ABC: The Alphabetizaton of the Popular Mind E-Book

Ivan Illich

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1988

Beschreibung

In ABC... philosopher and cultural analyst Ivan Illich and medieval scholar and literary critic Barry Sanders have produced an original, meticulous and provocative study of the advent, spread and present decline of literacy. They explore he impact of the alphabet on fundamental thought processes and attitudes, on memory, on political groupings and religous and cultural expectations. Their examination of the present erosion of literacy in the new technological languages of 'newspeak' and 'uniquack' and they point out how new attitudes to language are altering our world view; our sense of self and of community.

Leseprobe

The Alphabetizationof thePopular Mind

by IVAN ILLICH and BARRY SANDERS

EPISTOLA PRIMA.

AD RANULPHUM DE MAURIACO.

Quodcharitasnunquamexcidit.

Dilecto fratri R. HUGO peccator.

Charitasnunquamexcidit (ICor.XIII). Audieram hoc et sciebam quod verum erat. Nunc autem, frater charissime, experimentum accessit, et scio plane quod charitas nunquam excidit. Peregre profectus eram, et veni ad vos in terram alienam; et quasi aliena non erat, quoniam inveni amicos ibi: sed nescio an prius fecerim, an factus sim. Tamen inveni illic charitatem, et dilexi eam; et non potui fastidire, quia dulcis mihi erat; et implevi sacculum cordis mei, et dolui quod augustus inventus est, et non valuit capere totam: tamen implevi quantum potui. Totum implevi quod habui, sed totum capere non valui quod inveni. Accepi ergo quantum capere potui, et onustus pretio pretioso pondus non sensi, quoniam sublevabat me sarcina mea. Nunc autem longo itinere confecto, adhuc sacculum meum plenum reperio, et non excidit quidquam ex eo, quoniam charitasnunquamexcidit. Illic ergo, frater charissime, inter cætera memoria tui primum inventa est, et signavi ex ea litteras istas, cupiens te sanum esse et salvum in Domino. Tu ergo vicem repende dilectionis, et ora pro me. Dominus

Jesus Christus tecum sit. Amen.

Design by David Bullen Typeset in Mergenthaler Cloister by Wilsted & Taylor with Delphin II display and Unicorn Initials

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

PREFACE

I. WORDS AND HISTORY

II. MEMORY

III. TEXT

IV. TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE

V. THE SELF

VI. UNTRUTH AND NARRATION

VII. FROM TAUGHT MOTHER TONGUE TO NEWSPEAK AND UNIQUACK

POSTSCRIPT: SILENCE AND THE WE

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Copyright

Preface

This book gives shape to a series of discussions that took place as we were each other’s guests in Claremont and Mexico. The continuing theme in our conversations was medieval paleography. From our discussion of the impact of the written word on the mind of the laity in the late twelfth century, we strayed to speculations on two late-twentieth-century issues: the impact of literacy campaigns on the increasing number of people who remain functionally illiterate; and the impact that communication theory has had on our colleagues’ perceptions of reality, turning the English language into no more than a code. Our efforts to understand the effect that parchment and seal, ink and pen had on worldview eight hundred years ago led us to the discovery of a paradox: literacy is threatened as much by modern education as by modern communication—and yet, adverse as the side effects of compulsory literacy have been for most of our contemporaries, literacy is still the only bulwark against the dissolution of language into “information systems.”

We decided to retrace the route by which we had arrived at this paradox. We wrote for our own consolation and the pleasure we found in exchanging notes. When our notes turned into chapters, we agreed to make our reflections public. Since we have reached no conclusions and want to make no recommendations, we have only described a history that has jolted us into our new understanding. We cannot speculate about a future that, at least for the two of us, does not exist.

As students of the Middle Ages we have traveled two separate paths: one starts from Hugh of Saint Victor’s discovery that the supreme form of reading consists in the “silent contemplation of the text”; the other leads from Geoffrey Chaucer and his outspoken, even overspoken Wife of Bath to Huckleberry Finn, whose words cannot be contemplated silently.

We are both “lettered,” that is, creatures of the book, and not simply because we know how to write or decipher books. In the society that has come into existence since the Middle Ages, one can always avoid picking up a pen, but one cannot avoid being described, identified, certified, and handled—like a text. Even in reaching out to become one’s own “self,” one reaches out for a text.

