hutson. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1978.

-. The Adams-Jefferson: the Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Lester J. Cappon, editor). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. The American Challenge. Trans. Robert Steel. With a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

Neil Postman. Rising Tide of Illiteracy in the USA, in The Washington Post, 1985.

"Whatever else may be said of the immigrants who settled in New England in the 17th century, it is a paramount fact that they were dedicated and skillful readers.... It is to be understood that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households, for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief that printing was 'God's highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.' But reading for God's sake was not their sole motivation in bringing books into their homes."

Lauran Paine. Captain John Smith and the Jamestown Story. London: R. Hale, 1973.

Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.

Charles Dickens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

The book is a journal of Dickens's travels from Boston to St. Louis, from January through June, 1842.

Alexis de Toqueville. Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen). New York: Vintage Books, 1945.

Several other writers have attempted to characterize the USA, or at least some of its aspects:

Jean Baudrillard. Amérique. Paris: Grasset, 1986.

-. America. Chris Turner, London/New York: Verso, 1988.

Gerald Messadie. Requiem pour superman. La crise du mythe américain. Paris: R. Laffont, 1988.

Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Liberalismo y Jacobinismo. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Depalma, 1967.

In practically all her novels, Jane Austen extols the improvement of the mind (especially the female mind) through reading; see especially Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, chapter 8. (New York: The New American Library, 1961, p. 35).

Thomas Jefferson. Autobiography, in Writings. New York: The Library of America/Literary Classics of the United States, 1984.

Jefferson's father placed him in the English school when Thomas was five years old, and at age nine in the Latin school, where he learned Latin, Greek, and French until 1757. In 1758, Jefferson continued two years of the same program of study with a Reverend Maury. In 1760, he attended the College of William and Mary (for two years), where he was taught by a Dr. William Small of Scotland (a mathematician). His education consisted of Ethics, Rhetoric, and Belles Lettres. In 1762, he began to study law.

Joel Spring. The American School 1642-1990. 2nd ed. New York/London: Longman, 1990.

Benjamin Franklin's model academy embodied his own education. " '...it would be well if [students] could be taught every thing that is useful, and every thing that is ornamental. But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd that they learn those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.' [...] Franklin's early life was a model for getting ahead in the New World [...] The 'useful' elements in Franklin's education were the skills learned in apprenticeship and through his reading. The 'ornamental? elements,... were the knowledge and social skills learned through reading, writing, and debating" (p. 23).

Theodore Sizer, editor. The Age of the Academics, New York: Teachers College Press, 1964.

"The academy movement in North America was primarily a result of the desire to provide a more utilitarian education as compared with the education provided in classical grammar schools" (p. 22). Lester Frank Ward. The Psychic Factors of Civilization. 2nd ed. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970. "The highest duty of society is to see that every member receives a sound education" (p. 308).

Transcendentalism: "A 19th century New England movement of writers and philosophers who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of deepest truths." The main figures were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia. 1990 ed.

Paul F. Boller. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860. An Intellectual Inquiry. New York: Putnam, 1974. Major philosophers of pragmatics:

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Although no finished work deals explicitly with his pragmatic conception, this conception permeates his entire activity. His semiotics is the result of the fundamental pragmatic philosophy he developed.

John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey bases his pragmatic conception on the proven useful. This explains why this conception was labeled instrumentalism or pragmatics of verification. Among the works where this is expressed are How We Think (1910), Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (1938), Knowing and Known (1940).

William James (1842-1910). James expressed his pragmatic conception from a psychological perspective. His main works dedicated to pragmatism are Principles of Psychology (1890), Pragmatism (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909).

Josiah Royce (1855-1916). He is the originator of a conception he called absolute pragmatics.

John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple Computer, Inc took the bully pulpit for literacy (at President-elect Clinton's economic summit in December, 1992), stating that the American economy is built on ideas. He and other business leaders confuse ideas with invention, which is their main interest, and for which literacy is not really necessary.

Sidney Lanier. The Symphony, 1875, in The Poems of Sidney Lanier. (Mary Day Lanier, editor). Athens: University of Georgia Press, 198.

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). American economist and social scientist who sought to apply evolutionary dynamic approach to the study of economic constructions. Best known for his work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), in which he coined the term conspicuous consumption.

Theodore Dreiser. American Diaries, 1902-1926. (Thomas P. Riggio, editor). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

-. Sister Carrie (the Pennsylvania Edition). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

-. Essays. Selected magazine articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and art in the American 1890's. (Yoshinobu Hakutani, editor). 2 volumes. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985-1987.

Henry James. The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.

-. The Bostonians. London: John Lehmann Ltd. 1952.

"I wished to write a very American tale," James wrote in his Notebook (two years prior to the publication of the novel in 1886). He also stated, "I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point of our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex...."

Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.

In the section aptly entitled "The Literature of Revolt," Commager noticed that the tradition of protest and revolt (dominant in American literature since Emerson and Thoreau) turned, at the beginning of the 20th century (that is, with the New Economics), into an almost unanimous repudiation of the economic order. "...most authors portrayed an economic system disorderly and ruthless, wasteful and inhumane, unjust alike to working men, investors, and consumers, politically corrupt and morally corrupting," (p. 247). He goes on to name William Dean Howell (with his novels), Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and others. In the same vein, Denis Brogan (The American Character), J.T. Adams (Our Business Civilization), Harold Stearns (America: A Reappraisal), Mary A. Hamilton (In America Today), André Siegfried (America Comes of Age) are also mentioned.

Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Diane Ravitch. The Schools We Deserve. New York: Doubleday,1985.

Peter Cooper (1791-1883). Self-taught entrepreneur and inventor. As head of North American Telegraph Works, he made a fortune manufacturing glue and establishing iron works. In 1830, his experimental locomotive made its first 13-mile run.

The Corcoran case. The incredible secret of John Corcoran, 20/20, ABC News, April 1, 1988. (Text by byTranscripts: Journal Graphics, Inc. pp. 11-14.)

Noah Webster. The American Spelling Book: containing an easy standard of pronunciation. Being the first part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793.

William Holmes McGuffey. McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic First Reader: containing progressive lessons in reading and spelling (revised and improved by Wm. H. McGuffey). Cincinnati: Winthrop B. Smith, 1853. It is doubtful that all the clever remarks attributed to Yogi Berra came from him. What matters is the dry sense of humor and logical irreverence that make these remarks another form of Americana.

Akiro Morita, et al. Made in Japan. New York: Dutton, 1989.

United We Stand, the political interest group founded by H. Ross Perot, is probably another example of how difficult it is, even for those who take an active stand (no matter how controversial), to break the dualistic pattern of political life in the USA. This group became the Reform Party.

Gottfried Benn. Sämtliche Werke. (Gerhard Schuster, editor). Vols. 3-5 (Prosa). Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1986.

Benn maintains that the language crisis is actually the expression of the crisis of the white man.

Andrei Toom. A Russian Teacher in America, in Focus, 16:4, August 1996, pp. 9-11 (reprint of the same article appearing in the June 1993 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior and then in the Fall 1993 issue of American Educator).

Among the many articles dealing with American students' attitudes towards required subject matter, this is one of the most poignant. It involves not literature, philosophy, or history, but mathematics. The author points out not only the expectations of students and educational administrators, but also the methods in which the subject matter is treated in textbooks. Interestingly enough, he recounts his experience with students in a state university, where generalized, democratic access to mediocrity is equated with education.

From Orality to Writing

Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.

Andrew Sherrat, Editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.

Eric A. Havelock. Schriftlichkeit. Das griechische Alphabet als Kulturelle Revolution. Weinheim: Verlag VCH, 1990.

Ishwar Chandra Rahi. World Alphabets, Their Origin and Development. Allahabad: Bhargava Printing Press, 1977.

Current alphabets vary in number of letters from 12 letters of the Hawaiian alphabet (transliterated to the Roman alphabet by an American missionary) to 45 letters in modern Indian (Devnagari). Most modern alphabets vary from 24 to 33 letters: modern Greek, 24; Italian, 26; Spanish, 27; modern Cambodian, 32; modern Russian Cyrillic, 33. Modern Ethiopian has 26 letters representing consonants, each letter modified for the six vowels in the language, making a total of 182 letters.

Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the World. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.

The comparison between orality and writing has had a very long history. It is clear that Plato's remarks are made in a different pragmatic framework than that of the present. Ong noticed that: "...language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages-possibly tens of thousands-spoken in the course of human history, only around 106 have even been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all" (p.7). Ong also refers to pictographic systems, noticing that "Chinese is the largest, most complex, and richest: the K'anglisi dictionary of Chinese in 1716 AD lists 40,545 characters" (p. 8).

Recently, the assumption that Chinese writing is pictographic came under scrutiny. John DeFrancis (Visible Speech. The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, p. 115) categorizes the Chinese system as morphosyllabic.

Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1990.

David Diringer. The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind. 2nd ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953.

-. The Story of Aleph Beth. New York/London: Yoseloff, 1960.

-. Writing. Ancient Peoples and Places. London: Thames of Hudson, 1962.

Ignace J. Gelb. A Study of Writing. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963.

Gelb, as well as Ong, assumes that writing developed only around 3500 BCE among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Many scripts are on record: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan or Mycenean Linear B, Indus Valley script, Chinese, Mayan, Aztec, and others.

Ritual: a set form or system of rites, religious or otherwise.

Ralph Merrifield. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. London: B. T. Ratsford, 1987.

Catherine Bell. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Rite: a ceremonial or formal, solemn act, observance, or procedure in accordance with prescribed rule or custom, as in religious use (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary).

Roger Grainger. The Language of the Rite. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974.

Mythe-rite-symbole: 21 essais d'anthropologie littéraire sur des textes de Homère. Angers: Presses de l'Université d'Angers, 1984.

Weltanschauung: one's philosophy or conception of the universe and of life (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary). A particular philosophy or view of life; a conception of the world (cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English).

Francesco d'Errico. Paleolithic human calendars: a case of wishful thinking? in Current Anthropology, 30, 1989, pp. 117-118.

He regards petroglyphs were looked at as a possible mathematical conception of the cosmos, a numbering or even a calculation system, a rhythmical support for traditional recitation, a generic system of notation.

B.A. Frolov. Numbers in Paleolithic graphic art and the initial stages in the development of mathematics, in Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology, 16 (3-4), 1978, pp. 142-166.

A. Marshack. Upper paleolithic notation and symbol, in Science, 178: 817-28, 1972.

E.K.A. Tratman. Late Upper Paleolithic Calculator? Gough's Cave, Cheddar, Somerset, in Proceedings, University of Bristol, Speleological Society, 14(2), 1976, pp.115-122.

Iwar Werlen. Ritual und Sprache: Zum Verhältnis von Sprechen und Handeln in Ritualen. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 1984.

Inner clock, or biological clock, defines the relation between a biological entity and the time-based phenomena in the environment. As with the so-called circadian cycles (circadian meaning almost the day and night cycle, circa diem), rhythms of existence persist even in the absence of external stimuli. The appearance, at least, is that of an inner clock.

The notion of genetic code describes a system by which DNA and RNA molecules carry genetic information. Particular sequences of genes in these molecules represent particular sequences of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and thereby embody instructions for making of different types of proteins. On the same subject, but obviously at a deeper level than a dictionary definition, is James D. Watson's celebrated book, The Double Helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. (A new critical edition, including text, commentary, reviews, original papers, edited by Gunther S. Stent). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.

Homeostasis: the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements of the human body. Physiological processes leading to body equilibrium are interlocked in dynamic processes.

References to the oral phase of language in Claude Lévi-Strauss: La Pensée Sauvage (1962). Translated as The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Le Cru et le Cuit (1964) The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Andrew and Susan Sherrat (quoted by Peter S. Bellwood, Op.cit): A distinction accepted is that between unvocalized (Hebrew, Arabic) and vocalized alphabets (starting with the Greek, in which the vowels are no longer omitted). Some languages use syllabaries, reuniting a consonant and a following vowel (such as in the Japanese Katakana: ka, ke, ki, ko, ku). When two different conventions are applied, the writing system is hybrid: the Korean language has a very powerful alphabet, hangul, but also uses Chinese characters, but pronouned in Korean. The hangul system (15th century) expressed, for Koreans, a desire for self- identity.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e).

Oraltity and Language Today: What Do People Understand When They Understand Language?

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. Guinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.

Amos Oz refers to self-constitution in language as follows: "...a language is never a 'means' or a 'framework' or a 'vehicle' for culture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think, dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, tell lies in Hebrew, you are 'inside'. [...] If a writer writes in Hebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevksy or writes about a Tartar invasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen in his stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen with us: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, associations, longings, connotations, atavistic attitudes towards the whole of creation, and so forth," (Under This Blazing Light, Cambridge, England: University Press, 1979, p. 189).

J. Lyons. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Semantics requires that one "abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata" (Vol. 1., p.115).

Noam Chomsky. The distinction between competence and performance in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Many scholars noticed the dualism inherent in the Chomskyan theory. Competence is "the speaker- hearer's knowledge of his language;" performance is "the actual use of language in concrete situations" (p.4).

Noam Chomsky started to formulate the idea of the innate constitution of a speaker's competence in the famous article A review of B.K. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language, 35 (1959), an idea he has developed through all his scholarly work. In the review, he considered the alternatives: language is learned (within Skinner's scheme of stimulus-response), or it is somehow innate. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1965), Reflections on Language (London: Fontana, 1976), and Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), the thought is constantly refined, though not necessarily more convincing (as his critics noticed).

Roman Jakobson. Essais de Linguistique Générale, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.

Jakobson refused to ascertain any "private property" in the praxis of language. Everything in the domain of language "is socialized" (p. 33).

Feedback: "The property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance" (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p.47).

In 1981, Martin Gardner and Douglas Hoffstaedter shared a column in Scientific American, which Hoffstaedter called Metamagical Themes. In his first article, he defined self-reference: "It happens every time anyone says 'I' or 'me' or 'word' or 'speak' or 'mouth.' It happens every time a newspaper prints a story about reporters, every time someone writes a book about writing, designs a book about design, makes a movie about movies, or writes an article about self-reference. Many systems have the capability to represent or refer to themselves, or elements of themselves, within the system of their own symbolism" (Scientific American, January, 1981, vol. 244:1, pp. 22-23). Hofstaedter finds that self-reference is ubiquitous. Para-linguistic elements are discussed in detail in Eduard Ataian's book Jazyk i vneiazykovaia deistvitelnost: opyt ontologicheskovo sravnenia (Language and paralinguistic activity, an attempt towards an ontological comparison). Erevan: Izd. Erevanskovo Universiteta, 1987.

