Part 15 (1/2)

Markets abstract individual contributions to a product In the first place, language itself is reified and consuy, doubts, tie-into the coration leads to conditions in which high efficiency-the most possible at the lowest price-becomes a criterion for survival The consequence is that human individuality is absorbed in the product People literally put their lives, and everything pertaining to thes, culture, desires-in the outcome of their practical experiences This absorption of the hu into the product takes place at different levels In the second place, the individual constituted in work is also reified and consumed: the product contains a portion of the limited duration of the lives of those who processed it

Each for entities

As one fore that es of coordination corresponding to hunting, or those of incipient agriculture, made way for subsequent practical experience of self-constitution in language This applies to any and all forricultural, industrial, artistic, or ideological products The enetics and evolutionary models can be applied We can describe the evolution of work in y, but ould still not capture the active role of sign processes Moreover, human reproduction, between its sexual and its cultural forh which human self-constitution takes place

To illustrate how language is consumed, let us shortly examine what happens in the e call education In our day, the need for continual training increases dram of a once-for-life education is over, as much as literacy is over

Shorter production cycles require changes of tools and the pertinent training A career for life, possible while the linear progress of technology required only e, is an ideal of the past Efficiency requireies that are less costly and less perh literacy

These strategies produce educated operators as training itself beco companies whose list of clients includes fast food chains, nuclear energy producers, frozen storage facilities, the US Congress, and computer operations The market is the place where products are transacted and where the language of advertising, design, and public relations is consu, too, focused more and more on non-literate means of communication, is consumed

Literacy and the machine

Man built machines which ied the nature of work The skills needed to master such machines were quite different froeneration to generation, and less permanent The Industrial Revolution h to allow for the maintenance of both machines and workers It also made possible the improvement of machines and required better qualified operators, ere educated to extract the maximum from the means of production entrusted to therative mechanisms that humans have developed in the processes of labor division, natural language has lost, and keeps losing, importance in the population's practical experience The lower quality of writing, reading, and verbal expression, as they apply to self-constitution through work and social life, is symatic framework Literacy-based means of expression and communication are substituted, not just complemented, by other forms of expression and communication Or they are reduced to a stereotyped repertory that is easy to mechanize, to auto an auto a sophisticateda real overview of it, and many similar functions ultimately means to be part of a situation in which the subject's coressively reduced to fit the task Before being rationalized away, it is stereotyped The language involved, in addition to that of engineering, is continuously co to the reduced a to situations that change continuously and very fast

Today, a hly sophisticated es The words still used can be recorded and associated with the ie Or the whole manual can become a videotape, laser disk, or CD-ROM, even network-distributed applications, to be called upon when necessary The es (on the screen) appropriate to thesynthesized speech for short utterances, and for canned dialogues Here are sons dollar bills that will tell the user their denomination; cars are already equipped with ot to lock the door or fasten our seat belt; greeting cards contain voice es (and in the future they will probably contain aniets a victory of the ratuitous es are used or not, reflects an underlying structure better adapted to the coraphic dollar bill that declines its naht even become useless when transactions becoht end up in aour automobiles is in place, and all we have to do is to punch in a destination and some route expectations (”I want to take the scenic route”) Moreover, the supertech car itself ht join its precursors in the y, so evident on the rush-hour clogged highways, is replaced byis a tiht be The speaking greeting card ra the shot of the addressee (likes rap, wears artificial flowers, is divorced, lives in Bexley, Ohio), custoe delivered with the individualized electronic newspaper when the coffee is ready Atoday's still primitive applications in the networked world, could already do this

Anticipation aside, we notice that work involves means of production that are more and more sophisticated Nevertheless, the market of human work is at a relatively low level of literacy because hu do not need to be literate for most types of work One reason for this is that the new e needed to fulfill their tasks The machines have become more efficient than humans The university systeraduates for the world of work obeys the sah efficiency as any other human practical experience Universities beco facilities for specific vocations, instead of carrying on their original goal of giving individuals a universal education in the do the literacy level does not reflect the longing of humanists but the actual situation in the manpower market What we encounter is the structurally deterer, at least in its literate for collective experience, nor the universal means of education For instance, in all its aspects-work, market, education, social life-the practical experience of human self-constitution relies less on literacy and es is frequently ht suspect this is only a way of speaking The actual situation is quite different Pictographic es are used whenever a certain norm or rule has to be observed This is not a question of transcending various national languages (as in airports or Olynals, or in transactions pertinent to international trade), but a way of living and functioning The visual dominates co-tiraphical, and historical contexts, becauous and require too much educational overhead for successful communication Coher than the one needed for producing, perceiving, and observing ies a positivist attitude is embodied, and a sense of relativity is introduced

Avoiding sequential reading, tiidity of the rules of literacy, the use of ies reflects the drive for efficiency as this results fro The change from literacy-oriented to visually-oriented culture is not the result of ists would like us to believe Actually, the opposite is true It is the result of fundaoods, within the new pragmatic framework that determined the need for these media in the first place, and afterwards made possible their production, dissemination, and their continuous diversification

