Literate Technologies and the Science of Man

Abstract

This paper attempts to map the groundwork for a theory of ‘literate technologies’ – that is, the treatment of reading/writing process that devolve upon a materialist conception of agency. The basic premise is that such sign operations are essentially technical and not founded in either a transcendental ego or genetic faculty – such as, for example, Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’. This approach is only peripherally concerned with so‐called reading machines or artificial intelligence, except to the extent that such machines pose the question of the definability of such terms as ‘intelligence’. The technical status of literacy, moreover, is viewed as being contiguous with the advent of language as such, and not as a ‘technologisation’ of language. By recognising within this status the fundamentally ambivalent, probabilistic character of ‘agency’, it is argued that a condition of literacy may be said to obtain not only in terms of human systems of communication, but in the general terms of a base materiality, wherever ‘dynamic systems’ may arise.

Notes

1. Cf. Derrida (1981).

2. A contemporary example of what could be meant by this is the ‘third hand’ project of performance artist Stelarc. Using a robotic prosthesis connected by electrodes to the musculature of his own body, Stelarc produces simultaneous and synoptic written texts with all three of his ‘hands’: The artificial hand, attached to the right arm as an addition rather than as a prosthetic replacement, is capable of independent motion, being activated by the EMG signals of the abdominal and leg muscles. It has a pinch‐release, grasp‐release, 290 degree wrist rotation (clockwise and anti‐clockwise) and a tactile feedback system for a rudimentary ‘sense of touch’. Whilst the body activates its extra manipulator, the real left arm is remote‐controlled / jerked into action by two muscle stimulators. Electrodes positioned on the flexor muscles and biceps curl the fingers inwards, bend the wrist and thrust the arm upwards (Stelarc, http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/third/third.html Writing with the body in this way can be considered analogous to various sensory ‘prostheses’ that have been developed to assist the visually impaired and which necessitate a form of synaesthetic ‘literacy’ (i.e. of one sensory or experiential mode translating, decoding, interpreting or ‘reading’ data transmitted via a different mode). Essentially Ong’s distinction between orality and literacy is less ‘literalised’ than it is ‘ontological’. In any situation involving technology or ‘communication’, however, we see that the ‘literate function’ underwriting the entire significatory network is precisely not compatible with analogical thought.

3. Cf. Leroi‐Gouhran (1964).

4. A more radical formulation of this argument is given by Derrida (1974, p. 7): ‘In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language’.

5. Cf. Benveniste (1971).

6. One might nevertheless wish to question the motives behind proposing such a broad ‘interpretation’ of literacy – or the situating of literacy as an extension of its discursive practices. Indeed, the word interpretation here would seem to suggest something figurative, metaphorical, implying that the proper sense of the term ‘literacy’ had somehow been translated or distorted. And yet what would it mean to suggest that, to the contrary, this ‘broad interpretation’ is at the same time the most literal one possible? For what could the term literal mean here if not the very contrary of what its etymology would otherwise suggest? Are we not involved, in literality, with the very letter of the letter in its most radical sense – this sense being, we might say, in its very substance, its very materiality – as that which comes before the letter and hence in advance of its apprehension or general inscription? That is to say, of literacy. And this would not be a metaphor, even if it lends itself to a certain ‘metaphorisation’, since there is no question of establishing an analogy or equivalence between two terms – for example, materiality and its representation ‘in language’ (even in the specificity and literality of a term such as literacy). Man’s literate and technical development has, in any case, always assumed the form of a general (social, material) ecology, and it is on this basis that such terms as orality, literacy, writing and technology should be understood – whether that entail the paleotechnics of stone‐age man, or the new literacies which are being created by digital electronic communications and which have irremediably effected the meaning of ‘reading’ and of what is considered text.

7. Cf. Lacan (1977).

8. Jean‐Pierre Vernant, in discussion with Roland Barthes, cited in Vernant 1972, p. 152)

9. In his 1936 essay, ‘Signum et Signatum’, Jakobson (1884, p. 179) proposes that linguistics ‘tells us that energeīa and ergon – in other words, language (or any other social value) as creation and as œuvre – may be intrinsically bound to one another, but that they are by no means identical; nor can one aspect be mechanically derived from the other’. Indeed, we would argue that it is rather the non‐identicality of ergon and energeīa that situates the recursive mechanism by which autopoiesis avails itself: i.e. as the place of a generalised technē of inscription. In any case, the movement of this technē should not be confused with one of derivation.

10. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.4.1040a18. Because the ergon is said to escape technē, the latter is considered to be in a certain sense similar to tuchē, the accidental. See Heidegger (2003, p. 31): ‘The essential characteristic of the accidental’, Heidegger notes, ‘is that what emerges from it is out of its hands’ (emphasis added).

11. Cf. Chomsky (1969).

12. The logic of this argument, however, would require a comparable evolutionary model of the brains for starlings, for example, whose capacity for combining and transmitting complex syntactical (melodic) structures has been widely attested.

13. Bernard Stiegler, ‘The Discrete Image’, in Derrida & Stiegler (2002, p. 161). See also Stiegler (1998).

14. Cf., for example, Fauconnier (1994).

15. On transductive relations see also Simondon (1958).

16. Cf. Canguilhem (1952).