Luciano Canepari. L'internazione linguistica e paralinguistica, Napoli: Liguori, 1985.

Canepari insists on prosodic elements.

The pragmatic aspect of arithmetic is very complex. Many more examples relating to the use of numbers and their place in language can be found in Crump (the examples given are referenced in The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 34 and 37).

Face-to-face communication, or iteration, attracted the attention of semioticians because codes other than those of language are at work. Adam Kendon, among others, thought that non-verbal communication captures only a small part of the face-to-face situation. The need to integrate non-verbal semiotic entities in the broader context of a communicative situation finally leads to the discovery of non-verbal codes, but also to the question of how much of the language experience is continued where language is not directly used. Useful reading can be found in Aspects of Non-Verbal Communication (Walburga Raffler-Engel, Editor), Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980.

Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1994. (His book appeared eight years after this chapter was written.)

As opposed to pictograms, which are iconic representations (based on likeness) of concrete objects, ideograms are composites (sometimes diagrams) of more abstract representations of the same. Chao Yuen Ren (in Language and Symbolic Systems, Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968) shows how Chinese ideograms for the sequence 1,2,3 are built up: yi, represented as -; ér as -

; san as -

.

François Cheng. Chinese Poetic Writing, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. (Translation by D.A. Riggs and J.P. Seaton of L'écriture poétique chinoise, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977).

"The ideogram for one, consisting of a single horizontal stroke, separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth" (p. 5). He goes on to exemplify how, "By combining the basic strokes,...one obtains other ideograms." The example given is that of combining [one] and [man, house] to obtain [large, big] and further on [sky, heaven].

On protolanguage: Thomas V. Gamkredlidze and V.V. Ivanov, The Early history of Indo-European Languages, in Scientific American, March 1990, pp.110-116.

Reading by machines, i.e., scanning and full text processing (through the use of optical character recognition programs) led some companies to advertise a new literacy. Caere and Hewlett-Packard, sponsors of Project Literacy US and Reading is Fundamental came up with the headline "We'd Like to Teach the World to Read" to introduce optical character recognition technology (a scanner and software), which makes machine reading (of texts, numbers, and graphics) possible. In another ad, Que Software depicts English grammar, punctuation and style books, and the dictionary opposite a red key. The ad states: "RightWriter improves your writing with the touch of a hot key." The program is supposed to check punctuation and grammar. It can also be customized for specific writing styles (inquiry to your insurance agent, answer to the IRS, complaints to City Hall or a consumer protection agency). As a matter of fact, the phenomena referred to are not a matter of advertisement slogans but of a new means for reading and even writing. A program such as VoiceWorks (also known as VoiceRad) was designed for radiologists who routinely review X-rays and generate written reports on their findings. Based on patterns recognized by the physician, the program accepts dictation (from a subset of natural language) and generates the ca. 150-word report without misspelling difficult technical terms. VoiceEm (for Emergency Room doctors) is activated by voice clues (e.g., "auto accident"), displaying a report from which the physician chooses the appropriate words: "(belted/non-belted,) (driver/passenger) in (low/moderate/high) velocity accident struck from (rear/head-on/broadside) and (claims/denies) rolling vehicle." Canned medical and legal phrases summarize situations that correspond to circumstances on record. When the doctor states "normal throat," the machine spells out a text that reproduces stereotype descriptions: "throat clear, tongue, pharynx without injections, exudate tonsilar hypertrophy, teeth normal variant." The 1,000-word lexicon can handle the vast majority of emergencies. Those beyond the lexicon usually surpass the competence of the doctor.

The subject of visual mnemonic devices used in the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays is marvelously treated in Frances A. Yates's book The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1966). She discusses Robert Fludd's memory system of theater, from his Ars memoriae (1619), based on the Shakespearean Globe Theater. In ancient Greece, orators constructed complex spatial and temporal schemata as aids in rehearsing and properly presenting their speeches.

Functioning of Language

Research on memory and language functions in the brain is being carried out at the University of Minnesota, Institute of Child Development. Work is focused on individuals who are about to undergo partial lobotomies to treat intractable epilepsy. The goal is to provide a functional map of the brain.

"History remains a strict discipline only when it stops short, in its description, of the nonverbal past." (Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, p. 3).

Derrick de Kerkhove, Charles J. Lumsden, Editors. The Alphabet and the Brain. The Lateralization of Writing. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1988.

In this book, Edward Jones and Chizato Aoki report on the different cognitive processing of phonetic (Kana) and logographic (Kanji) characters in Japanese (p. 301).

André Martinet. Le Langage. Paris: Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, 1939.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des Idées, 1945.

André Leroi-Gourhan. Moyens d'expression graphique, in Bulletin du Centre de Formation aux Recherches Ethnologiques, Paris, No. 4, 1956, pp. 1-3.

-. Le geste et la parole, Vol. I and II. Paris: Albin Michel, 1964-1965. -. Les racines du monde, in Entretiens avec Claude-Henri Rocquet. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1982.

Gordon V. Childe. The Bronze Age. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1969.

John DeFrances. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. 1983.

Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill 1964.

In many of his writings, Roland Barthes suggested characteristics of the oral and visual culture. The distinction between the two preoccupied him.

Klingon is a language crafted by Marc Okrand, a linguist, for use by fictional characters. The popularity of Star Trek explains how Klingon spread around the world.

By eliminating sources of ambiguity and prescribing stylistic rules, controlled languages aim for improved readability. They are easier to maintain and they support computational processing, such as machine translation (cf. Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Introduction to Controlled Languages, a Webtext of 1996).

An example of an artificial language of controlled functions and logic is Logics Workbench (LWB), developed at the University of Berne, in Switzerland. The language is available through the WWW.

Drawing: The trace left by a tool drawn along a surface particularly for the purpose of preparing a representation or pattern. Drawing forms the basis of all the arts.

Edward Laning, The Act of Drawing, New York: McGraw Hill, 1971.

Design: Balducinni defined design as "a visible demonstration by means of those things which man has first conceived in his mind and pictured in the imagination and which the practised hand can make appear."

"Before Balducinni, its primary sense was drawing." (cf. Oxford Companion to Art). More information is given in the references for the chapter devoted to design.

Alan Pipes, Drawing for 3-Dimensional Design: Concepts, Illustration, Presentation, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.

Thomas Crump. The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Referring to Yoshio Yano's article of 1973, in Japanese, entitled Communication Life of the Family, Crump writes: "...age, in the absence of other overreaching criteria, determines hierarchy: this rule applies, for instance, in Japan, and is based on the antithesis of semmai-kohai, whose actual meaning is simply senior-junior. The moral basis of the precedence of the elder over the younger (cho-yo-no-jo) originated in China, and is reflected in the first instance in the precedence of siblings of the same sex, which is an important structural principle within the family" (p. 69).

On the issue of context affecting language functions, see George Carpenter Barker, Social Functions of Language in a Mexican-American Community. Phoenix: The University of Arizona Press, 1972.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Disuniting of America. Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.

Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin, Editors. Beyond the Echo. Multicultural Women's Writing . St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988.

Stephen J. Rimmer. The Cost of Multiculturalism. Belconnen, ACT: S.J.Rimmer, 1991.

Language and Logic

A.E. Van Vogt. The World of Null-A. 1945. The novel was inspired by a work of Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933).

Walter J. Ong seems convinced that "...formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible" (Op. cit., p. 52). He reports on A.R. Luria's book, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (1976). After experiments designed to define how illiterate subjects react to formal logical procedures (in particular, deductive reasoning), Luria seems to conclude that no one actually operates in formally stated syllogisms.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan, 1910. (Translated as How Natives Think by Lilian A. Clave, London: Allen & Unwin, 1926.)

Lévy-Bruhl reconnects to the notion of participation that originates in Plato's philosophy and applies it to fit the so-called pre-logic mentality.

Anton Dumitru. History of Logic. 4 vols. Turnbridge Wells, Kent: Abacus Press, 1977.

In exemplifying the law of participation, Dumitru gives the following example: "In Central Brazil there lives an Indian tribe called Bororó. In the same region we also find a species of parrots called Arara. The explorers were surprised to find that the Indians claimed to be Arara themselves. [...] Put differently, a member of the Bororó tribe claims to be what he actually is and also something else just as real, namely an Arara parrot" (vol. 1, pp. 5-6).

René Descartes (1596-1650), under his Latinized name Renatus Cartesius, sees logic as "teaching us to conduct well our reason in order to discover the truths we ignore" ("qui apprend à bien conduire sa raison pour découvrir les vérités qu'on ignore"). For Descartes, mathematics is the general method of science. Oeuvres de Descartes. Publiées par Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Eds. 11 vols. Nouvelle présentation en co-édition avec le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris: Vrin. 1965-1973 (reprint of the 1897-1909 edition). In English, the rendition by Elizabeth S. Haldane and George R.T. Ross was published in London, Cambridge University Press, 1967.

"Logic is the art of directing reason aright, in obtaining the knowledge of things, for the instruction both of ourselves and of others. It consists of the reflections which have been made on the four principal operations of the mind: conceiving, judging, reasoning, and disposing" (Port Royal Logic, Introduction).

John Locke (1632-1704) was looking for simple logical elements and rules to compound them. Certainty is not the result of syllogistic inference. "Syllogism is at best nothing but the art of bringing to light, in debate, the little knowledge we have, without adding any other to it." An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690) sets an empirical, psychologically based perspective of logic.

George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London,1854), which eventually became the basis for digital computation.

Fung-Yu-lan. Précis d'histoire de la philosophie chinoise. Paris: Plon, 1952.

"It is very difficult for somebody to understand fully Chinese philosophical works, if he is not able to read the original text. The language is indeed a barrier. Due to the suggestive character of Chinese philosophical writings, this barrier gets more daunting, these writings being almost untranslatable. In translation, they lose their power of suggestion. In fact, a translation is nothing but an interpretation" (p. 35).

Chang-tzu. cf. Anton Dumitru, Op.cit., p. 13.

Kung-Fu-tzu (551-479, BCE), whose Latinized name is Confucius, expressed the logical requirement to "rectify the names." This translates as the need to put things in agreement with one another by correct designations. "The main thing is the rectification of names (cheng ming) [...] If the names are not rectified, the words cannot fit; if the words do not fit, the affairs [in the world] will not be successful. If these affairs are not successful, neither rites nor music can flourish. If rites and music do not flourish, punishments cannot be just. If they are not just, people do not know how to act." The conclusion is, "The wise man should never show levity in using words;" (Lun-yu, cf. Wing-Tsit-chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Logic in his view is thinking about thinking. The whole logical theory of the syllogism is presented in the Analytica Priora. The Analytica Posteriora gives the structure of deductive sciences. The notion of political animal is part of the Aristotelian political system (cf. Politics).

Takeo Doi. Amae no kozo. Tokyo: Kobundo. 1971. (Translated as The Anatomy of Dependence by John Bester, Tokyo/New York: Kodansho International and Harper & Row,1973.)

Vedic texts, the collective name for Veda, defined as the science (the root of the word seems to be similar to the Greek for idea, or the Latin videre, to see) of direct intuition, convey the experience of the Rsis, ancient sages who had a direct perception of things. The writings that make up Veda are: Rig Veda, invocatory science; Yajur Veda, sacrificial; Sama Veda, melody; Atharva Veda, of incantation. In each Veda, there is a section on the origin of the ritual, on the meaning, and on the esoteric aspect.

Mircea Eliade. Yoga. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

"India has endeavoured...to analyze the various conditioning factors of the human being. ...this was done not in order to reach a precise and coherent explanation of the human being, as did, for instance, Europe of the 19th century,... but in order to know how far the zones of the human being go and see whether there is anything else beyond these conditionings" (p. 10).

The logic of action, as part of logical theory, deals with various aspects of defining what leads to reaching a goal and what are the factors involved in defining the goal and testing the result.

Raymond Bondon, in Logique du social (translated by David and Gillian Silverman as The Logic of Social Action: An Introduction to Sociological Analysis, London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), gives the subject a sociological perspective. Cornel Popa, in Praxiologie si Logica (Praxiology and Logic, Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1984) deals with social action. Authors such as D. Lewis, A. Salomaa, B.F. Chelas, R.C. Jeffrey, and Jaako Hintikka, whose contributions were reunited in a volume celebrating Stig Kanger, pay attention to semantic aspects and conditional values in many-valued propositional logics (cf. Logical Theory and Semantic Analysis, edited by Soren Stenlund, Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1974).

The term culture originates in human practical experiences related to nature: cultivating land, breeding and rearing animals. By extension, culture (i.e., cultivating and breeding the mind) leads to the noun describing a way of life. In the late 18th century, Herder used the plural cultures to distinguish what was to become civilization. In 1883, Dilthey made the distinction between cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, addressing the mind) and natural sciences. The objects of cultural sciences are man-made and the goal is understanding (Verstehen). For more information on the emergence and use of the term culture, see A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckholm, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, in Peabody Museum Papers, XLVII, Harvard University Press, 1952.

Ramon Lull (Raymundus Lullus, 1235-1315) suggested a mechanical system of combining ideas, an alphabet (or repertory) and a calculus for generating all possible judgments. Called Ars Magna (The Great Art), his work attracted both ironic remarks and enthusiastic followers.

Athanasius Kircher, in Polygraphia nova et universalis ex combinatoria arte detecta (New and universal polygraphy discovered from the arts of combination, Rome, 1663), tried to introduce an arithmetic of logic.

George Delgarus, in Ars signorum (The art of signs, London, 1661), suggested a universal language of signs.

John Wilkins dealt with it as a secret language (1641, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger, and 1668, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language).

Lotfi Zadeh introduced fuzzy logic: a logic of vague though quantified relations among entities and of non- clear-cut definitions (What is young? tall? bold? good?).

Felix Hausdorf/Paul Mongré. Sant 'Ilario. Gedanken aus der Landschaft Zarathustras. 1897. p. 7

W.B. Gallie (Peirce's Pragmatism, in Peirce and Pragmatism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952) noticed that Peirce, "in the Pragmaticism Papers, approaches the subject of vagueness from a number of different sides. He claims, for instance, that all our most deeply grounded and in practice indubitable beliefs are essentially vague" (cf. Peirce, 5.446). According to Peirce, vagueness is a question of representation, not a peculiarity of the object of the representation. He goes on to specify that the source of vagueness is the relation between the sign and the interpretant ("Indefiniteness in depth may be termed vagueness," cf. MSS 283, 141, 138-9). Additional commentary in Nadin, The Logic of Vagueness and the Category of Synechism, in The Monist, Special Issue: The Relevance of Charles Peirce, 63:3, July, 1980, pp. 351-363.

Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

-. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the historic and methodological background to the subject in Introduction to Memetic Science.

E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975.

Mihai Nadin. Mind-Anticipation and Chaos (from the series Milestones in Thought and Discovery). Stuttgart/Zurich: Belser Presse. 1991.

"Minds exist only in relation to other minds" p. 4. The book was based on a lecture delivered in January,1989 at Ohio State University.

Language as Mediating Mechanism

Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

-. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the historic and methodological background to the subject in Introduction to Memetic Science., a Webtext.

E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975.

Mediation: a powerful philosophic notion reflecting interest in the many ways in which something different from what we want to know, understand, do, or act upon intercedes between the object of our interest, action, or thought.

G.W. Hegel. Hegels Werke, vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, vols. I-XIX. Berlin. 1832-1845, 1887

The dialectics of mediation includes a non-mediated mode, generated by the suppression of mediation, leading to the Thing-in-itself: "Dieses Sein ist daher eine Sache, die an und für sich ist die Objektivität" (vol. V, p. 171) (This being is, henceforth, a thing in itself and for itself, it is objectivity.) Everything else is mediated.

In all post-Hegelian developments-right wing (Hinrichs, Goeschel, Gabler), left-wing (Ruge, Feuerback, Strauss), center (Bauer, Köstlin, Erdmann)-mediation is a major concept.

Emile Durkheim. De la Division du Travail Sociale. 9th ed. Paris: Presses Univérsitaires de France, 1973. (Translated as The Division of Labor in Society by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press, 1984).

Michel Freyssenet. La Division Capitaliste du Travail. Paris: Savelli, 1977.

Elliot A. Krause. Division of Labor, A Political Perspective. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

Gunnar Tornqvist, Editor. Division of Labour, Specialization, and Technical Change: Global, Regional, and Workplace Level. Malmo, Sweden: Liber, 1986.

Marcella Corsi. Division of Labour, Technical Change, and Economic Growth. Aldershot, Hants, U.K.: Avebury/Brookfield VT: Gower Publishing Co., 1991.

Leonard Bloomfield. Language. 1933. rpt. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 1964.

In this work, the author maintains that the division of labor, and with it the whole working of human society, is due to language.

Charles Sanders Peirce. "Anything that determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum" (2.303). "Something which stands to somebody in some respect or capacity" (2.228).

Other sign definitions have been given: "In the language, reciprocal presuppositions are established between the expression (signifier) and the expressed (signified). The sign is the manifestation of these presuppositions," (A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language. An Analytical Dictionary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, p. 296; translation of Sémiotique. Dictionnaire Raisonné de la Théorie du Langage, Paris: Classique Hachette, 1979).

According to L. Hjelmslev, the sign is the result of semiosis taking place at the time of the language act. Benveniste considers that the sign is representative of another thing, which it evokes as a substitute.

Herbert Marcuse. The One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

Regarding cave paintings, see:

Mihai Nadin. Understanding prehistoric images in the post-historic age: a cognitive project, in Semiotica, 100:2-4, 1994. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 387-405 B. Campbell. Humankind Emerging. Toronto: Little, Brown & Co.,1985.

W. Davis. The origins of image making, in Current Anthropology, 27 (1986). pp. 193-215.

Luigi Bottin. Contributi della Tradizione Greco-Latina e Arabo-Latina al Testo della Rhetorica di Aristotele. Padova: Antenore, 1977.

Marc Fumaroli. L'Age de l'Éloquence: Rhétorique et 'Res Literaria' de la Renaissance au Seuil de l'Époque Classique. Geneva: Droz and Paris: Champion, 1980.

William M.A. Grimaldi. Aristotle, Rhetoric: A Commentary. New York: Fordham University Press, 1980- 1988.

Rhetoric is generally seen as the ability to persuade. Using many kinds of signs (language, images, sounds, gestures, etc.), rhetoric is connected to the pragmatic context. In ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in China and India, rhetoric was considered an art and practiced for its own sake. Some consider rhetoric as one of the sources of semiotics (together with logic, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language (cf. Tzvetan Todorov, Théorie du Symbole, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1977). Gestures are a part of rhetoric. Quintillian, in De institutione oratoria, dealt with the lex gestus (law of gesture). In the Renaissance, the code of gesture was studied in detail. In our days of illiterate rhetoric based on stereotypes and increasingly compressed messages, gestures gain a special status indicative of the power of non-literacy-based ceremonies. The rhetoric of advertisement pervades human interaction.

George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London, 1854), which eventually became the basis for digital computation.

Howard Rheingold.Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books, 1991.

Rheingold offers a description that can substitute for a definition: "Imagine a wraparound television with programs, including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands. Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather than peering at it from a fixed perspective through a flat screen in a movie theater, on a television set, or on a computer display. Imagine that you are the creator as well as the consumer of your artificial experience, with the power to use a gesture or a word to remold the world you see and hear and feel" (p. 16).

In an Internet interview with Rheingold, Sherry Turkel points out that computers and networks are objects- to-think-with for a networked era. She predicts, "I believe that against all odds and against most current expectations, we are going to see a rebirth of psychoanalytic thinking" (cf. Brainstorms, http://www.well.com, 1996).

Literacy, Language, and Market

Reference is made to the works of Margaret Wheatley (Management and the New Science); Michael Rothschild (Bionomics); Bernardo Huberman (Dynamics of Collective Actions and Learning in Multi-agent Organizations); Robert Axtel and Joshua Epstein (creators of Sugarscape, a model of trade); and Axel Leijonhufvud (Multi-agent Systems), all published as Webtexts.

Transactions as extensions of human biology evince the complex nature of human interactions. Maturana and Varela indirectly refer to human transactions: "Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social (linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members" (Op. cit., p.199). They diagram the shift from minimum autonomy of components (characteristic of organisms) to maximum autonomy of components (characteristic of human societies).

A Walk Through Wall Street, in US News and World Report, Nov. 16, 1987, pp. 64-65. One from among many reminiscences by Martin Mayer, author of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Men and Money.

"Wall Street as price setter for the country dealt with much more than pieces of paper. Commodities markets proliferated. The fish market was on the East River at Fulton; the meat market on the Hudson just to the north.... The 'physicals' of all commodities markets were present...there were cotton sacks in the warehouse of the Cotton Exchange, coffee bags stored here for delivery against the contracts at the Sugar and Coffee Exchange on Hanover Square and often a smell of roasting coffee.

"In the 1950's, this was a male world-women were not allowed to work on the floor of the Stock Exchange, let alone become members. The old-timers explained with great sincerity that there was no ladies room."

The report points out that today Wall Street "sees less of the real world outside, depends more on abstract information processed through data machinery and more than ever responds to forces far from its borders."

Zoon semiotikon, the semiotic animal, labeled by Paul Mongré (also known as Felix Hausdorf).

Charles S. Peirce gave the following definitions: Representamen: a Sign is a Representamen of which some interpretant is a cognition of a mind (2.242). Object: the Mediate object is the object outside the Sign; ...the sign must indicate it by a hint (Letter to Lady Welby, December 23, 1908). Interpretant: the effect that the sign would produce upon any mind (Letter to Lady Welby, March 14, 1909).

In reference to the symbolic nature of market transactions, another Peircean definition is useful: "Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs.... We think only in signs.... If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts" (2.307).

The pragmatic thought is, nevertheless, inherent in any sign process. Markets embody sign processes in the pragmatic field.

Winograd and Flores state bluntly "A business (like any other organization) is constituted as a network of recurrent conversations" (Op. cit., p. 168).

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (with the assistance of Takashi Hikino) Scale and Scope. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge MA/London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990.

"...the modern industrial Enterprise...has more than a production function." (p. 14). Chandler further notes that "expanded output by a change in capital-labor ratios is brought about by economies of scale which incorporate economies of speed.... Wholesalers and retailers expand to exploit economies of scale" (p. 21).

James Gordley. The Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Mariadele Manca Masciadri. I Contratti di Baliatico, 2 vols. Milan: (s.n.), 1984.

John H. Pryor. Business Contracts of Medieval Provence. Selected Notulae from the Cartulary of Girard Amalric of Marseilles, 1248. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981.

ECU: In 1979, the process of European unification led to the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS), with its coin being the European Currency Unit (ECU) and the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). As a basket of European currencies, the ECU serves as a reserve currency in Europe and probably beyond. It is not the currency of choice for international transactions, and as of the Maastricht negotiations, which affirmed the need for a Community currency, the ECU was not adopted for this purpose. Although predominant weight in the basket (over 30%) is given to the German mark, the ECU is designed on the assumption that it is quite improbable that a certain currency will move in the same direction against all others. Therefore, exchange rates are statistically stabilized.

Michael Rothschild. Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem. Webtext, 1990.

Robert L. Heilbroner. The Demand for the Supply Side, in The New York Review of Books, June 11, 1981, p.40.

He asks rhetorically: "How else should one identify a force that debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were devoted to some other purpose-say the exaltation of the public sector-it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its own doings, not from that of its governing institutions."

Literacy and Education

Will Seymour Monroe. Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational Reform. New York: Arno Press, 1971, (originally printed in 1900).

Adolphe Erich Meyer. Education in Modern Times. Up from Rousseau. New York: Avon Press, 1930.

Linus Pierpont Brockett. History and Progress of Education from the Earliest Times to the Present. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1860. (Originally signed "Philobiblius," with an introduction by Henry Barnard.)

James Bowen. A History of Western Education. 3 Vols. London: Methuen, 1972-1981.

Pierre Riché. Education et culture dans l'occident barbare 6-8 siècles. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962.

Bernard Bischoff. Elementärunterricht und probationes pennae in der ersten Hälfte des Mittelalters, in Mittelalterliche Studien I, 1966, pp. 74-87.

James Nehring. The Schools We Have. The Schools We Want. An American Teacher on the Frontline. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.

Irenée Henri Marron. A History of Education in Antiquity. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956.

Jacques Barzun. The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (Morris Philipson, Editor). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

The review mentioned was written by David Alexander, Begin Here, in The New York Review of Books, April 21, 1991, p. 16.

Polis (Greek) signifies settled communities that eventually evolved into cities.

The City-State in Five Cultures. Edited with an introduction by Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas. Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1981.

J.N. Coldstream. The Formation of the Greek Polis: Aristotle and Archaeology. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984.

Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis, 800-500 BC. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Will Durant. The Story of Civilization. Vol 4, The Age of Faith. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

In 825, the University of Pavia was founded as a school of law. The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 by Irnevius, also for the teaching of law. Students from all over Latin Europe came to study there. Around 1103, the University of Paris was founded; by the middle of the 13th century, four faculties had developed: theology, canon law, medicine and the seven arts. (The seven liberal arts were comprised of the trivium-grammar, rhetoric, and logic-and the quadrivium-arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.) Some time in the 12th century, a studium generale or university was established at Oxford (pp 916-921).

The name university derives from the fact that the essences or universals were taught (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 12, 1990.

Logos: (noun, from the Greek, from the verb lego: "I say"): word, speech, argument, explanation, doctrine, principle, reason; signified word or speech.

Ratio (from the Latin "to think"): reason, rationale; signified measure or proportion.

Some of the work linking the early knowledge of the Latin and Greek heritage of European thought, especially that part shut off to Christendom in Moorish Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Sicily, and Spain, was transmitted by the Jews, who translated works in Arabic to Latin. The Moslems preserved the texts of Euclid and works dealing with alchemy and chemistry. In 1165, Gerald of Cremona studied Arabic in Spain in order to translate works of Aristotle (Posterior Analysis, On the Heavens and the Earth, among others), Euclid (Elements, Data), Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Galen, works of Greek astronomy and Greco-Arabic physics, 11 books of Arabic medicine and 14 works of Arabic astronomy and mathematics from the Arabic to Latin. Beginning 1217, Michael Scot translated a number of Aristotle's works from the Arabic to Latin (cf. Will Durant, Op. cit., pp. 910-913).

Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (Two New Sciences: Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion, translated, with a new introduction and notes, by Stillman Drake) Toronto: Wall & Thompson. 1989

-. Galileo's Early Notebooks. The Physical Questions (translated from the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary, by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 1977

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In 1687, he published Philosophiae Principia Mathematica, in which he offered explanations for the movement of planets. In this work, the abstraction of force (of attraction) is constituted and a postulate is formulated: every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other with a force whose magnitude depends directly upon the product of their masses and inversely upon the square of the distance between the two.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published in 1916 his contribution as Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, in which he referred to the attraction of massive objects. The cosmic reality of such objects and of huge distances and high velocities is quite different from the mechanical universe under consideration by Galileo and Newton. Movement of planets cause the curving of space. Einstein's theory shows that the curvature of space time evolves dynamically. Newton's theory turned out to be an approximation of Einstein's more encompassing model.

John Searle. The Storm Over the University, in The New York Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42

Mathematization: the use of mathematical methods or concepts in particular sciences or in the humanities. The conception of mathematics as a model for the sciences as well as for the humanities has been repeatedly expressed throughout history. In some cases, mathematization represents the search for abstract structures. Today mathematization is often taken to mean modeling on computer programs.

Académie Française: French library academy established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1634. Its original purpose was to maintain standards of literary taste and to establish the literary language. Membership is limited to 40 (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 1, 1990. p. 50).

Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. How Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1987

"Those despised millionaires who set up a university in the midst of a city that seems devoted only to what they had neglected, whether it was out of a sense of what they themselves had issued, or out of bad conscience about what their lives were exclusively devoted to, or to satisfy the vanity of having their names attached to the enterprise," (p. 244).

Bart Simpson, the main character of the animated cartoon series of the same name, created by Matt Groening. Bart was first sketched in 1987; the television series first aired in the winter of 1990.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986.

"Organizations exist as networks of directives and commissives. Directives include orders, requests, consultations, and offers; commissives include promises, acceptances, and rejections" (p. 157).

They state also: "In fulfilling an organization's external commitments, its personnel are involved in a network of conversations" (p. 158).

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations (Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe of Philosophische Untersuchungen). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1984 (reprint of the 1968 edition)

If a multiple choice test in World History (given in June, 1992 at Stuyvesant High School in New York City) asks whether the Holocaust is an Italian revolutionary movement, and if Mein Kampf was Hitler's body guard or his summer retreat, why should anyone be surprised that American students show no better choices than those they are supposed to choose from?

