Part 9 (2/2)

Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

The history of culture has recorded nu, probably, in Marshall McLuhan's philosophy (1964): alphabetic cultures have unifor an excessive rationalism, nationalism, and individualism Here we have, in a succinct list, the indict on E M

Forster's A Passage to India, McLuhan re meant uniform and continuous and sequential In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalise the co, with its own rationality, is a shortcoument

The consequences of these attacks-as ed froained-have nevertheless not been the abate or of its influence In the same vein, the need to proceed to an oral-visual culture has been idealistically suggested (Barthes'

well known plea of 1970 can be cited)

There is no doubt that all the plans devised by architects, artisans, and designers of artifacts belong to a praxis uniting oral (instructions to those transposing the plan into a product) and visual cultures Many such plans, e as those we read in manuscripts and later in books, vanished Some of the artifacts they created did withstand the test of time Even if the domination of the written word somehow resulted in a relatively loareness of the role drawings played over tie transs are holistic units of a complexity difficult to co conferred by the intereneralization, or re-individualization: What is it for the individual reading and understanding it? It inversely travels the route that led fro, from the concrete to the abstract, froe At any given tih we have, on the one hand, the finite reality of signs (alphabet, words, idiomatic expressions) and, on the other, the practically infinite reality ee sequences or ideas expressed In view of this, the question arises regarding the source of ideas and the relation between signs (words, in particular) and their assignedthe language Meaning is conjured in Western culture through additiveis based on subtractive ht

Alphabetic writing, although more siraphic writing The experience from which it results is one of abstraction Henceforth, it subjects the readers of the alphabetic text to the task of filling the enorn from its referent with their own experience The assumption of the literate practical experience is that literacy can substitute for the reference through history or culture Readers of ideographic texts have the advantage of the concreteness of the representation Even if Chinese characters stand for specific Chinese words, as John DeFrancis convincingly showed, the experience of that writing system remains different frorates its own history as the summary of the practical activity in which it was constituted, reading in a language of a foreign experience

Research undertaken in the last 15 years shows that at a certain stage, aphasia brings on a regression froraphic, iconic reading Letters lose their linguistic identity The aphasic reader sees only lines, intersections, and shapes Ideas expressed in writing crus shaken by an earthquake What is still perceived is the sis The decline from the abstract to the concrete can be seen as a socio-cultural accident taking place against the background of a natural (biological) accident

In our days we encounter sy to a sort of collective aphasia in reverse

Indeed, writing is deconstructed and becoe, and defying literacy For a while, graffiti was criminalized Later on it was fra the otiates What we probably refused to see is how deep the literacy of graffiti goes, where its roots are, hoide the extensions, and how

After all, it was not only in the New York subway that trains were literally turned intobooks, issued as often as authority was circuraffiti because it obliterated legitimate communication and a sense of neatness and order that literacy continuously reinforced But raffiti Gang rituals and fights are a continuation of these Messages exchanged on the data highways-from e-mail to Web communication-often display the same characteristics of aphasia Concreteness is obsessively pursued

:) (the smiley) renders expressions of pleasure useless, while (: (the grince) warns of being flae of infores in the cognitive condition of the people involved in its practical experiences Neither opportunistic excite experience can replace the need to understand what makes it necessary and how to best benefit froes andindividuals escaping any for practical experiences of networking, literacy is challenged by transitory, partial literacies Literacy is exposed in its infatuation and e theIt is often ridiculed for not being appropriate to the new circumstances of the practical and spiritual experience of a hurown all its clothes, toys, books, stories, tools, and even conflicts

A legitimate follow-up question is whether the literate experience of the word contributes to its progressive lack of detere of context affects the interpretation, ie, the seue Probably both factors play a role in the process On the one hand, literacy progressively exhausts its potential On the other, new contexts make it simultaneously less suited as the donification of ideas For instance, the establish of de contexts, such as ar it In the last 10 years we have experienced many such conflicts, but ere not prepared to see theher levels of efficiency according to the new scale that humankind has reached

