The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 20

Among the many networks through which the foundation of our existence is continuously altered, cable TV plays a distinct role. Many consider it more important than libraries, probably for the wrong reasons. Whether living in thickly populated urban cl.u.s.ters or in remote locations, people are physically connected through multi- channeled communication networks, and even through interactive media. Cable TV is often seen only as another entry to our home for downloading cla.s.sical programs as well as p.o.r.nography and superst.i.tion. The full utilization of the electronic avenue as a multi-lane, bi-directional highway through which we can be receivers of what we want to accept, and senders of visual messages to whomever is interested and willing to interact with these messages, is still more a goal than a reality. With computer- supported visual communication integrating digital television, we will dispose of the entire infrastructure for a visually dominated civilization. In the age of Internet, wired or wireless networks become part of the artificial nervous system of advanced societies. Whether in its modem-based variant, or through other advanced schemes for transporting digital information and supporting interaction, the cable system already contributes to the transformation of the nature of many human practical experiences. These can be experiences of entertainment, but also of learning, teaching, even work.

There is a negative side to all this development, and a need to face consequences that over time can acc.u.mulate beyond what we already know and understand. Children growing up with TV miss the experience of movement. Jaron Lanier discussed the "famous childhood zombiehood," an expression of staring into nothing, a limited ability to see beyond a television image, the desire for instant gratification, and a lack of basic common sense appreciation for doing work in order to achieve satisfaction.

Games developed around video technology train children to behave like laboratory rats that learn a maze by rote. They grow up accepting the politics of telegenic compet.i.tion, a poor subst.i.tute for competence and commitment. Their vote is focused on brands, regardless of whether they regard political choices or cereals. Addressed en ma.s.se, such viewers gel in the ma.s.s image of polls that rapidly succeed one another. That technology makes possible alternatives to literacy embodied in the visual is unquestionable. To what extent these alternatives carry with them previous determinations and constraints, or they correspond to a new stage in human civilization, is the crux of the matter. The degree of necessity and thus the efficiency of any new form of visual expression, communication, or interaction can be ascertained only in how individuals const.i.tute themselves through practical activities coherently integrating the visual.

There is no higher form of empowerment than in the fulfillment of our individual possibilities. Telegenic or not, a president or a TV star has little, if any, impact on our fulfillment in the interconnected world of our time.

Television implies a great deal of language, but such language frees the audience from the requirement of literacy. You do not need to know how to write or read to watch TV; you need to be in command of a limited part of spoken language in order to understand a TV show, even to actively partic.i.p.ate in it-from going on a game show to using cable networks, videotex, or interactive programs, exploring the Internet, or setting up a presence on the network.

Growing up with TV results in stereotypes of language and att.i.tudes representing a background of shared expressions, gestures, and values. To see in these only the negative, the low end, is easier than to acknowledge that previous backgrounds, const.i.tuted on the underlying structure of literacy, have become untenable under the new pragmatic circ.u.mstances. Due to its characteristics, television belongs to the framework of rapid change typical of the dynamics of needs and expectations within the new scale of humankind. There are many varied implications to this: it makes each of us more pa.s.sive, more and more subject to manipulations (economic, political, religious), robbing (or freeing) us from the satisfaction of a more personal relation (to others, art, literature, etc.). n.o.body should underestimate any of these and many other factors discussed by media ecologists and sociologists. But to stubbornly, and quite myopically, consider TV only from the perspective and expectations of literacy is presumptuous. We have to understand the structural changes that made TV and video possible. Moreover, we have to consider the changes they, in turn, brought about. Otherwise we will miss the opportunities opened by the practical experience of understanding the new choices presented to us, and even the new possibilities opened. There is so much more after TV, even on 500 channels and after video-on-demand!

Language is not an absolute democratic medium; literacy, with intrinsic elitist characteristics, even less. Although it was used to ascertain principles of democracy, literacy ended up, again and again, betraying them. Because they are closer to things and actions, and because they require a relatively smaller background of shared knowledge, images are more accessible, although less challenging. But where words and text can obscure the meaning of a message, images can be immediately related to what they refer to. There are more built-in checks in the visual than in the verbal, although the deceptive power of an image can be exploited probably much more than the power of the word. Such, and many other considerations are useful, since the transfer of social and political functions from literacy (books and newspapers, political manifestos, ceremonies and rituals based on writing and reading) to the visual, especially television, requires that we understand the consequences of this transfer. But it is not television that keeps voters away from exercising the right to elect their representatives in the civilization of illiteracy, and not the visual that makes us elect actors, lawyers, peanut farmers, or successful oilmen to the highest (and least useful) posts in the government.