We are prejudiced in favor of history in trying to understand when and how this society came into existence. The techniques that have constituted alphabetic writing—consonants, vowels, breaks between words, paragraphs, titles—developed historically to become what they are today. Certain constructs that cannot exist without reference to the alphabet—thought and language, lie and memory, translation, and particularly the self—developed parallel to these writing techniques.

If these categories had a historical beginning then they can also come to an end. Our keen awareness of literacy as a historic construction whose first emergence we can describe deepens our sense of responsibility to preserve it. Standing firmly on the terra of literacy, we can see two epistemological chasms. One of these chasms cuts us off from the domain of orality. The other, which moves like smog to engulf us, equates letters with bits of information, degrading reading and writing.

We discuss this impending degradation only at the end of this book. Uwe Poerksen examines it in detail elsewhere. He is one of five friends—three of whom are finishing their own manuscripts—whose contributions aided our work. Poerksen is a medievalist and a linguist, known for his history of vernacular language as used in science, when Latin was abandoned as the only scientific tongue. In his new book he deals with the “mathematization” of ordinary speech: what we refer to in chapter seven as amoebawords. The fourth friend, Majid Rahnema, left a high United Nations position to call for the redefinition of major development goals rather than the redesign of institutional or technical means. He analyzes the unwanted side effects of literacy programs, while we limit ourselves to the history of the categories out of which these programs are constructed. The fifth friend is Barbara Duden. Her subject is the sociogenesis of the modern human body. In the light of historical studies, she shows that the result of the self’s possessive description (or should we say, the possessive self-description) is to make the body into a layer cake of superimposed texts, each “text” lettered by a different profession to define a separate set of needs that only that profession can meet. The body thus appears as the incarnation of “texts.”

In view of this community of collaborators, the reading guide at the end of this book has a narrow scope. It leads to the starting point of our conversations: the alphabetization of the twelfth-century popular mind.

I. Wordsand History

HistorybecomespossibleonlywhentheWordturnsintowords.Onlyverbatimtraditionsenablethehistoriantoreconstructthepast.Onlywherewordsthatwerelostcanbefoundagaindoesthehistoriographerreplacethestoryteller.Thehistorianshomeisontheislandofwriting.Hefurnishesitsinhabitantswithsubjectmatteraboutthepast.Thepastthatcanbeseizedisrelatedtowriting.

Beyondtheisland’sshores,memoriesdonotbecomewords.Wherenowordsareleftbehind,thehistorianfindsnofoundationsforhisreconstructions.Intheabsenceofwords,artifactsaresilent.Wehaveoftenfeltfrustrated,butweacceptthatprehistorycannotberead.Nobridgecanbeconstructedtospanthischasm.

ISTORY REMAINS a strict discipline only when it stops short, in its description, of the nonverbal past. The critical historian, reading Herodotus or Homer, observes and admires the very creation of Greek words, for the word is a creature of the alphabet and has not always existed. If the historian tries to describe wordless societies, he soon becomes a natural historian, an anthropologist like Aristotle, whose anthroplogein can only be translated as “idle talk” or “tattle tales.”

Herodotus knew how far the writ of the historiographer ran. A thousand years after the death of Polycrates, he wrote that the tyrant of Samos “was the first to set out to control the sea, apart from Minos of Knossos and possibly others who may have done so as well. Certainly Polycrates was the first of those whom we call the human race.” Herodotus did not deny the existence of Minos, but for him Minos was not a human being in the literal sense. He let the architect of the labyrinth live on as the father-in-law of the Minotaur. He believed in gods and myths, but he excluded them from the domain of events that could be described historically. His ability cheerfully to place historical truth alongside the qualitatively different truth of myth stemmed from his having set limits on historiography. He did not see it as his job to decipher a core of describable truths in myth, to explain the sacrifice of Athenian boys to Minos as a tribute to please some lecherous Oriental potentate, as later Greek and Roman historians did. Like Plato, he retained the ability to see the myths as stories that spoke to the illiterate, to children, poets, and old women.

Prior to history, Plato says, there is a narrative that unfolds, not in accordance with the rules of art and knowledge, but out of divine enthusiasm and deep emotion. Corresponding to this prior time is a different truth—namely, myth. In this truly oral culture, before phonetic writing, there can be no words and therefore no text, no original, to which tradition can refer, no subject matter that can be passed on. A new rendering is never just a new version, but always a new song. Thinking itself takes wing; inseparable from speech, it is never there but always gone, like a bird in flight. The storyteller spins his threads, on and on, never repeating himself word for word. No variants can ever be established. This is often overlooked by those who engage in the “reading” of the prehistorical mind, whether their reading is literary, structuralist, or psychoanalytic. They turn Minos into a person, the Minotaur into a dream, and the Labyrinth into a symbol.