Steve Waite. Interview with Bill Melton, Journal of Bionomics, July 1996.

Family: Discovering the Primitive Future

Statistics on family in the USA and the world are a matter of public record. The processing and interpretation of data, even in the age of electronic processing, takes time once data has been collected. The Statistical Handbook on the American Family (Phoenix AZ: The Orynx Press, 1992), for instance, deals with trends covering 1989-1990. The numbers are intriguing. Well over 85% of the adult population married by the time of their 45th birthday, but only around 60% are currently married. 10% are divorced and almost as many widowed. The general conclusions about the family are: There is a decline in marital stability with over one million children per year affected by the divorce of their parents. Less than 20% of the people see marriage as a lifetime relationship. The POSSLQ (persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters) is well over 5% of the population. The size of the average American household shrank from 3.7 persons over 40 years ago to 2.6 recently. Interracial marriages, while triple in number compared to 1970, include slightly below 2% of the population.

A.F. Robertson. Beyond the Family. The Social Organization of Human Reproduction. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1991.

Martine Fell. Ça va, la famille? Paris: Le Hameau, 1983.

Nicolas Caparros. Crisis de la Familia. Revolución del Vivir. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Pargieman, 1973.

Adrian Wilson. Family. London: Travistock Publications, 1985.

Charles Franklin Thwing. The Family. An Historical and Social Study. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1887.

Edward L. Kain. The Myth of Family Decline. Understanding Families in a World of Rapid Social Change. Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1990. Herbert Kretschmer. Ehe und Familie. Die Entwicklung von Ehe und Familie im Laufe der Geschichte. Dornach, Switzerland: Verlag am Goetheanum, 1988.

André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, Françoise Zonabend, Editors. Histoire de la famille (preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss)..Paris: Armand Colin, 1986.

Family is established in extension of reproductive drives and natural forms of cooperation. Regardless of the types leading to what was called the family nucleus (husband and wife), families embody reciprocal obligations. The formalization of family life in marriage contracts was stimulated by writing.

J.B.M. Guy. Glottochronology Without Cognate Recognition. Canberra: Department of Linguistics Research, School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1980.

Although the processes leading to the formation of nations is relatively recent, nations were frequently characterized as an extended family, although the processes reflect structural characteristics of human practical experiences different from those at work in the constitution of the family.

Martin B. Duberman. About Time. Exploring the Gay Past. New York: Gay Presses of New York City, 1986.

Jeffrey Weeks. Against Nature. Essays on History, Sexuality, and Identity. London: Rivers Oram, 1991.

Bernice Goodman. The Lesbian. A Celebration of Difference. Brooklyn: Out & Out Books, 1977.

Jean Bethke Elshtain. Against Gay Marriage, in Commonweal, November 22, 1991, pp. 685-686.

Brent Hartinger. A Case for Gay Marriage, in Commonweal, November 22, 1991, pp. 675, 681-686.

Not in The Best Interest (Adoption by Lesbians and Gays), in Utne Reader, November/December, 1991, p. 57.

William Plummer. A Mother's Priceless Gift, in People Weekly, August 26, 1991, pp. 40-41.

Nelly E. Gupta and Frank. Feldinger. Brave New Baby (ZIFT Surrogacy), in Ladies Home Journal, October, 1989, pp. 140-141.

Mary Thom. Dilemmas of the New Birth Technologies, in Ms., May, 1988, pp. 4, 66, 70-72.

Cleo Kocol. The Rent-A-Womb Dilemma, in The Humanist, July/August, 1987, p. 37.

Marsha Riben. A Last Resort (excerpt from Shedding Light on the Dark Side of Adoption), in Utne Reader, November/December, 1991, pp. 53-54.

Lisa Gubernick. How Much is that Baby in the Window? in Forbes, October 14, 1991, pp. 90-91.

Self-sufficiency, reflecting contexts of existence of limited scale, marks the Amish and Mennonite families. The family contract is very powerful. Succeeding generations care for each other to the extent that the home always includes quarters for the elderly. Each new generation is endowed in order to maintain the path of self-sufficiency. The Amish wedding (the subject of Stephen Scott's book of the same title, Intercourse PA: Good Books, 1988), as well as the role the family plays in educating children (Children in Amish Society: Socialization and Community Education, by J.A. Hosteter and G. Enders Huntington, New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971) are indicative of this family life.

Andy Grove. Only the Paranoid Survive. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

The CEO of Intel, one of the world's most successful companies, discussed the requirement of genetic update and his own, apparently dated, corporate genes.

Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, Editors). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature (L.A. Selby-Bigge, Editor). 2nd edition. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1978.

-. Inquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals (L.A. Selby-Bigge, Editor). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Takeo Doi. Amae no kozo. Tokyo: Kobundo, 1971. Translated as The Anatomy of Dependence by John Bester. Tokyo/New York: Kodansho International and Harper & Row, 1973.

A God for Each of Us

The following books set forth the basic tenets of their respective religions:

Bhagavad Gita: part of the epic poem Mahabharata, this Sanskrit dialog between Krishna and Prince Arjuna poetically describes a path to spiritual wisdom and unity with God. Action, devotion, and knowledge guide on this path.

Torah: the books of Moses (also known as the Pentateuch); for Chistians, the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These describe the origin of the world, the covenant between God and the people of Israel, the Exodus from Egypt and return to the Promised Land, and rules for religious and social behavior. Together with the books labeled Prophets and Writings, they make up the entire Old Testament. The controversy among Jews, Roman Catholics, Eastern Christians, and Protestants about the acceptance of some books, the order of books, and translations reflect the different perspectives adopted within these religions.

New Testament: the Christian addition to the Bible comprises 27 books. They contain sayings attributed to Jesus, his life story (death and resurrection included), the writings of the apostles, rules for conversion and baptism, and the Apocalypse (the end of this world and the beginning of a new one).

Koran (al Qur'an): the holy book of the Moslems, is composed of 114 chapters (called suras). Belief in Allah, descriptions of rules for religious and social life, calls to moral life, and vivid descriptions of hell make up most of the text. According to Moslem tradition, Mohammed ascended the mount an illiterate. He came down with the Koran, which Allah had taught him to write.

I-Ching: attributed to Confucius, composed of five books, containing a history of his native district, a system for divining the future (Book of Changes), a description of ceremonies and the ideal government (Book of Rites), and a collection of poetry. In their unity, all these books affirm principles of cooperation, reciprocal respect, and describe etiquette and ritual rules.

Mircea Eliade, Editor-in-Chief.The Encyclopedia of Religion (). New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Mircea Eliade (with I. P. Couliano and H.S. Wiesner). The Eliade Guide to World Religions. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.

Eliot Alexander. The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters, and Others. New York: New American Library, 1990.

P. K. Meagher, T.C. O'Brien, Sister Consuelo Maria Aherne. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion. 3 Vols. Corpus City Publications, 1979.

In regard to the multiplicity of religions, the following works provide a good reference:

John Ferguson. Gods Many and Lords Many: A Study in Primal Religions. Guildford, Surrey: Lutterworth Educational, 1982.

Suan Imm Tan. Many Races, Many Religions. Singapore: Educational Publications Bureau, 1971-72.

H. Byron Earhart. Religions of Japan: Many Traditions within One Sacred Way. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.

John M. Reid. Doomed Religions. A Series of Essays on Great Religions of the World. New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1884.

Although no precise statistics are available, it is assumed that ca. three billion people acknowledge religion in our days. The numbers are misleading, though. For instance, only 2.4% of the population in England attends religious services; in Germany, the percentage is 9%; in some Moslem countries, service attendance is close to 100%. The "3-day Jews" (two days of Rosh Hashana and 1 day of Yom Kippur, also known as "revolving door" Jews, in for New Year and out after Atonement Day), the Christian Orthodox and Catholics of Christmas and Easter, and the Buddhists of funeral ceremonials belong to the vast majority that refers to religion as a cultural identifier. Many priests and higher order ecumenical workers recite their prayers as epic poetry.

Atheism. The "doctrine that God does not exist, that existence of God is a false belief" (cf. M. Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, pp 479-480). Literature on atheism continuously increases. A selection showing the many angles of atheism can serve as a guide:

The American Atheist (periodical). Austin TX: American Atheists.

Gordon Stein, Editor. An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism. Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books, 1980.

Michael Martin. Atheism: A Philosophical Analysis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Jacques J. Natanson. La Mort de Dieu: Essai sur l'Athéisme Moderne. Paris: Presses Univérstaires de France, 1975.

Robert A. Morey. The New Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom. Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1986.

James Thrower. A Short History of Western Atheism. London: Pemberton Books, 1971.

Robert Eno. The Confucian Creation of Heaven. Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Ronald L. Grimes. Research in Ritual Studies. A Programmatic Essay and Bibliography. Chicago: American Theological Library Association; Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985.

Evan M. Zuesse. Ritual Cosmos. The Sanctification of Life in African Religions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979.

Godfrey and Monica Wilson. The Analysis of Social Change. Based on observations in Central Africa. Cambridge: The University Press, 1968.

"A pagan Najakunsa believes himself to be dependent upon his deceased father for health and fertility; he acts as if he were, and expresses his sense of dependence in rituals" (p. 41).

References for the study of myths are as follows:

Eliot Alexander. The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters, and Others. New York: New American Library, 1990.

Jane Ellen Harrison. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Walter Burkert. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

John Ferguson. Greek and Roman Religion: A Source Book. Park Ridge NJ: Noyes Press, 1980.

Arcadio Schwade. Shinto-Bibliography in Western Languages. Leiden: Brill, 1986.

Japanese Shintoism began before writing.

Hinduism: With one of the highest number of followers (ca. 650 million), Hinduism is an eclectic religion. Indigenous elements and Aryan religions, codified around 1500 BCE in the Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajor Veda, Atharva Veda, Aranyakas, Upanishads, result in an amalgam of practices and beliefs dominating religious and social life in Indiat The caste system classifies members of society in four groups: priests (Brahmins), rulers, farmers, and merchants, laborers (on farms or in industry). Devotion to a guru, adherence to the Vedic scriptures, the practice of yoga are the forms of religious action. The divine Trinity of Hinduism unites Brahma (the creator), Vishna (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer).

Taoism: In the Tao Te Ching (Book of the Way and Its Virtue), one reads: "The Tao of origin gives birth to the One. The One gives birth to the Two. The Two gives birth to the Three. The Three produces the Ten Thousand Things." With some background in Tao, the poetry becomes explicit: The One is the Supreme Void, primordial Breath. This engenders Two, Yin and Yang, the duality from which everything sprung once a ternary relation is established. Tao is poetic ontology.

Confucianism: Stressing the relationship among individuals, families, and society, Confucianism is based on two percepts: li (proper behavior) and jen (cooperative attitude). Confucius expressed the philosophy on which this religion is based on sayings and dialogues during the 6th-5th century BCE. Challenged by the mysticism of religions (Taoism, Buddhism) in the area of its inception, some followers incorporated their spirit in new-Confucianism (during the period known as the Sung dynasty, 960-1279).

Judaism: Centered on the belief in one God, Judaism is the religion of the Book (the Torah), established at around 2000 BCE by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Judaism promotes the idea of human improvement, as well as the Messianic thought. Strong dedication to community and sense of family are part of the religious practice.

Islam: The contemporary religion with the highest number of adherents (almost 9000 million Muslims on record), and growing fast, Islam celebrates Mohammed, who received the Koran from Allah. Acknowledged at 610, Islam (which means "submission to God") places its prophet in the line started with Abraham, continued with Moses, and redirected by Jesus. The five pillars of Islam are: Allah is the only God, prayer (facing Mecca) five times a day, giving of alms, fast of Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca.

Christianity: in its very many denominations (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Protestant, which split further into various sects, such as Baptist, Pentecostal, Episcopal, Lutheran, Mormon, Unitarian, Quakers), claims to have its origin in Jesus Christ and completes the Old Testament of the Hebrews with the New Testament of the apostles. It is impossible to capture the many varieties of Christianity in characteristics unanimously accepted. Probably the major celebrations of Christianity (some originating in pre-Christian pagan rituals related to natural cycles), i.e., Christmas and Easter, better reflect elements of unity. Christianity promotes respect for moral values, dedication to the family, and faith in one God composed of three elements (the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).

Bahai of Bahá'i: ascertains the unity of all religious doctrines as these embody ideals of spiritual truth. The name comes from Baha Ullah (Glory of God), adopted by its founder Mirza Husain Ali Nuri, in 1863, in extension of the al-Bab religion. Universal education, equality between male and female, and world order and peace are its goals. The religion is estimated to have 5 million adherents world-wide.

Richard Wilhelm. I Ging; Das Buch der Wandlungen. Düsseldorf/Köln: Diedrichs, 1982.

Wilhelm states that, in the context described, Fuh-Hi emerged: "He reunited man and woman, ordered the five elements and set the laws of mankind. He drew eight signs in order to dominate the world." The eight signs are the eight basic trigrams of I Ging, the Book of Changes (which attracted Leibniz's attention).

King Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick I of the Holy Roman Empire, 1123-1190). Well known for challenging the authority of the Pope and for attempting to establish German supremacy in religious matters.

Joan of Arc (1412-1431). A plowman's daughter who, as the story goes, listened to the voices of saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. Thus inspiring the French to victory over British invaders, she made possible the coronation of Charles II at Reims. Captured by the English, she was declared a heretic and burned at the stake. In 1920, Pope Benedict XV declared her a saint.

Jan Hus (1372-1415). Religious reformer whose writings exercised influence over all the Catholic world. In De Ecclesia, he set forth that scripture is the sole source of Christian doctrine.

Martin Luther (1483-1546). A priest from Saxony, a scholar of Scripture, and a linguist, who is famous for having attacked clerical abuses. Through his writings (The 95 Theses), he precipitated the Reformation.

Moslem armies defeated the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, led by Charles Martel, at Poitiers (cf. J.H. Roy, La Bataille de Poitiers, Octobre 733, Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

Crusades: a series of military expeditions taking place from 1095 to 1270) intent on reclaiming Jerusalem and the holy Christian shrines from Turkish control.

David Kirsch poses the questions: Is 97% of human activity concept-free, driven by control mechanisms we share not only with our simian forebears, but with insects? (Today the Earwig, Tomorrow the Man? in Artificial Intelligence, 47:1-3, Jan. 1991, p. 161).