Conditions that require the mult.i.tude of languages that we use, the layers of mediation, the tendency to decentralization, to name a few, resulted in the increased influence of the visual, as well as in some of the choices mentioned so far.

High definition television (HDTV) helps us distinguish some characteristics of the entire development under discussion-for instance, how the function of integration is carried out.

Integration through the intermediary of literacy required shared knowledge, and in particular, knowledge of writing and reading.

Integration through the intermediary of modern image-producing technology, especially television and computer-aided visual communication, means access to and sharing of information.

Television has made countries which are so different in their ident.i.ty, history, and culture (as we know the countries of the world to be) seem sometimes so similar that one has to ask how this uniformity came about. Some will point to the influence of the market process- advertis.e.m.e.nts look much the same all over the world. Others may note the influence of technology-an electronic eye open on the world that renders uniform everything within its range. The new dynamics of human interaction, required by our striving for higher efficiency appropriate to the scale of humankind, probably explains the process better. The similarity is determined by the mechanism we use to achieve this higher efficiency, i.e., progressively deeper labor division, increased mediation, and the need for alternative mechanisms for human integration, that is reflected in TV images. This similarity makes up the substratum of TV images, as well as the substratum of fas.h.i.+on trends, new rituals, and new values, as transitory as all these prove to be.

Literacy and television are not reciprocally exclusive. If this were not the case, the solution to the lower levels of literacy would be at hand. Nevertheless, all those who hoped to increase the quality of literacy by using television had to accept that this was a goal for which the means are not appropriate.

Language stabilizes, induces uniformity, depersonalizes; television keeps up with change, allows and invites diversity, makes possible personalized interaction among those connected through a TV chain of cameras and receivers. Literacy is a medium of tedious elaboration and inertia. TV is spontaneous and instantaneous. Moreover, it also supports forms of scientific activity for which language is not at all suited. We cannot send language to look at what our eyes do not see directly, or see only through some instruments. We cannot antic.i.p.ate, in language, processes which, once made possible on a television screen, make future human experience conceivable. I know that in these last lines I started crossing the border between television and digital image processing, but this is no accident.

Indeed, human experience with television, in its various forms and applications, although not at all closed, made necessary the next step towards a language of images which can take advantage of computer technology and of networking.

With the advent of HDTV, television achieves a quality that makes it appropriate for integration in many practical experiences.

Design (of clothes, furniture, new products) can result from a collaborative effort of people working at different sites, and in the manufacture of their design during a live session.

Modifications are almost instantaneously integrated in the sample. The product can be actually tested, and decisions leading to production made. Communication at such levels of effectiveness is actually integrated in the creative and productive effort. The language is that of the product, a visual reality in progress. The results are design and production cycles much shorter than literacy-based communication can support.

HDTV is television brought to a level of efficiency that only digital formats make possible. The reception of digital television opens the possibility to proceed from each and every image considered appropriate to storing, manipulating, and integrating it in a new context. Digital television reinstates activity, and is subject to creative programming and interactivity. The individual can make up a new universe through the effort of understanding and creative planning. It is quite possible that alternative forms of communication, much richer than those in use today, will emerge from practical experiences of human self-const.i.tution in this new realm. That in ten years all our TV sets, if the TV set remains a distinct receiver, will be digital says much less than the endless creative ideas emerging around the reality of digital television.

Visualization

Whenever people using language try to convince their partner in dialogue, or even themselves, that they understood a description, a concept, a proof, and answer by using the colloquial "I see," they actually express the practical experience of seeing through language. They are overcoming the limitations of the abstract system of phonetic language and returning to the concreteness of seeing the image. Way of speaking equals way of doing-this sums up one of the many premises of this book. We extract information about things and actions from their images. When no image is possible-what does a thought look like, or what is the image of right, of wrong, of ideal?-language supports us in our theoretic experiences, or in the attempt to make the abstract concrete. Language is rather effective in helping us identify kinds of thoughts, in implementing social rules that encode prescriptions for distinguis.h.i.+ng between right and wrong, for embodying the just in the inst.i.tution of justice, and ideals in values. But the experience of language can also be an experience of images.