There is also the atteeneralities of all deious or emancipated) can serve as exas, horoscopes, and tarot cards, revived in recent years against the background of illiteracy None of these is new, but the relative flourishi+ng of the uity, reflective of a deviant functioning of language, is

Together with illiteracy, they are other symatics discussed in this book

These and other exaes in the functions of language It is known that the oldest preserved cave drawings are ns) of an oral context rather than representations of hunting scenes (even though they are often interpreted as such) They testifyis about

The decadent literacy of es does the same It speaks about their writers y, or anthropology And the increased oral and visual coy, defines the post-literate condition of the hu corresponds to the shi+ft fro people and their environment It takes place in the context of the evolution from the syncretic to the analytic The transition fromatics of non-linear relations, and results from the evolution from analytic to synthetic These affirmations, at least as far as the civilization of literacy is concerned, apply to the universe of European cultures and their later extensions The cultures of the Far East are characterized by language's tendency to present, not to explain The analytical structure of logical thought (which will be discussed in another chapter) is actually formed in the sentence structure of speech, which is fundamentally different in the two culturesconfers on the Chinese language, for example, a continuous state of birth (speech in the act) The preeminence of the act in Oriental culture is reflected by the central position the verb occupies Concentration around the verb guides thought towards the relationshi+p between condition and conditioned

The experience of logic characteristic of European cultures (under the distinctive mark of classical Greek philosophy) shows that theis the noun It is freer than the verb (tied to the for identity, invariance, and the universal

The logic founded on this premise is oriented toward the search for unity between species and genus European writing and Oriental ideographic writing have each participated in this process of defining logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics

Fro the history of knowledge and history per se, we can say that the European Occident achieved the e and world control, while the Orient achieved self-knowledge and self-control It would seeical, and political i these s However, this would ies in the status of literacy in both cultures This is exactly the direction of the changes itness, as languages function towards convergence in the two cultures e between cultures; it also sets boundaries a them This holds true for both Western and Far Eastern (and any other) civilization japan, for instance, despite the spectacular effort of assiies, maintains inside its national boundaries a framework quite well suited to its traditional literacy Outside, it assimilates other literacies In different ways, this holds true for China It is willing to build its internal network (Intranet) without connecting it to the all-encoh which we experience soanization of hierarchy, whichthe West why japan succeeds better in economic terms, is centered around the unity sematic framework of a literacy different froic and ethics pertinent to the distinction mentioned evolved The moral basis of the precedence of the senior over the junior is pragmatic in nature The Chinese formula (cho-jo-no-jo) results froe but also in the systeed is both experience and perforories of kyu, referring to proficiency, and dau, referring to curaphy, wrestling (suement (ikebana), as well as to social rank In the dynaes, such systee functions, we notice that national language can serve for insulation, while adopted language-English, in particular-can serve as a bridge to the rest of the world Nevertheless, japanese society, like all contemporary societies, is lobality, and with the need to constitute appropriate nification pertinent to the global world While japan is an exaidly hierarchic, discri circumstances for human practical experiences of self-constitution as japanese, and as rated world coe within its hoe in countries such as China, Korea, and Indonesia, and in the Arab nations As a result, we experience changes in the nature of the relations between the cultures of the Far East, Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the West The process expands, probably ht expect, to the African and South American continents

Global econo nations and cultures, and these relations need to correspond to the dynaainst the background of the new scale of hue expressed in the multiculturalism trend of our days will find in the past its uments The point is proven by the naive h the activists of the movement Multiculturalism corresponds to the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy: fro mode to plurality, not limited to race, lifestyle, or cultures Whoever sees ender (against the background of history), will not be able to design a course of action to best serve those whose different condition is now acknowledged A different condition results in different abilities, and thus different ways of projecting one's identity in the practical experience of self-constitution The past is irrelevant; eic