The Bible on CD-ROM is a publication of Nimbus Information Systems (1989). The CD-Word Interactive Biblical Library (1990), published by the CD-Word Library, Inc. offers 16 of the world's most used Bible texts and reference sources (two Greek texts, four English versions).

Secular god-building in the Soviet Union: Ob ateizme i religii. Sbornik Statei, Pisem i drughich materialov (About atheism and religion. Collected articles, letters, and other materials) by Anatoli Vasilevich Lunacharskii (1875-1933), Moscow: Mysl, 1972. This is a collection of articles on atheism and religion, part of the scientific-atheistic library. See also Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts (translated by Herman Erolaev). New York: P.S. Ericksson, 1966.

Ernest Gellner, Scale and Nation, in Scale and Social Organization (F. Barth, editor).

"Max Weber stressed the significance of the way in which Protestantism made every man his own priest" (p. 143).

Glen Tinder. Can we be good without God? in Atlantic Monthly, December, 1989.

Michael Lewis. God is in the Packaging, in The New York Times Magazine, July 21, 1996, pp. 14 and 16.

Lewis describes pastors using marketing techniques to form congregations. The success of the method has led to branch congregations all over the USA.

Tademan Isobe, author of The Japanese and Religion, states: "The general religious awareness of the Japanese does not include an ultimate God with human attributes, as the God of Christianity. Instead, Japanese sense the mystery of life from all events and natural phenomena around them in their daily lives. They have what might be called a sense of pathos" (cf. Web positing of August, 1996, http://www.ariadne.knee.kioto-u.ac.jp).

A Mouthful of Microwave

From a strictly qualitative perspective, the amount of food people eat is represented by numbers so large that we end up looking at them in awe, without understanding what they mean. The maintenance of life is an expensive proposition. Nevertheless, once we go beyond the energetic equation, i.e., in the realm of desires, the numbers increase exponentially. It can be argued that this increase (of an order of magnitude of 1,000) is higher than that anticipated by Malthus. On the subject of what, how, and why people eat, see:

Claudio Clini. L'alimentazione nella storia. Uomo, alimentazione, malattie. Abano Terme, Padova: Francisci, 1985.

Evan Jones. American Food. The Gastronomic Story. Woodstock NY: Overlook Press, 1990.

Nicholas and Giana Kurti, Editors. But the Crackling is Superb. An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Bristol, England: A. Hilger, 1988.

Carol A. Bryant, et al. The Cultural Feast. An Introduction to Food and Society. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1985.

Hilary Wilson. Egyptian Food and Drink. Aylesbury, Bucks, England: Shire, 1988.

Reay Tannahill. Food in History. New York: Stein and Day, 1973.

Charles Bixler Heiser. Seed to Civilization. The Story of Food. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Margaret Visser. Much Depends on Dinner. The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, 1986.

Esther B. Aresty. The Delectable Past. The Joys of the Table, from Rome to the Renaissance, from Queen Elizabeth I to Mrs. Beeton. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978.

Maria P. Robbins, Editor. The Cook's Quotation Book. A Literary Feast. Wainscott NY: Pushcart Press, 1983.

The Pleasures of the Table (compiled by Theodore FitzGibbon). New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Charles Dickens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. (pp. 154-155). On the symbolism of food, informative reading can be found in:

Carol A. Bryant. The Cultural Feast: An Introduction to Food and Society. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1985.

Lindsey Tucker. Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast: Alimentary Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce's Ulysses. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984.

In L'aile ou la cuisse (Wing or Drumstick), a 1976 French film directed by Claude Zidi, Luis de Funés became, as the French press put it, "the Napoleon of gastronomy" fighting the barbarian taste of industrial food, seen as a real danger to the authentic taste of France.

At the initiative of the Minister of Culture, a Conseil National des Arts Culinaires (CNAC) was founded in 1989. Culinary art and gastronomic heritage were made part of the French national identity. Awakening of Taste (Le reveil du goût) is a program launched in the elementary schools. A curriculum originating from the French Institute of Taste is used to explain what makes French food taste good. The CNAC provides a nationwide inventory of local foods. A University of Taste (Centre de Goût) would be established in the Loire Valley.

Jean Bottero. Mythes et Rites de Babylone. Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1985.

Reallexikon der Assyriologie. Vol. III, Getränke (Drinks), pp. 303-306; Gewürze (Spices), pp. 340-341; Vol. VI, Küche (Cuisine), pp. 277-298. Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1982.

La Plus Vieille Cuisine du Monde, in L'Histoire, 49, 1982, pp. 72-82.

M. Gabeus Apicius. De re conquinaria (rendered into English by Joseph Sommers Vehling, New York: Dover Publications, 1977) first appeared in England in 1705, in a Latin version, based on the manuscripts of this work dating to the 8th and 9th centuries. Apicius was supposed to have lived from 80 BCE to 40 CE. This book has since been questioned as a hoax, although it remains a reference text.

Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. De re rustica. (12 volumes on agriculture. Latin text with German translation by Will Richter). München: Artemis Verlag, 1981.

Roland Barthes. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang. 1982. (Originally published in French as L'Empire des Signes, Geneva: Editions d'Art Albert Skira, S.A.

"The dinner tray seems a picture of the most delicate order: its frame containing, against a dark background, various objects (bowls, boxes, saucers, chopsticks, tiny piles of food, a little gray ginger, a few shreds of orange vegetable, a background of brown sauce)...it might be said that these trays fulfill the definition of painting which according to Piero della Francesca is merely demonstration of surfaces and bodies becoming even smaller or larger according to their term" (p. 11).

"Entirely visual (conceived, concerted, manipulated for sight, and even for a painter's eye), food thereby says that it is not deep: the edible substance is without a precious heart, without a buried power, without a vital secret: no Japanese dish is endowed with a center (the alimentary center implied in the West by the rite which consists of arranging the meal, of surrounding or covering the article of food); here everything is the ornament of another ornament: first of all because on the table, on the tray, food is never anything but a collection of fragments, none of which appears privileged by an order of ingestion; to eat is not to respect a menu (an itinerary of dishes), but to select, with a light touch of the chopsticks, sometimes one color, sometimes another, depending on the kind of inspiration which appears in its slowness as the detached, indirect accompaniment of the conversation...." (p. 22).

The writings of the various religions (Koran, Torah, New Testament) contain strictures and ceremonial rules concerning food. For cooking and eating restrictions in various cultures, see Nourritures, Sociétés et Religions: Commensalités (introduction by Solange Thierry). Paris: L'Harmattan, 1990.

On the microwave revolution in cooking, see:

Lori Longbotham. Better by Microwave. New York: Dutton, 1990.

Maria Luisa Scott. Mastering Microwave Cooking. Mount Vernon NY: Consumers Union, 1988.

Eric Quayle. Old Cook Books: An Illustrated History. New York: Dutton. 1978; and Daniel S. Cutler. The Bible Cookbook. New York: Morrow, 1985, offer a good retrospective of what people used to eat.

In World Hunger. A Reference Handbook (Patricia L. Kutzner, Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1991), the author gives a stark description of the problem of hunger in today's world:

"With more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, hundreds of millions of men, women, and children still go hungry" (p. ix).

It is not the first time in history that starvation and famine affect people all over the world. What is new is the scale of the problem, affecting well over one billion human beings. In June, 1974, in the Assessment of the World Food Situation, commissioned by the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the situation was described in terms still unchanged: "The causes of inadequate nutrition are many and closely interrelated, including ecological, sanitary, and cultural constraints, but the principal cause is poverty. This in turn results from socioeconomic development patterns that in most of the poorer countries have been characterized by a high degree of concentration of power, wealth, and incomes in the hands of relatively small elites of national and foreign individuals or groups. [...] The percentage of undernourished is highest in Africa, the Far East, and Latin America; the hunger distribution is highest in the Far East (in the range of 60%). Of the hungry, the majority (up to 90%) is in rural areas.

Data is collected and managed by the World Food Council. The Bellagio Declaration, Overcoming hunger in the 1990's, adopted by a group of 23 prominent development and food policy planners, development practitioners, and scientists noticed that 14 million children under the age of five years die annually from hunger related causes.

Among the organizations created to help feed the world are CARE, Food for Peace, OXFAM, Action Hunger, The Hunger Project, Save the Children, World Vision, the Heifer Project. This list does not include the many national and local organizations that feed the hungry in their respective countries and cities.

Science and Philosophy: More Questions than Answers

T.S. Elliot. Burnt Norton, in V. Four Quartets. London: Faber & Faber, 1936.

For information on the development of science and philosophy in early civilizations, see:

Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin, Editors. Chinese Science: Exploration of an Ancient Tradition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973.

Karl W. Butzer. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: a Study in Cultural Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Heinrich von Staden. Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

The Cultural Heritage of India, (in 6 volumes). Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission, Institute of Culture, 1953.

James H. MacLachlan. Children of Prometheus: A History of Science and Technology. Toronto: Wall & Thompson, 1989.

Isaac Asimov. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. The Lives and Achievements of 1195 Great Scientists from Ancient Times to the Present. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1972. Fritz Kraft. Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft. Freiberg: Romback, 1971.

G.E.R. Lloyd. Methods and Problems in Greek Science Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Robert K.G. Temple. China, Land of Discovery. London: Patrick Stephens, 1986.

Temple documents discoveries and techniques such as row cultivation and hoeing ("There are 3 inches of moisture at the end of a hoe,"), the iron plow, the horse harness, cast iron, the crank handle, lacquer ("the first plastic"), the decimal system, the suspension bridge as originating from China. In the Introduction, Joseph Needham writes: "Chauvinistic Westerners, of course, always try to minimize the indebtedness of Europe to China in Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (p.7).

What is of interest in the story is the fact that all these discoveries occur in a context of configurational focus, of synthesis, not in the sequential horizon of analytic Western languages. In some cases, the initial non-linear thought is linearized. This is best exemplified by comparing Chinese printing methods, intent on letters seen as images, with those following Gutenberg's movable type. Obviously, a text perceived as a holistic entity, such as the Buddhist charm scroll (printed in 704-751) or the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of 868 (cf. p. 112) are different from the Bibles printed by Gutenberg and his followers. Contributions to the history of science from India and the Middle East also reveal that many discoveries celebrated as accomplishments of Western analytical science were anticipated in non-analytical cultures.

Satya Prakash. Founders of Science in Ancient India. Dehli: Govindram Hasanand, 1986.

G. Kuppuram and K. Kumudamani, Editors. History of Science and Technology in India. Dehli: Sundeep Prakashan, 1990.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic Science. Persia. Tihran: Surush, 1987.

Charles Finch. The African Background to Medical Science: Essays in African History, Science, and Civilization. London: Karnak House, 1990.

Magic, myth, and science influence each other in many ways. Writings on the subject refer to specific aspects (magic and science, myth as a form of rational discourse) or to the broader issues of their respective epistemological condition.

Richard Cavendish. A History of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977.

Gareth Knight. Magic and the Western Mind: Ancient Knowledge and the Transformation of Consciousness. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1991.

Umberto Eco. Foucault's Pendulum. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

In this novel, Umberto Eco deals, in a light vein, with the occult considered as the true science.

Jean Malbec de Tresfel. Abrège de la Théorie et des véritables principes de l'art appelé chymie, qui est la troisième partie ou colonne de la vraye medecine hermetique. Paris: Chez l'auteur,1671.

Adam McLean. The Alchemical Mandala. A Survey of the Mandala in the Western Esoteric Traditions. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1989.

Titus Burckhardt. Alchemie, Sinn und Weltbild. London: Stuart & Watkins, 1967. Translated as Alchemy. Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, by William Stoddart. Longmead/Shaftesbury/Dorest: Element Books, 1986.

Marie Louise von Franz. Alchemy. An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980.

Neil Powell. Alchemy. The Ancient Science. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. Alchemy. The Secret Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.

J.C. Cooper. Chinese Alchemy. The Taoist Quest for Immortality. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1984.

Robert Zoller. The Arabic Parts in Astrology. The Lost Key to Prediction. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International (distributed by Harper & Row), 1989.

Dane Rudhyar. An Astrological Mandala. The Cycle of Transformation and Its 360 Symbolic Phases. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1973.

Cyril Fagan. Astrological Origins. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1971.

Percy Seymour. Astrology. The Evidence of Science. Luton, Bedfordshire: Lennard, 1988.

Rodney Davies. Fortune-Telling by Astrology. The History and Practice of Divination by the Stars. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1988.

"Astrological herbalism distinguished seven planetary plants, twelve herbs associated with signs of the zodiac and thirty-six plants assigned to decantates and to horoscopes" cf. Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit, p. 42. Ruth Drayer. Numerology. The Language of Life. El Paso, TX: Skidmore-Roth Publications, 1990.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Nobel prize laureate, 1921.

He discusses the conditions of existence for which we are not adjusted in Über den Frieden, Weltordnung und Weltuntergang (O. Norden and H. Norden, Editors.), Bern. 1975, p. 494.

In a letter to Jacques Hadamard (1945), Einstein explained: "The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanisms of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced or combined" cf. A Testimonial from Professor Einstein, in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, edited by J. Hadamard, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945, p. 142.

Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

"Rather than defining intelligence in terms of its constituent processes, we might define it in terms of its goal: the ability to use symbolic reasoning in the pursuit of a goal" (p. 17).

Alan Bundy, The Computer Modelling of Mathematical Reasoning. New York: Academic Press, 1983.

Allan Ramsey. Formal Methods in Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

M. Reinfrank, Editor. Non-Monotonic Reasoning: Second International Workshop. Berlin/New York: Springer Verlag, 1989. Titus Lucretius Carus. De rerum natura (edited with translation and commentary by John Godwin). Warminster, Wiltshire, England: Aris & Phillips,1986.

-. The Nature of Things. Trans. Frank O. Copley. 1st ed. New York: Norton., 1977.

Epicurus, called by Timon "the last of the natural philosophers," was translated by Lucretius into Latin. His Letter to Herodotus and Master Sayings (Kyriai doxai) were integrated in De rerum natura (On Nature). A good reference book is Clay Diskin's Lucretius and Epicurus, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (Two New Sciences: Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion, translated, with a new introduction and notes, by Stillman Drake). Toronto: Wall & Thompson, 1989.

-. Galileo's Early Notebooks. The Physical Questions (translated from the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary, by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977.