Once we reach the moment when we can embody the abstract in a concrete theory, in action, in new objects, in inst.i.tutions, and in choices, and once we are able to form an image of these, share the image, make it part of the visual world we live in, and use it further for many practical or intellectual purposes, we expand the literate experience in new experiences. So it seems that we tend to visualize everything. I would go so far as to say that we not only visualize everything, but also listen to sounds of everything, experience their smell, touch, and taste, and recreate the abstract in the concreteness of our perceptions. The domination of language and the ideal of literacy, which instills this domination as a rule, was and still is seen as the domination of rationality, as though to be literate equals being rational, volens nolens. In fact, the rationality a.s.sociated with language, and expressed with its help, is only a small part of the potential human rationality.

The measure (ratio) we project in our objectification can as well be a measure related to our perceptive system. It is quite plausible to suspect that some of the negative effects of our literate rationality could have been avoided had we been able to simultaneously project our other dimensions in whatever we did.

The s.h.i.+ft from a literacy-dominated civilization to the relative domination of the visual takes place under the influence of new tools, further mediations, and integration mechanisms required by self-const.i.tutive practical experiences at the new human scale. The tools we need should allow us to continue exploring horizons at which literacy ceases to be effective, or even significant. The mediations required correspond to complexities for which new languages are structurally more adequate. The necessary integration is only partially achievable through literate means since many people active in the humanities and the sciences gave up the obsession of final explanations and accepted the model of infinite processes.

Images, among other sign systems, are structurally better suited for a pragmatic framework marked by continuous multiplication of choices, high efficiency, and distributed human experience. But in order to use images, the human being had to put in place a conceptual context that could support extended visual praxis.

When the digital computer was invented, none of those who made it a reality knew that it would contribute to more than the mechanization of number crunching. The visionary dimension of the digital computer is not in the technology, but in the concept of a universal language, a characteristica universalis, or lingua Adamica, as Leibniz conceived it.

This is not the place to rewrite the history of the computer or the history of the languages that computers process. But the subject of visualization-presented here from the perspective of the s.h.i.+ft from literacy to the visual-requires at least some explanation of the relation between the visual and the human use of computers. The binary number system, which Leibniz called Arithmetica Binaria (according to a ma.n.u.script fragment dated March 15, 1679), was not meant to be the definitive alphabet, with only two letters, but the basis for a universal language, in which the limitations of natural language are overcome. Leibniz tried hard to make this language utilizable in all domains of human activity, in encoding laws, scientific results, music. I think that the most intriguing aspect, which has been ignored for centuries, was his attempt to visualize events of abstract nature with the help of the two symbols of his alphabet. In a letter to Herzog Rudolph August von Braunschweig (January 2, 1697), Leibniz described his project for a medal depicting the Creation (Imago Creationis). In this letter, he actually introduced digital calculus. Around 1714, he wrote two letters to Nicolas de Remond concerning Chinese philosophy. It is useful to mention these here because of the binary number representation of some of the most intriguing concepts of the Ih-King. Through these letters, we are in the realm of the visual, and in front of pages in which, probably for the first time, translations from ideographic to the sequential, and finally to the digital, were performed. It took almost 300 years before hackers, trying to see if they could use the digital for music notation, discovered that images can be described in a binary system.

This long historic parenthesis is justified by two thoughts.

First, it was not the technology that made us aware of images, or even opened access to their digital processing, but intellectual praxis, motivated by its own need for efficiency.

Second, visualization is not a matter of ill.u.s.trating words, concepts, or intuitions. It is the attempt to create tools for generating images related to information and its use. A text on a computer screen is, in fact, an image, a visualization of the language generated not by a human hand in control of a quill, a piece of lead or graphite, a pencil or a pen. The computer does not know language. It translates our alphabet into its own alphabet, and then, after processing, it translates it back into ours. Displayed in those stored images which, if in lead, would const.i.tute the contents of the lower and upper cases of the drawers in each typography shop, this literacy is subject to automation.

When we write, we visualize, making our language visible on paper. When we draw, we make our plans for new artifacts visible. The mediation introduced by the computer use does not affect the condition of language as long as the computer is only the pen, keyboard, or typewriter. But once we encode language rules (such as spelling, case agreement, and so on), once we store our vocabulary and our grammar, and mimic human use of language, what is written is only partially the result of the literacy of the writer. The visualization of text is the starting point towards automatic creation of other texts. It also leads to establis.h.i.+ng relations between language and non-language sign systems. Today, we dispose of means for electronically a.s.sociating images and texts, for cross-referencing images and texts, and for rapidly diagramming texts. We can, and indeed do, print electronic journals, which are refereed on the network. Nothing prevents such journals from inserting images, animation and sounds, or for facilitating on-line reactions to the hypotheses and scientific data presented. That such publications need a shorter time to reach their public goes without saying. The Internet thus became the new medium of publication, and the computer its printing press-a printing press of a totally new condition. Individuals const.i.tuting their ident.i.ty on the Internet have access to resources which until recently were available only to those who owned presses, or gained access to them by virtue of their privileged position in society.