The change under discussion here is very cohly mediative means of mass communication (television, co as instrulobal econoht to expression in this es, and from direct to indirect, ocentrism (a structural characteristic of cultures based on literacy) and the logic attached to it We participate in the process of establishi+ng many centers of ie as we know it These can be found in subculture, but also within the entrenched culture One example is the proliferation of electronic cafs, where clients sipping their coffee on the West Coast can carry on a dialogue with a friend in Barcelona; or contact a japanese journalist flying in one of the Soviet space ota; or play chess with one of the miracle sisters froenerically as cyberspace

The disposable hu

While it is true that just as h a finite number of points, consistent observations can be subsu the role and status of literacy losses on their results, but they cannot escape confire ultimately concerns the identity humans acquire in illiterate experiences of self-constitution

Progressively abandoning reading and writing and replacing them with other forms of communication and reception, hue: from centralization to decentralization; from a centripetal model of existence and activity, with the traditional systeious, aesthetic, al model; and from a monolithic to a pluralistic model Paradoxically, the loss of the center also s lose their central role and referential value This results in a dramatic situation: When human creativity coy, food supply, water, etc), either by producing substitutes or by sti efficient forms of their use, the human itself becomes a disposable commodity, more so the more limited its practical self-constitution is

Within the prag literacy, ed, the human operator did not have to be replaced A basic set of skills sufficed for lifelong activity Engineering was concerned with artifacts as long lasting as life The pragressively shorter cycles, made the human more easily replaceable At the new scale of hu cos decreases in value: in its market value, and in its spiritual and real value The sanctity of life gives way to the intricate technology of life maintenance, to theshops In the stock market of spare parts, a kidney or a heart, mechanical or natural, is listed alh's paintings, CD players, and nuclear headscrews They are quoted and transacted as cohly specialized work, compensated at the level of professional football or basketball

Projected into and a to make them project a morality of the disposable that affects their own condition and, finally, the dissolution of their values As a result of high levels of work efficiency, there are enough resources to feed and house huh to support practical experiences that redeenity of human existence Within a literate discourse, with an ey of perood headlines; but since it does not affect the structural conditions conducive to this ets lost in thethe decline of literacy

The broader picture to which these reflections belong includes, of course, the thee If basic skills, as defined by Harvard professor and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Lester Thurow, and ful in the fast-changing world of work, it is easy to understand why little weight can be attached to one or another individual Under the guise of basic skills, young and less than young workers receive an education in reading and writing that has nothing to do with the eent practical experiences of ever shorter cycles Companies in search of cheap labor have discovered the USA, or at least some parts of it, and achieve here efficiencies that at homatics, are not attainable

Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, and many japanese companies train their labor force in South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other states The usefulness of the people these companies train is almost equal to that of the machine, unless the workers are replaced by autoical cycle and the human cycle are so closely interwoven that one can predicate the hybrid nature of technology today: machines with a live co to notice how progressively er serve us, but hoe serve theh quality desktop publishi+ng, to process data for financial transactions, to visualize scientific phenomena, such raful output results In the case in which the ood and bad typography, for exae, based on intangible factors such as style or taste

Scale of work, scale of language

Within each frariculture, pre-industrial, industrial, or post- industrial practical experiences, continuity of means and methods and of semiotic processes can be easily established What shouldthrough such a discontinuity, and the opposition between the civilization of literacy and the civilization of illiteracy is suggestive of this Evidently, within the new practical experiences through which our own identity is constituted, this is reflected in fast dynaht Many innovative ideas become work almost as quickly, but this work has a different condition Discontinuity goes beyond analogy and statistical inferences It e which we see ee

One of the major hypotheses of this book is that discontinuities, also described in dynaes Threshold values n processes As we have seen, practical experiences through which humans continuously ascertain their reality are affected by the scale at which they take place Immediate tasks, such as those characteristic of direct forms of work, do not require a division into smaller tasks, a decomposition into smaller actions The more complex the task, the more obvious the need to divide it But it is not until the scale characteristic of our age is reached that decomposition becomes as critical as it now is In industrial society, and in every civilization prior to it, the relation between the whole (task, goal, plan) and the parts (subtasks, partial goals, successive plans) is within the range of the human's ability to handle it Labor division is a powerful y applied to tasks of growing coeneration of choices, and the ability to compensate for the limited nature of resources as these affect the equation of population growth, integrate this rule of decomposition

Literacy, itself a practical experience of not negligible co as the depth of the division into srative travail do not go beyond litercy's own complexity When this happens, it is obvious that even ifvery deep hierarchies in order to allow for re-integration of the parts in the desired whole, the o beyond the coh very powerful in h which language attains its optimal operational power) appears flat Actually, not only literacy appears flat, but even the ence

Distinctions that result froht about by the requirenitude exponentially higher than any experience an individual can have, can no longer be grasped by single minds Since the condition of the mind depends on interaction with other minds within practical experiences of self-constitution, it results that means of interaction different from those appropriate to sequentiality, linearity, and dualise is not a continuation of a previous stage It is even less a result of an increression The wheel, once upon a ti with a host of wheel-based ression So did the lever, and probably alphabetic writing, and the number systeh coiven scale of hues, we have to deal with discontinuity and avoid e of the past