Starting out as a dictionnaire raisonné of the sciences, the arts, and crafts, the Encyclopédie became a major form of philosophic expression in the 18th century. Philosophers dedicated themselves to the advancement of the sciences and secular thought, and to the social program of the Enlightenment. The Encyclopédie showcased new directions of thought in all branches of intellectual activity. The emergent values corresponding to the pragmatic condition of time, tolerance, innovation, and freedom, were expressed in the Encyclopedic writings and embodied in the political program of the revolutions it inspired. One of the acknowledged sources of this orientation is Ephraim Chamber's Cyclopedia (or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences), London, 1728.

The examination of star naming is in some ways an exercise in the geology of pragmatic contexts. The acknowledgment of what is high, over, above, and beyond the observer's actions suggested power. The sequence of day and night, of seasons, of the changing weather is a mixture of repetitive patterns and unexpected occurrences, even meteorites, some related to wind, fire, water. Once the shortest and the longest days are observed, and the length of day equal to that of night (the equinox), the sky becomes integrated in the pragmatics of human self-constitution by virtue of affecting cycles of work. Furthermore, parallel to the mytho-magical explanation of what happens follows the association of mythical characters, mainly to stars. Saturn, or Chronos, was the god of time, a star known for its steady movement; Jupiter, known by the Egyptians as Ammon, the most impressive planet, and apparently the biggest. Details of this geology of naming could lead to a book. Here are some of the names used: Mythomagical: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto; Zodiacal: Gemini, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, etc.

Space: limitless, 3-dimensional, in which objects exist, events occur, movement takes place. Objects have relative positions and their movement has relative directions. The geometric notion of space expands beyond 3-dimensionality.

Paradigm: Since the time Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the concept of paradigm was adopted in philosophic jargon. The underlying thesis is that science operates in a research space dominated by successive research models, or paradigms. The domination of such a paradigm does not make it more important than previous scientific explanations (paradigms are not comparable). Rather it effects a certain convergence in the unifying framework it ascertains.

Logos: ancient Greek for word, was many times defined, almost always partially, as a means to express thoughts. By generalization, logos became similar to thought or reason, and thus a way to control the word through speech (legein). In this last sense, logos was adapted by Christianity as the Word of Divinity.

For a description of holism, see Holism-A Philosophy for Today, by Harry Settanni (New York: P. Lang, 1990).

Techné: from the Greek, means "pertaining to the making of artifacts" (art objects included).

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Statesman and philosopher, distinguished for establishing the empiric methods for scientific research. Intent on analytical tools, he set out methods of induction which proved to be effective in the distinction between scientific and philosophical research. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) and especially Novum Organum (1620), Bacon set forth principles that affected the development of modern science.

René Descartes (1596-1650): Probably one of the most influential philosophers and scientists, whose contribution, at a time of change and definition, marked Western civilization in many ways. The Cartesian dualism he developed ascertains a physical (res extensa) and a thinking (res cogitans) substance. The first is extended, can be measured and divided; the second is indivisible. The body is part of res extensa, the mind (including thoughts, desires, volition) is res cogitans. His rules for the Direction of the Understanding (1628), influenced by his mathematical concerns, submitted a model for the acquisition of knowledge. The method of doubt, i.e., rejection of everything not certain, expressed in the famous Discourse on Method (1637), together with the foundation of a model of science that combines a mechanic image of the universe described mathematically, are part of his legacy.

Edwin A. Abbot. Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions. By a Square.

A broad-minded square guides the reader through a 2-dimensional space. High priests (circular figures) forbid discussing a third dimension. Abruptly, the square is transported into spaceland and peers astonished into his 2-dimensional homeland.

Spatial reasoning: a type of reasoning that incorporates the experience of space either in direct forms (geometric reasoning) or indirectly (through terms such as close, remote, among others).

Linearity: relation among dependent phenomena that can be described through a linear function.

Non-linearity: relations among dependent phenomena that cannot be described through a linear function, but through exponential and logarithmic functions, among others.

Jackson E. Atlee. Perspectives of Non-Linear Dynamics. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

S. Neil Rasband. Chaotic Dynamics of Non-Linear Systems. New York: Wiley, 1990.

Coherence: the notion that reflects interest in how parts of a whole are connected. Of special interest is the coherence of knowledge.

Ralph C.S. Walker. The Coherence Theory of Truth: Realism, Anti-Realism, Idealism. London/New York: Routledge, 1989.

Alan H. Goldman. Moral Knowledge. London/New York: Routledge, 1988.

A major survey, focused on the contributions of Keith Lehrer and Laurence Bon Jour, was carried out in The Current State of the Coherence Theory. Critical Essays on the Epistemic Theories of Keith Lehrer and Laurence Bon Jour, with Replies (John W. Bender, Editor, Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).

David Kirsch. Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. (A special volume of the journal Artificial Intelligence, 47:1-3, January 1991. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Self-organization is a dominant topic in artificial life research. The Annual Conference on Artificial Life (Santa Fe) resulted in a Proceedings in which self-organization is amply discussed. Some aspects pertinent to the subject can be found in:

H. Haken. Advanced Synergetics: Instability Hierarchies of Self-Organizing Systems and Devices. Berlin/New York: Springer Verlag, 1983.

P.C.W. Davies. The Cosmic Blueprint. London: Heinemann, 1987.

G. M. Whitesides. Self-Assembling Materials, in Nanothinc, 1996. http://www.nanothinc.com/webmaster @nanothinc.com

More information on self-assembling materials and nanotechnology can be found on the Internet at http://www.nanothinc.com/webmaster @nanothinc.com and at http://www.foresight.org/[email protected].

Richard Feynman, in a talk given in 1959, stated that "The principles of physics...do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. [...] The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to...do things on an atomic level is ultimately developed, a developmet which I think cannot be avoided." (cf. http://www.foresight.org).

Preston Prather. Science Education and the Problem of Scientific Enlightenment, in Science Education, 5:1, 1996.

The money invested in science is a slippery subject. While direct funds, such as those made available through the National Science Foundation, are rather scarce, funding through various government agencies (Defense, Agriculture, Energy, NASA) and through private sources amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. How much of this goes to fundamental research and how much to applied science is not very clear, as even the distinction between fundamental and applied is less and less clear.

Ernst Mach. The Science of Mechanics (1883). Trans. T.J. McCormick. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1960.

Henri Poincaré. The Foundations of Science (1909). Trans. G.B. Halsted. New York: The Science Press, 1929.

N.P. Cambell. Foundations of Science (1919). New York: Dover, 1957.

Bas C. van Fraasen. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1980.

Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

-. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the historic and methodological background to the subject in Introduction to Memetic Science.

E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975.

Mihai Nadin. Mind-Anticipation and Chaos (from the series Milestones in Thought and Discovery). Stuttgart/Zurich: Belser Presse, 1991.

-. The Art and Science of Multimedia, in Real-Time Imaging (P. Laplante & A. Stoyenko, Editors). Piscataway NJ: IEEE Press, January, 1996.

-. Negotiating the World of Make-Believe: The Aesthetic Compass, in Real-TIme Imaging. London: Academic Press, 1995.

"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," Karl Marx (cf. Theses on Feuerbach (from Notebooks of 1844-1845). See also Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1967, p. 402.

Paul K. Feyerabend. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: Verson Edition,1978.

-. Three Dialogues on Knowledge. Oxford, England/Cambridge MA: Blackwell,1991.

Imre Lakatos. Philosophical Papers, in two volumes (edited by John Worrall and Gregory Currie). Cambridge, England/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

-. Proofs and Refutations. The Logic of Mathematical Discovery (John Worrall and Elie Zahar, Editors). Cambridge, England/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Multivalued logic: expands beyond the truth and falsehood of sentences, handling the many values of the equivocal or the ambiguous.

Charles S. Peirce ascertained that all necessary reasoning is mathematical reasoning, and that all mathematical reasoning is diagrammatic. He explained diagrammatic reasoning as being based on a diagram of the percept expressed and on operations on the diagram. The visual nature of a diagram ("composed of lines, or an array of signs...") affects the nature of the operations performed on it (cf. On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation, in The American Journal of Mathematics, 7:180-202, 1885).

Brockman, John. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. (A collection of essays with Introduction written by John Brockman.) New York: Simon & Schuster. 1995

Here are some quotations from the contributors: Brockman maintains that there is a shift occurring in public discourse, with scientists supplanting philosophers, artists, and people of letters as the ones who render "visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

"We're at the stage where things change on the order of decades, and it seems to be speeding up...." (Danny Hillis)

Auguste Compte, in whose works the thought of Positivism is convincingly embodied, attracted the attention of John Stuart Mill, who wrote The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Compte (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1871). Some of Compte's early writings are reproduced in The Crisis of Industrial Civilization (Ronald Fletcher, Editor, London: Heinemann Educational, 1974).

Stefano Poggi. Introduzione al il Positivisma. Bari: Laterza, 1987.

Sybil de Acevedo. Auguste Compte: Qui êtes-vous? Lyons: La Manufacture, 1988.

Emil Durkheim. De la division du travail social. 9e ed. Paris: Presses univérsitaires de France, 1973. (Translated as The Division of Labor in Society by W.D. Halls, New York: Free Press, 1984.

Durkheim applied Darwin's natural selection to labor division.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903): very well known for his essay, Progress: Its Laws and Cause (1857), attempted to conceive a theory of society based on naturalist principles. What he defined as the "super- organic," which stands for social, is subjected to evolution. In his view, societies undergo, cycles of birth- climax-death. Productive power varies from one cycle to other (cf. Principles of Sociology, 1876-1896).

Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes

Art Speigelman. Maus. A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986; and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale-And Here My Troubles Began. New York Pantheon Books, 1991.

Started as a comic strip (in Raw, an experimental Comix magazine, co-edited by Speigelman and Françoise Monly) on the subject of the Holocaust, Maus became a book and, on its completion, the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a show to the artist. Over 1500 interlocking drawings tell the story of Vladek, the artist's father. The comic book convention was questioned as to its appropriateness for the tragic theme.

Milli Vanilli, the group that publicly acknowledged that the album Girl You Know It's True, for which it was awarded the Grammy for Best New Artist of 1989, was vocally interpreted by someone else. The prize winners, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, credited for the vocals, were hardly the first to take advantage of the new means for creating the illusion of interpretation. As the 'visual entertainment," they became the wrapper on a package containing the music of less video-reputed singers. Their producer, Frank Tarian (i.e., Franz Reuther) was on his second "fake." Ten years earlier, he revealed that the pop group Boney M. was his own "mouthpiece." Image-driven pop music sells the fantasy of teen idol to a musically illiterate public. Packaged music extends to simulations of instruments and orchestras as well.

Beauty and the Beast is the story of a handsome prince in 18th century France turned into an eight-foot tall, hideous, hairy beast. Unless he finds someone to love him before his 21st birthday, the curse cast upon him by the old woman he tried to chase away will become permanent. In a nearby village, Maurice, a lovable eccentric inventor, his daughter Belle, who keeps her nose in books and her head in the clouds, and Gaston, the macho of the place, go through the usual "he (Gaston) loves/wants her; she does not care for/shuns him, etc." As its 30th full-length animation, this Walt Disney picture is a musical fairy tale that takes advantage of sophisticated computer animation. Its over one million drawings (the work of 600 animators, artists, and technicians) are animated, some in sophisticated 3-dimensional computer animation. The technological performance, resulting from an elaborate database, provided attractive numbers, such as the Be Our Guest sequence (led by the enchanted candelabra, teapot, and clock characters, entire chorus lines of dancing plates, goblets, and eating utensils perform a musical act), or the emotional ballroom sequence. Everything is based on the accepted challenge: "OK, go ahead and fool us," once upon a time uttered by some art director to the computer-generated imagery specialists of the company. The story (by Mme. Leprince de Beaumont) inspired Jean Cocteau, who wrote the screenplay for (and also directed) La Belle et La Bête (1946), featuring Jean Marais, Josette Day, and Marcel André.

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Seduced by the relation to history, he produces allegories in reference to myth, art, religion, and culture. His compositions are strongly evocative, not lacking a certain critical dimension, sometimes focused on art itself, which repeatedly failed during times of challenge (those of Nazi Germany included).

Terminator 2 is a movie about two cyborgs who come from the future, one to destroy, the other to protect, a boy who will affect the future when he grows up. It is reported to be the most expensive film made as of 1991 (over 130 characters are killed), costing 85 to 100 million dollars; cf. Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, August 12, 1991, pp. 28-29.

Kitsch: defined in dictionaries as gaudy, trash, pretentious, shallow art expression addressing a low, unrefined taste. Kitsch-like images are used as ironic devices in artworks critical of the bourgeois taste.

The relation between art and language occasioned a major show organized by the Société des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels. A catalogue was edited by Jan Debbant and Patricia Holm (Paris: Galerie de Paris; London: Lisson Gallery; New York: Marian Goodman Gallery). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Ästhetik (Hrsg. von Friedrich Bassenge). Berlin: Verlag das Europäische Buch, 1985.

Dadaism: Hans Arp defined Dada as "the nausea caused by the foolish rational explanation of the world" (1916, Zurich). Richard Huelsenbeck stated that "Dada cannot be understood, it must be experienced" (1920). More on this subject can be found in:

Raoul Hausmann. Am Anfang war Dada. (Hrsg. von Karl Riha & Gunter Kampf). Steinbach/Giessen: Anabas-Verlag G. Kampf, 1972.

Serge Lemoine. Dada. Paris: Hazan, 1986.

Dawn Ades. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978.

Hans Bollinger, et al. Dada in Zurich. Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich, 1985.

Walter Benjamin. Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction is a translation of Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit: drei studien zur Kunstsoziologie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963.

Walter de Maria's Lightning Field project was carried out with the support of the Dia Art Foundation, which bought the land and maintains and allows for limited public access to the work. As the prototypical example of land-art, this lattice of lightning rods covers an area of one mile by one kilometer. Filled with 400 rods placed equidistantly, the lightning field is the interplay between precision and randomness. During the storm season in New Mexico, the work is brought to life by many bolts of lightning. The artist explained that "Light is as important as lightening." Indeed, during its 24-hour cycle, the field goes through a continuous metamorphosis. Nature and art interact in fascinating ways.

Christo's latest work was entitled Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, July 1995. Regarding Christo's many ambitious projects, some references are:

Erich Himmel, Editor. Christo. The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris 1975-1985. New York: Abrams, 1990.

Christo: The Umbrellas. Joint project for Japan and the USA, 25 May - 24 June, 1988. London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 1988.