The visual component of computer processing, i.e., the graphics, relies on the same language of zeros and ones through which the entire computer processing takes place. As a result of this common alphabet and grammar (Boolean logic and its new extensions), we can consider language (image translations, or number-image relations such as diagrams, charts, and the like), and also more abstract relations. Creating the means to overcome the limitations of literacy has dominated scientific work. The new means for information processing allow us to replace the routine of phenomenological observation with processing of diverse languages designed especially to help us create new theories of very complex and dynamic phenomena.

The s.h.i.+ft to the visual follows the need to change the accent from quant.i.tative evaluations and language inferences based on them, to qualitative evaluations, and images expressing such evaluations at some significant moments of the process in which we are involved. Let us mention some of these processes. In medicine, or in the research for syntheses of new substances, and in s.p.a.ce research, words have proven to be not only misleading, but also inefficient in many respects. New visualization techniques, such as those based on molecular resonance, freed the praxis of medicine from the limitations of word descriptions. Patients explain what they feel; physicians try to match such descriptions to typologies of disease based on data resulting from the most recent data. When this process is networked, the most qualified physician can be consulted. When experimental data and theoretic models are joined, the result is visualized and the information exchanged via high-speed broadband digital networks.

Based on similar visualization techniques, we acquire better access to sources of data regarding the past, as well as to information vital for carrying through projects oriented towards the future. Computed tomography, for instance, visualized the internal structure of Egyptian mummies. Three-dimensional images of the whole body were created without violating the casings and wrappings that cover the remnants. The internal body structure was visualized by using a simulation system similar to those utilized in non-intrusive surgery.

The design and production of new materials, s.p.a.ce research, and nano- engineering have already benefited from replacing the a.n.a.lytical perspective ingrained in literacy-based methods with visual means for synthesis. It is possible to visualize molecular structures and simulate interactions of molecules in order to see how medicine affects the cells treated, the dynamics of mixing, chemical and biochemical reactions. It is also possible to simulate forces involved in the so-called docking of molecules in virtual s.p.a.ce. No literacy-based description can subst.i.tute for flight simulators, or for visualization of data from radio astronomy, for large areas of genetics and physics.

Not the last among examples to be given is the still controversial field of artificial intelligence, seduced with emulating behaviors usually a.s.sociated with human intelligence in action. But it should not surprise anybody that while the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy requires freedom from literacy, people will continue to preserve values and concepts they are used to, or which are appropriate to specific knowledge areas. Paradoxically, artificial intelligence is, in part, doing exactly this.

When people grow up with images the same way prior generations were subjected to literacy, the relation to images changes. The technology for visualization, although sometimes still based on language models, makes interactivity possible in ways language could not. But it is not only the technology of visualization applied within science and engineering that marks the new development. Visualization, in its various forms and functions, supports the almost instantaneous interaction between us and our various machines, and among people sharing the same natural environment, or separated in s.p.a.ce and time. It const.i.tutes an alternative medium for thinking and creativity, as it did all along the history of crafts, design, and engineering. It is also a medium for understanding our environment, and the mult.i.tude of changes caused by practical experience involving the life support system. Through visualization, people can experience dimensions of s.p.a.ce beyond their direct perception, they can consider the behavior of objects in such s.p.a.ces, and can also expand the realm of artistic creativity.

The print media, as an overlapping practical experience uniting literacy and the power of sight, are more visual today than at any previous time. We are no longer subjected-sometimes with good reason, other times for dubious motives-to the sequentiality of literacy-dominated modes of communication. An entire shared visual language is projected upon us in the form of comic strips, advertis.e.m.e.nts, weather maps, economic reports, and other pictorial representations. Some of these representations are still printed on paper. Others are displayed through the more dynamic forms at public information kiosks, or through interactive means of information dissemination, such as computer-supported networks and non-linear search environments, which Ted Nelson antic.i.p.ated back in 1965. The World Wide Web embodies many of his ideas, as well as ideas of a number of other visionaries.