Christo: Surrounded Islands. Köln: DuMont Buch Verlag, 1984. Christo: Wrapped Walkways, Loose Park, Kansas City, Missouri, 1977-1978. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1978.

Christo: Valley Curtain, Riffle, Colorado. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1973.

The Bauhaus, a school of arts and crafts, founded in 1919 in Weimar, by Walter Gropius. Its significance results from the philosophy of education expressed in the Bauhaus program, to which distinguished artists contributed, and from the impressive number of people who, after studying at the Bauhaus, affirmed its methods and vision in worlds of art, architecture, and new educational programs. Among the major themes at Bauhaus were the democratization of artistic creation (one of the last romantic ideas of our time), the social implication of art, and the involvement of technology. Collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts were encouraged; the tendency to overcome cultural and national boundaries was tirelessly pursued; the rationalist attitude became the hallmark of all who constituted the school. In 1925, the Bauhaus had to move to Dessau, where it remained until 1928, before it settled in Berlin. After Gropius, the architects Hans Mayer (1930-1932) and Mies van der Rohe (1932-1933) worked on ascertaining the international style intended to offer visual coherence and integrity. In some ways, the Bauhaus was continued in the USA, since many of its personalities and students had to emigrate from Nazi Germany and found safe haven in the USA.

Leon Battista Alberti (15th century) wrote extensively on painting and sculpture: De pictura and De Statua were translated by Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972). Alberti's writings on the art of building, De re aedificatoria, was translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (10 volumes, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988).

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Intently against those who were "intoxicated by turpentine," he pursued a "dry art." From the Nu descendant un escalier, considered "an explosion in a fireworks factory" to his celebrated ready-mades, Duchamp pursued the call to "de-artify" art. Selection became the major operation in offering objects taken out of context and appropriating them as aesthetic icons. He argued that "Art is a path to regions where neither time nor space dominate."

Happening: An artistic movement based on the interaction among different forms of expression. Allan Kaprow (at Douglas College in 1958) and the group associated with the Reuben gallery in New York (Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Whitman, Hausen) brought the movement to the borderline where distinctions between the artist and the public are erased. Later, the movement expanded to Europe.

Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and Back Again. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

-. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw Hill, 1973.

Andy Warhol is remembered for saying that in the future, everyone will be a celebrity for 15 minutes.

Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov. Lectures on Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers, introduction by John Updike. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980-1981.

"A rose is a rose is a rose...," now quite an illustrious (if not trite) line, originated in Gertrude Stein's poem Sacred Emily. But "...A rose by any other name/would smell as sweet." from Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet can be seen as a precursor.

Symbolism is a neo-romantic art movement of the end of the 19th century, in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and positivist attitudes permeating art and existence. Writers such as Beaudelaire, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Huysmans, composers (Wagner, in the first place), painters such as Gauguin, Ensor, Puvis de Chavannes, Moreau, and Odilon Redon created in the spirit of symbolism. At the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism attempted to submit a unified alphabet of images. Jung went so far as to identify its psychological basis.

James Joyce (1882-1941). Ulysses. A critical and synoptic (though very controviersial) edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfgang Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Garland Publishers, 1984.

Antoine Furetière. Essais d'un Dictionnaire Universel. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968 (reprint of the original published in 1687 in Amsterdam under the same title).

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). 2000 Pagine de Gramsci. A cura di Giansiro Ferrata e Niccolo Gallo. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1971.

-. Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings. (Edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Newell-Smith; translated by William Boelhower). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

-. Le Ceneri di Gramsci. Milano: Garzanti, 1976.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Turc al Friul. Traduzione e introduzione di Giancarlo Bocotti. Munich: Instituto Italian di Cultura, 1980. Ken Kesey. The Further Inquiry. Photographs by Ron Bevirt. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Madame Bovary. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.

-. Madame Bovary. Patterns of provincial life. (Translated, with a new introduction by Francis Steegmuller). New York: Modern Library, 1982.

Donald Barthelme. Amateurs. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1976.

-. The King. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

-. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering Djinn. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1971.

Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions or, Goodbye Blue Monday! New York: Delacorte Press, 1973.

-. Galapagos. A Novel. New York: Delacorte Press, 1985.

-. Fates Worse than Death. An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980's. New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1991.

John Barth. Chimera. New York: Random House, 1972.

-. The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment. Northridge CA: Lord John Press, 1982.

-. Sabbatical. A Romance. New York: Putnam, 1982.

William H. Gass. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf, 1970.

-. Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

-. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Gary Percesepe. What's Eating William Gass?, in Mississippi Review, 1995.

Gertrude Stein's writing technique is probably best exemplified by her own writing. How to Write, initially published in 1931 in Paris (Plain Editions), states provocatively that "Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean nor how clearly you mean what you mean." In an interview with Robert Haas, 1946) in Afterword, Gertrude Stein stated that "Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them," (p. 101). "I write with my eyes not with my ears or mouth," (p. 103). Moreover: "My writing is as clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear."

Gertrude Stein. How to Write (with a new preface by Patricia Meyerowitz). New York: Dover Publications, 1975.

The author shows that "the innovative works of an artist are explorations" (p.vi).

-. Useful Knowledge. Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 1988.

-. What are Masterpieces? New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1970 (reprint of 1940 edition).

Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballentine, 1970.

The author maintains that the book became the organizing principle for all existence, a model for achieving bureaucracy.

It seems that the first comic strip in America was The Yellow Kid, by Richard F. Outcault, in the New York World, 1896. Among the early comic strips: George Harriman's Krazy Kat (held as an example of American Dadaism); Windsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland; Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirated.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). Il Futurismo was written in 1908 as the preface to a volume of his poetry and was published in 1909. Its manifesto was set forth in the words "We declare that the splendor of the world has been increased by a new beauty: the beauty of speed." Breaking with the livresque past, the Italian Futurism took it upon itself to "liberate this land from the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, guides, and antiquarians." The break with the past was a break with its values as these were rooted in literate culture.

Dziga Vertov (born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman,1986-1954). Became known through his innovative montage juxtaposition, about which he wrote in Kino-Glas (Kino-Eye). The film We (1922) is a fantasy of movement. Kino-Pravda (1922-1925) were documentaries of extreme expressionism, with very rich visual associations.

Experiments in simultaneity are also experiments in the understanding of the need to rethink art as a representation of dynamic events.

Michail Fyodorovich Larionov (1881-1964). Russian-born French painter and designer, a pioneer in abstract painting, after many experiences in figurative art and with a declared obsession with the aesthetic experience of simultaneity. Founder of the Rayonist movement-together with his wife, Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), painter, stage designer, and sculptor-Larionov went from a neo-primitive painting style to cubism and futurism in order to finally synthesize them in a style reflecting the understanding of the role of light (in particular, as rays). His Portrait of Tatline (1911) is witness to the synthesis that Rayonism represented.

Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Machine Aesthetics, 1923.

"La vitesse est la loi de la vie moderne." (Speed is the modern law of life.)

Libraries, Books, Readers

In his Introduction to A Carlyle Reader, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), G.B. Tennyson is unequivocal in his appreciation: "No one who hopes to understand the nineteenth century in England can dispense with Carlyle," (p. xiv). Since nineteenth century England is of such relevance to major developments in the civilization of literacy, one can infer that Tennyson's thought applies to persons trying to understand the emergence and consolidation of literacy. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote Signs of Times. (He took the title from the New Testament, Matthew 16:3, "O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the sign of the times?") He condemns his age in the following terms: "Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one," (cf. Reader, p. 34). Parallels to the reactions to new technology in our age are more than obvious.

New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Cultural Impact of an Encounter, a major public documentary exhibit at the New York Public Library, September 1992-January 1992, curated by Anthony Grafton, assisted by April G. Shelford.

At the other end of the spectrum defined by Carlyle's faith in books comes a fascinating note from Louis Hennepin (1684): "We told them [the Indians] that we know all things through written documents. These savages asked, 'Before you came to the lands where we live, did you rightly know that we were here?' We were obliged to say no. 'Then you didn't know all things through books, and they didn't tell you everything'"

A. Grafton, A. Shelford, and N. Siraisi,The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

In comparison to Carlyle's criticism of mechanical mediation of the Industrial Age comes this evaluation of the Information Age or Post-Industrial Age:

"In the industrial age, when people need to achieve something, do they have to go through a series of motions, read manuals, or become experts at the task? Not at all; they flip a switch.... It isn't necessary to know a single thing about lighting; all one needs to do is flip a switch to turn the light on. [...] To take care of a number of tasks, you push a button, flip a switch, turn a dial. That is the age of industry working at its best, so that you don't have to become an electrical engineer or physicist to function effectively.

"To get the information you need...do you need to go on-line or open a manual? Unfortunately, most of us right now end up going through a series of activities in order to get the precise information we need. In the age of information...you will be able to turn on a computer, come up with the specific question, and it will do the work for you." (cf. Address by Jeff Davidson, Executive Director of the Breathing Space Institute of Chapel Hill, before the National Institute of Health, Dec. 8, 1995; reprinted in Vital Speeches, Vol. 62, 06-01-1996, pp. 495, and in the Electric LibraryT.)

George Steiner. The End of Bookishness? (edited transcript of a talk given to the International Publishers' Association Congress in London, on June 14, 1988) in Times Literary Supplement, 89-14, 1988, p. 754.

Aldus Manutius, the Elder (born Aldo Manuzio, 1449-1515): Known for his activity in printing, publishing, and typography, especially for design and manufacture of small pocket-sized books printed in inexpensive editions. The family formed a short-lived printing empire (ending in 1597 with Aldus Manutius, the Younger) and is associated with the culture of books and with high quality typography.

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. An abridged version appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction (1950) under the title The Fireman.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Mein Kampf (translated by Ralph Manheim) Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Mao (1893-1976). Comrade Mao Tze-tung on imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1958.

Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose (translated by William Weaver). San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1983. Originally published in Italy as Il nome della rosa. Milano: Fabbri-Bompiani, 1980.

Topos uranikos, in Plato's philosophy is the heavenly place from which we originally come and where everything is true. Vilém Flusser wrote that, "The library (transhuman memory) is presented as a space (topos uranikos)" cf. On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise), in Leonardo, 23-4, 1990, p. 398.

Great libraries take shape, under Libraries, in Compton's Encyclopedia (Compton's New Media), January 1, 1994

Noah Webster (1758-1843) wrote The Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 2 volumes, in 1828. He was probably inspired by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who wrote his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755.

Larousse de la Grammaire. Paris: Librairie Larousse. 1983

Dudens Bedeutungswörterbuch: 24,000 Wörter mit ihren Grundbedeutungen (bearbeitet von Paul Grebe, Rudolf Koster, Wolfgang Müller, et al). Zehn Bänden. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut. 1980

Vannevar Bush. As We May Think, in The Atlantic Monthly, A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics. vol. CLXXVI, July-Dec., 1945.

The blurb introducing the article states: "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. VANNEVAR BUSH has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article, he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge," (p. 101). In many ways, this article marks the shift from a literacy-dominated pragmatics to one of many new forms of human practical activity.

Ted Nelson. Replacing the Printed Word: A Complete Literary System, in Information Processing 80. (S.H. Lavington, Editor). Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1980, pp. 1013-1023.

Rassengna dei siti piu' utilizzati, and Bibliotechi virtuali, in Internet e la Biblioteca, http://www.bs.unicatt.it/bibliotecavirtuale.html, 1996.

The Infonautics Corporation maintains the Electric LibraryT on the World Wide Web.

The Sense of Design

The term design (of Latin origin) can be understood as meaning "from the sign," "out of the sign," "on account of the sign," "concerning the sign," "according to the sign," "through the medium of the sign." All these possible understandings point to the semiotic nature of design activity. Balducinni defined design as "a visible demonstration by means of lines of those things which man has first conceived in his mind and pictured in the imagination and which the practised hand can make appear." It is generally agreed that before Balducinni's attempt to define the field, the primary sense of design was drawing. More recently, though, design is understood in a broad sense, from actual design (of artifacts, messages, products) to the conception of events (design of exhibitions, programs, and social, political, and family gatherings).

"Nearly every object we use, most of the clothes we wear and many things we eat have been designed," wrote Adrian Forty in Objects of Desire. Design and Society since 1750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986; paperback edition, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992, p. 6).

International Style: generic name attached to the functionalist, anti-ornamental, and geometric tendency of architecture in the second quarter of the 20th century. In 1923, Henri-Russel Hitchcock and Philip Johnson organized the show entitled International Style-Architecture Since 1922, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among the best known architects who embraced the program are Gerrit T. Rietveldt, Adolf Loos, Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Eero Saalinen.

H. R. Hitchcock and P. Johnson. The International Style. New York: Norton, 1966.

Jay Galbraith. Designing Complex Organizations. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973.

Devoted to the art of drawing, a collection of lectures given at the Fogg Museum of Harvard University in March, 1985, Drawing Defined (Walter Strauss and Tracie Felker, Editors, New York: Abaris Books, 1987) is a good reference for the subject. Richard Kenin's The Art of Drawing: from the Dawn of History to the Era of the Impressionists (New York: Paddington Press, 1974) gives a broad overview of drawing.

Vitruvius Pollio. On Architecture (Edited from the Harleian Manuscripts and translated into English by Frank Granger). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Marcus Cetius Faventius. Vitruvius and Later Roman Building Manuals. London: Cambridge University Press. 1973. This book is a translation of Faventius' compendium of Vitruvius' De Architectura and of Vitruvius' De diversis fabricis architectonicae. Parallel Latin-English texts with translation into the English by Hugh Plommer.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965). One of the most admired and influential architects and city planners whose work combines functionalism and bold sculptural expression.

Since the time design became a field of study, various design styles and philosophies crystallized in acknowledged design schools. Worthy of mention are the Bauhaus, Art Deco, the Ulm School (which continued in the spirit of the Bauhaus), and Post-modernism. A good source for information on the becoming of design is Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design, Harmondsworth, 1960.

The Scholes and Glidden typewriter of 1873, became, with refinements, the Remington model 1 (Remington was originally a gun and rifle manufacturer in the state of New York.) Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 12, 1990. pp. 86-87). See also History of the Typewriter (reprint of the original history of 1923). Sarasota FL: B. R. Swanger,1965.

Peter Carl Fabergé (1846-1920). One of the most renown goldsmiths, jewelers, and decorative artists. After studying in Germany, Italy, France, and England, he settled in St. Petersburg in 1870, where he inherited his father's jewelry business. Famous for his inventiveness in creating decorative objects- flowers, animals, bibelots, and especially the Imperial Easter Egg-Fabergé is for many the ideal of the artist-craftsman.