Parallel to these developments, we are becoming more and more aware of the possibilities of using images in human activities where they played a reduced role within literacy-civic action, political debate, legal argumentation. Lawyers already integrate visual testimony in their cases. Juries can see for themselves the crime being committed, as well as the results of sophisticated forensic tests. Human destinies are defended with arguments that are no longer at the mercy of someone's memory or another's talent for rhetoric or drama. The citizen is frequently addressed by increasingly visual messages that explain how tax dollars are spent and why he or she should vote for one or another candidate. In becoming the Netizen, he or she will partic.i.p.ate in social interactions fundamentally new in nature.

On the Net, politicians claiming credit for some accomplishment can be immediately challenged by the real image. Political promises can be modeled and displayed while the campaign speech is given. A decision to go to war can be subjected to an instant referendum while the simulation of the war itself, or of alternatives, is played on our monitors. But again, to idealize these possibilities would be foolish. The potential for abusive use of images is as great as that for their meaningful application.

Many factors are at work slowing down the process of educating visually literate individuals. We continue to rediscover the wheel of reading and writing without advancing comprehensive programs for visual education. Ill.u.s.trative visual alternatives, advanced more as an alibi for the maintenance of literacy-dominated communication, are by the nature of their function inappropriate in the context of higher efficiency requirements. Utilized as alternatives, these materials can be, and often are, irrelevant, ugly, insignificant, and expensive.

More often than not, they are used not to enhance communication, but to direct it, to manipulate the addressee. It will take more than the recognition of the role of the visual to understand that visual literacy, or probably several such literacies, comprising the variety of visual languages we need, less confining, less permanent, and less patterned, are necessary in order to improve practical experiences of self-const.i.tution through images. We are yet to address the ethical aspects of such experiences, especially in view of the fact that the visual entails constraints different from those encoded in the letter of our laws and moral principles.

In discussing the transition to the visual, I hope to have made clear that the process is not one of subst.i.tuting one form of literacy for another. The process has a totally different dynamics. It implies transition from a dominating form of literacy to a mult.i.tude of highly adaptive sign systems. These all require new competencies that reflect this adaptability. It also requires that we all understand integrative processes in order to make the best of individual efforts in a framework of extremely divided and specialized experiences of self-const.i.tution. If seeing is believing, then believing everything we see in our day is a challenge for which we are, for all practical purposes, ill prepared.

Unbounded s.e.xuality

"Freedom of speech Is as good as s.e.x." Madonna

The Netizens were up in arms: The Communications Decency Act must be repealed. Blue ribbons appeared on many Websites as an expression of solidarity. This Act was prompted by the American government's attempt to prevent children from accessing the many p.o.r.nographic outlets of the Internet. This first major public confrontation between a past controlled by literate mechanisms and a future of illiterate unrestricted freedom seemed to be less about s.e.x and more about democracy. But that the two are related, and defined within the current pragmatics of human self- const.i.tution, has escaped both parties to the dispute.

Seeking good s.e.x

In Economic-Philosophical Ma.n.u.scripts, Karl Marx (a product of the civilization of literacy) addressed alienation: "We thus arrive at the result that man feels that he acts freely only in his animal functions-eating, drinking, procreation, or at most using shelter, jewelry, etc.-while in his human functions, he feels only animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal." How an a.n.a.lysis of industrial capitalism, with its underlying pragmatic structure reflected in literacy, can antic.i.p.ate phenomena pertinent to the post-industrial, and reflected in illiteracy, is not easy to explain.

Although he referred to economic self-const.i.tution, his description is significant in more than one way. s.e.xuality is of concern in the civilization of illiteracy insofar as the human being in its multi-dimensionality is of concern. This might sound too broad to afford any meaningful inference from the condition of literacy to the condition of human s.e.xuality, but it is an existential premise. Through s.e.xuality humans project their natural condition and the many influences, language included, leading to its humanization. An understanding of the multiple factors at work in conditioning human experiences as intimate as s.e.xual relations, depends upon the understanding of the pragmatic framework in which they unfold. Child p.o.r.nography on the Internet is by no means the offspring of our love affair with technology.

Neither is p.o.r.nography being invoked for the first time as a justification for censors.h.i.+p. Nevertheless, the commotion regarding the Communications Decency Act const.i.tutes a new experience that is intimately related to the condition of human existence in today's world.