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). American painter, craftsman, decorator, designer and philanthropist who became one of the most influential personalities in the Art Nouveau style who made significant contributions to glassmaking. Son of Charles Louis Tiffany (1812-1902), the jeweler, he is well known for his significant contributions to glassmaking.

Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873): British politician, poet, and novelist, famous for The Last Days of Pompeii. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 7, 1990. p. 595).

James Gibson. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

In our days, design is focused on major themes: design integrity (promoting exemplary forms of typography and form studies, as with the Basel School and its American counterparts), design function (of concern to industry-oriented schools), computation based on design. Originating from Gibson's studies in the psychology of man-nature relations, the ecological approach in design has its starting point in affordance. Thus many designers reflect concern for an individualized approach to the understanding of affordance possibilities.

Costello, Michie, and Milne. Beyond the Casino Economy. London: Verso, 1989.

D. Hayes. Beyond the Silicon Curtain. Boston: South End Press, 1989.

Mihai Nadin. Interface design: a semiotic paradigm, in Semiotica 69:3/4. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988, pp. 269-302.

-. Computers in design education: a case study, in Visible Language (special issue: Graphic Design- Computer Graphics),vol. XIX, no. 2, Spring 1985, pp. 282-287.

-. Design and design education in the age of ubiquitous computing, in Kunst Design & Co. Wuppertal: Verlag Müller + Busmann, 1994, pp. 230-233.

Kim Henderson. Architectural Innovation: The reconfiguration of existing product technologies, in Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 35, January, 1990.

M. R. Louis and R. I. Sutton. Switching Cognitive Gears: From habits of mind to active thinking. Working Paper, School of Industrial Engineering, Stanford University, 1989.

Patrick Dillon. Multimedia Technology from A-Z. New York: Oryx Press, 1995.

Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). So viel Anfang war noch nie, in Poems. English and German. Selected verses edited, introduced, and translated by Michael Hamburger. London/Dover NH: Anvil Press Poetry, 1986.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Brave, New World. New York: Modern Library, 1946, 1956

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931). Noted for inventing, among other things, the phonograph and the incandescent bulb.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). Inventor of the graphophone. He is credited with inventing the telephone and took out the patent on it.

Otto Nicklaus Otto (1832-1891). Inventor of the four-stroke engine applied in the automotive industry.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Inventor of the electric alternator.

Lev Nikolaievich Tolstoy (1828-1910). War and Peace. Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. This is a translation of Voina i Mir, published in Moscow at the Tipografia T. Ros, 1868.

The Declaration of Independence was approved by a group delegates from the American colonies in July, 1776, with the expressed aim of declaring the thirteen colonies independent of England.

Signed at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after much dispute over representation, the Constitution of the United States of America entered into effect once all thirteen states ratified it. Its major significance derives from its ascertainment of an effective alternative to monarchy. The system of checks and balances contained in the Constitution is meant to preserve any one branch of government from assuming absolute authority.

The Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen was approved by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789 and declares the right of individuals to be represented, equality among citizens, and freedom of religion, speech, and the press. The ideals of the French Revolution inspired many other political movements on the continent.

Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in a year of many popular uprisings all over Europe against conservative monarchies, the Communist Manifesto of 1848 expresses the political program of a revolutionary movement: workers of the world united, leading the way to a classless society. The Romantic impetus of the Manifesto and its new messianic tone was of a different tenor from the attempts to implement the program in Russia and later on Eastern Europe, China, and Korea.

Married...with Children: A situation comedy at the borderline between satire and vulgarity, presenting a couple, Al and Peggy Bundy, and their teenage children, Kelly and Bud, in life-like situations at the fringes of the consumer society.

Born in 1918, Alexander Solzhenitsyn became known as a writer in the context of the post-Stalin era. His books, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), The Oak and the Calf (1980), testify to the many aspects of Stalin's dictatorship. In 1974, after publishing Gulag Archipelago (about life in Soviet prison camps), the writer was exiled from his homeland. He returned to Russia in 1990.

Yevgeni Alexandrovich Yevtushenko: A rhetorical poet in the tradition of Mayakovsky's poetry for the masses. During the communist regime, he took it upon himself to celebrate the official party line, as well as to poeticallly unveil less savory events and abusive practices. His poetry is still the best way to know the poet and the passionate human being. See also Yevtushenko's Reader. Trans. Robin Milner-Gulland. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972.

Dimitri Dimitrevich Shostakovich (1906-1975): For a very long time the official composer of the Soviet Union. After his death, it became clear how deeply critical he was of a reality he seemed to endorse. He created his harmonic idiom by modifying the harmonic system of classical Russian music. See also Gunter Wolter. Dimitri Shostakovitch: eine sowjetische Tragödie. Frankfurt/Main, New York: P. Lang, 1991.

There is no good definition of Samizdat, the illegal publishing movement of the former Soviet Block and China. Nevertheless, the power of the printed word-often primitively presented and always in limited, original editions-remains exemplary testimony to the many forces at work in societies where authoritarian rules are applied to the benefit of the political power in place. From a large number of books on various aspects of Samizdat, the following titles can be referenced:

Samizdat. Register of Documents (English edition). Munich: Samizdat Archive Association. From 1977.

Ferdinand J. M. Feldbrugge. Samizdat and Political Dissent in the Soviet Union. Leyden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1975.

Claude Widor. The Samizdat Press in China's Provinces, 1979-1981. Stanford CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 1987.

Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989). His life can be summed up in John Sweeney's statement: "In Ceausescu's Romania, madness was enthroned, sanity a disease" cf. The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu, London: Hutchinson, 1991, p. 105.

Berlin Wall. Erected in August, 1961, the wall divided East and West Berlin. Over the years, it became the symbol of political oppression. Hundreds of people were killed in their attempt to escape to freedom. The political events in East Europe of Fall, 1989 led to destruction of the wall, a symbolic step in the not so easy process of German reunification. See also: J. Ruhle, G. Holzweissig. 13 August 1961: die Mauer von Berlin (Hrsg von I. Spittman). Köln: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1981.

Red. B. Beier, U. Heckel, G. Richter.9 November 1989: der Tag der Deutschen. Hamburg: Carlsen, 1989.

John Borneman. After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Political unrest, due to intense resentment of the Soviet occupation, and economic hardship led to the creation of an independent labor union, the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) in 1980. In 1981, nationwide strikes brought Poland to a standstill. Martial law was imposed and Solidarity was banned in 1982 after dramatic confrontations at the Gdansk shipyards. Reinstated in 1989, Solidarity became a major political factor in the formation of the new, non-communist government.

Massimo d'Azeglio (1798-1866): I miei ricordi. A cura di Alberto M. Ghisalberti. Torino: Einaudi, 1971.

Germany has a rather tortuous history behind its unification. After the peace of Westphalia (1648) ending the Thirty Years' War, a sharp division between Catholic and Protestant states arose. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (1815), the German Confederation (led by Austria) prepared the path towards future unification. In 1850, the attempt to form a central government was blocked, to be resuscitated after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). On his defeat of Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Prussian Wilhelm I became the first emperor of a unified Germany in 1871, and Bismarck his first chancellor.

Prepared by Garibaldi's conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1860), the creation of the Kingdom of Italy by Victor Emmanuelle (1861) ended with the seizure of Rome (1870) from the control of the Vatican. Italy became a republic in 1946.

The establishments of various Arab states is a testimony to the many forces at work in the Arab world. The victory of the Allies in World War 1 brought about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Modern Turkey was established in 1920, ruled initially by a Sultan, becoming a republic in 1923 under the presidency of Kamal Atatürk. At around the same time, Syria (including Lebanon) fell under the mandate of the French League of Nations. Lebanon became a separate state in 1926. Iraq was established as a kingdom in 1921, falling under the same status as Syria within the British League of Nations. Saudi Arabia was created in 1932, and Jordan became an independent kingdom in 1946. The history of national definition and sovereignty in the Middle East is far from being closed.

For information on the Ustasha organization in Croatia, see Cubric Milan's book Ustasa hrvatska revolucionarna organizacija, Beograd: Idavacka Kuca Kujizevne Novine, 1990.

Chetniks (in Serbia), see A Dictionary of Yugoslav Political and Economic Terminology (cf. Andrlic Vlasta, Rjecnik terminologije jugoslavenskog politicko-ekonomskog sistema, published in 1985, Zagreb: Informator). The reality of the breakdown of the country that used to be Yugoslavia is but one of the testimonies of change that renders words and the literate use of language meaningless.

Omae Kenichi. The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the Interlinked World Economy. New York: Harper Business, 1990.

Isaiah Berlin. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Chapters in the History of Ideas. London: John Murray, 1990.

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). Author of Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie), Trans. David McDuff, Harmondsworth: Viking, 1991.

Toqueville noticed that "...scarcely any question arises in the United States which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate.... As most public men are, or have been, legal practitioners, they introduce the customs and the technicalities of their profession into the affairs of the country.... The language of the law becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue" cf. Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America.

Gary Chapman. Time to Cast Aside Political Apathy in Favor of Creating a New Vision for America, in Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 1996, p. D3.

Edward Brent (writing as Earl Babble). Electronic Communication and Sociology: Looking Backward, Thinking Ahead, in American Sociologist, 27, Apr. 1, 1996, pp. 4-24.

"Theirs not to reason why"

A professional description of the initial strike in the Gulf War gives the following account: "In the blitz that launched Desert Storm, Apache and special forces helicopters first took out two early warning radar stations. This opened a corridor for 22 F-15E aircraft following in single file to hit Scud sites in western Iraq. Also, 12 stealth F-117A fighters, benefiting from Compass Call and EF-111 long-distance jamming, hit targets in Baghdad, including a phone exchange and a center controlling air defenses. Other such underground centers were hit in the south. Tomahawk missiles took out power plants. All this occurred within 20 minutes.

"About 40 minutes into the assault, a second wave of strike 'packages' of other aircraft, including 20 F-117As, attacked. They were guided by AWACs (airborne warning and control systems) crafts, which had been orbiting within a range of Iraqi radar for months. Coalition forces flew 2399 sorties the first day, losing only three planes." cf. John A. Adam, Warfare in the information age, in IEEE Spectrum, September, 1991, p. 27.

One more detail: "The architects of the huge raid are the Central Commander, Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, and Brigadier General C. Glosson, an electrical engineer by training. For months they have overseen complete war games and rehearsed precision bombing in the Arabian expanse," p. 26.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston & London: Shambala Dragon Editions,1988.

"Military action is important to the nation-it is the ground of death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is imperative to examine it" p. 41.

"Speed is the most important in war," Epaminondas of Thebes. Battle of Leuctra, 371 BCE.

Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891). Geschichte des deutsch-französischen Krieges von 1870-1871. The Franco-German War of 1870-1871. Trans. Clara Bell and Henry W. Fischer. New York: H. Fertig, 1988. Reprint of the version published in New York by Harper in 1892.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831).Vom Kriege. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Editors. On War. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Theodor Heuss (1884-1963). Theodor Heuss über Staat und Kirche. Frankfurt/Main: P. Lang, 1986.

C. W. Groetsch. Tartaglia's Inverse Problem in a Resistive Medium, in The American Mathematical Monthly, 103:7, 1996, pp. 546-551.

Roland Barthes. Leçon, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978.

The book is based on the lecture delivered at the inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France on January 7, 1977.

"But Language-the performance of a language system-is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist, for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech."

Alan Mathison Turing (1913-1954). British mathematician, one of the inventors of the programmable computer. During World War 2, Turing worked at the British Foreign Office, helping crack the German secret military code.

William Aspray and Arthur Burks, Editors. Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computer Theory. Cambridge MA: MIT Press; Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1987. Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, Vol. 12.

John Condry, TV: Live from the Battlefield, in IEEE Spectrum, September, 1991.

Regarding the role of imagery and how it effectively replaces the written word, the following example is relevant: An Israeli visiting Arizona talked to his daughter in Tel Aviv while simultaneously watching the news on the Cable News Network (CNN). The reporter stated that a Scud missile had been launched at Tel Aviv, and the father informed the daughter, who sought protection in a shelter. "This is what television has become since its initial adoption 40 years ago...The world is becoming a global village, as educator Marshall McLuhan predicted it would. Imagery is its language" p. 47.

Darrell Bott. Maintaining Language Proficiency, in Military Intelligence, 21, 1995, p. 12.

Charles M. Herzfeld. Information Technology: A Retro- and Pro-spective. Lecture presented at the Battelle Information Technology Summit. Columbus OH, 10 August 1995. Published in Proceedings of the DTIC/Battelle Information Technology SummIT.

Linda Reinberg, In the Field: the Language of the Vietnam War, New York: Facts of File, 1991.

The strategic defense initiative (SDI) was focused upon developing anti-missile and anti-satellite technologies and programs. A multi-layered, multi-technology approach to ballistic missile defense (BMD) meant to intercept offensive nuclear weapons after they had been launched by aggressors. The system consisted of the so-called target acquisition (search and detection of an offensive object); tracking (determination of the trajectory of the offensive object); discrimination (distinguishing of missiles and warheads from decoys or chaff); interception (accurate pointing and firing to ensure destruction of the offensive object). The critical components are computer programs and the lasers designed to focus a beam on the target's surface, heating it to the point of structural failure.

The Pentagon. Critical Technologies Plan, March, 1990.

Restructuring the U.S. Military, a report by a joint task force of the Committee for National Security and The Defense Budget Project. Obviously, the post-Cold War momentum provided many arguments for new plans for a scaled down, but highly technological, defense. The new circumstances created by the end of the Cold War require strategies for conversion of industries that until recently depended entirely upon the needs and desires of the military.

The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the Age of the Web

Elaine Morgan. Falling Apart: The Rise and Decline of Urban Civilisation. London: Souvenir Press, 1976.

David Clark. Urban Decline. London/New York: Routledge, 1989.

Katharine L. Bradbury. Urban Decline and the Future of American Cities. Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1982.

Hegel's theory of state derives from his philosophy of history. Civil society affords individuals opportunities for freedom. But since the state is the final guarantor, it accordingly has priority over the individual; cf. Philosophy of Right, T.B. Knox, Editor. London, 1973.

E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, Editors. Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population, 1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. London: W. Pickering, 1986.

"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio" (p. 9).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Philosopher of the French Enlightenment. In Du Contract Social, he stated the law of inverse proportion between population and political freedom (cf.