"SWF seeks unemployed SWM grad student for hideaway weekends, intimate dinners, and cuddling. Must know how to read, and be able to converse without extensive use of 'you know' or 'wicked.'" This announcement (dated October 6, 1983) is one among many that use qualifying initials, but with one twist: "Must know how to read."-moreover, to be articulate. What over ten years ago was formulated innocently (hideaway, intimate dinner, cuddling) would today be expressed quite bluntly: "Looking for good s.e.x." What does reading, and possibly writing, have to do with our emotional life, with our need and desire to love and be loved; that is, what does reading have to do with s.e.x?

Long before h.o.m.o Sapiens ascertained itself, reproduction, and all it comprises in its natural and and form, ensured survival.

Do literacy, language, or sign systems affect this basic equation of life? Mating seasons and habits shed some light on the natural aspect. Colors, odors, mating calls, specific movements (dances, fights, body language) send s.e.xual signals.

Molecular biology places the distinction between hominids and chimpanzees at four million years ago. After all this time of freeing themselves from nature, even to the extent of self-const.i.tution in the practical experience of artificial insemination, human beings still integrate color, odor, mating calls, and particular movements into the erotic. But they also integrate the experience of their self-const.i.tution in language.

Since the time hominids distinguished themselves, the s.e.xuality of the species started differentiating itself from that of animals. For example, humans are permanently attractive, even after insemination, while animals attract each other only at moments favorable for reproduction. Along the timeline from the primitive being to our civilization, s.e.x changed from being an experience in reproduction to being predominantly a form of pleasure in itself.

Instead of the immediacy of the s.e.xual urge, projected through patterns subject to natural cycles, humans experience ever more mediated forms of s.e.xual attraction and gratification, which are not necessarily a.s.sociated with reproduction. An initial change occurred when humanized s.e.xual drive turned into love, and became a.s.sociated with its many emotions. The practical experience of language played an important part in extending s.e.xual encounters from the exclusive realm of nature to the realm of culture. Here they acquired a life of their own through practical experiences characteristic of the syncretic phase of human practical experiences, mostly rituals. During the process of differentiating these experiences-const.i.tution of myths, moral and ethical self-awareness, theater, dance, poetry-s.e.xual encounters were subjected to various interpretations.

Beyond immediacy

The birth of languages and the establishment of s.e.x codes, as primitive as they were, are related to the moment of agriculture, a juncture at which a certain autonomy of the species was reached. Rooted in the biological distinction between male and female, labor division increased the efficiency of human effort. Divisions were also established, some under the model of male domination, others under the model of female domination, pertinent to survival activities, and later on to incipient social life. Eventually, labor division consecrated the profession of prost.i.tution, and thus the practice of satisfying natural urges in a context in which nature was culturized. The prototypical male-dominated structure of the s.e.xual relation between man and woman marked the history of this relation more than female domination did. It introduced patterns of interaction and hierarchies today interpreted wholesale as harmful to the entire development of women.

What is probably less obvious is the relation among the many aspects of the pragmatic context in which such hierarchies were acknowledged. Moreover, we do not know enough about how these hierarchies were transformed into the underlying consciousness of the populations whose ident.i.ties resulted from experiences corresponding to the pragmatic context. The implicit thesis of this book is that everything that made language and writing possible, and progressively necessary, led to a coherent framework of human practical experiences that are characterized by sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism, and which literacy appropriated and transmits. Consequently, when the structural framework no longer effectively supports human self-const.i.tution, the framework is modified. Other aspects of human existence, among them s.e.xuality, reflect the modification.

Reading and writing have much to do with our emotional life. They remove it from the immediacy of drive, hope, pain, and disappointment and give it its own s.p.a.ce: human striving, desire, pleasure. They are a.s.sociated with an infinity of qualifiers, names, and phrases. With language, feelings are given a means for externalizing, and they are stabilized.

Expectations diversify from there. Structural characteristics of the context that makes language necessary simultaneously mark the very object of the self- const.i.tutive experience of loving and being loved. There are many literary and visual testimonies to how the erotic was const.i.tuted as a realm of its own: From Gilgamesh, the Song of Solomon, Kama Sutra, Ovid's Art of Love, through Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, to the erotic literature of 18th and 19th century Europe, down to the many current romance novels and handbooks on lovemaking. No matter which of them is examined, one inference becomes clear: the pragmatic context of the continuous human self-const.i.tution effects changes in the way people are attracted to each other.