Memories of this prehistory become a historical source, a verbatim tradition, only through historiography. Only the historian, writing it down, freezes the source material for his descendants, as Flavius Josephus stresses in his JewishWar: “My task is to write down what I have been told, not to believe everything; and what I am saying here applies to my entire work.” Only the original text gives simultaneous rise to source and history.

Every original text is the record of something heard. Some scribe of genius listened to Homer and the result was the one Iliad. Bernardo de Sahagun, the sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary in Mexico, and a pupil of Erasmus, took down hundreds of Aztec songs. He tried to apply the rules of textual criticism to several songs on the same theme all attributed to Prince Netzalhuacoyotl, but failed to reconstruct an original. In their deceptive similarity, each song, when written down, was not a variant but an original. Anthropologists become hunters chasing unwritten materials; tape recorders in hand, they descend on blacks, women, peasants—anyone on whose lips they sense prehistory. Folklorists sieve sagas and legends for fragments of oral phraseology. It is the task of the historian to develop the tools for recognizing which of these records are original sources, that is to say, texts that are not based on other texts, but represent the first fixing of speech. For those records are the flotsam from the oral realm that have washed up on the historiographer’s shore, dicta for the first time broken down into words, sung rhythms strung in verses.

Writing is not the only technique we know of for making the flow of speech coagulate and for carrying clots of language along intact for tens or even hundreds of years. When melody, meter, and rhythm combine with a proverb, the result is often an indestructible nugget of language. The drummers of the Lokele who live in the jungle of Zaire, not far from the former Congo River, still know the sayings that fit their tom-tom rhythms. In fact they need the sayings in order to drum the rhythms. But no one now remembers what they mean—or whether they ever “said” anything.

In certain rituals practiced in the Isthmus of Panama, sequences of sounds are used, in which rhythm, melody, and articulation form a three-dimensional counterpoint. The counterpoint effectively prevents any change from creeping in, the chants acting as mummified dicta from a forgotten, prehistoric age. Legal maxims, oaths, spells, benedictions and curses, elements of genealogy, the stock epithets attaching to the name of a god, a hero, or a place, are all very often secured against corruption in this way. The utterance can also be tied to a thing. The tally stick that the Maori orator holds in front of him and to which he hitches his solemn oration, the quipu, or knotted bundle of threads that enables the Incan runner to reel off his news like a rosary, the sequence of pictures drawn on a wall, can support the unchanged repetition of sounds that might make no sense to the speaker. The caste organization of preliterate India can be understood as the social organization of a mnemonic device that enables the Brahmins to preserve the Vedas unchanged. Gestures that coalesce with the liturgical murmurs in a sacrificial ceremony fix language to body movements. Through all these techniques, nuggets of frozen speech can be carried along in an oral culture.

But it would be a grave mistake to view the alphabet primarilyas an immense improvement over these mnemonic devices. Only the alphabet has the power to create “language” and “words,” for the word does not emerge until it is written down. Neither the songs of the poets, nor the invocations of the priests, nor the dictates of rulers from prehistoric times are sequences of words. Their immense yet evanescent power eludes description, and those who uttered them were unable, for all their oral skill, to see their own speech as a string on which words are the beads. Prehistory knows nothing of these mono-or polysyllabic atoms of language whose semantic fields we plot with our dictionaries. What prehistory perceives as units can have only audible contours. The sequences of sounds between pauses that characterize speech are not words but syllables, phrases, strophes. It is to these measures of speech alone that the original word or Logos relates. This meaning has become secondary today, although we invoke it when we “give” or “go back on” our word, or when we “have a word” with someone. For us the “real” meaning of word is grammaticalbuildingblock, before and after which our pen breaks contact with the paper. Plato’s slayers, barbarians, and children still live in a prelogical, that is, a “word-less” society.

The historian misreads prehistory when he assumes that “language” can be spoken in that word-less world. In the oral beyond, there is no “content” distinct from the winged word that always rushes by before it has been fully grasped, no “subject matter” that can be conceived of, entrusted to teachers, and acquired by pupils (hence no “education,” “learning,” and “school”). For it is the record in phonetic writing that first carries what is heard across a chasm separating two heterogenous eras of speech. The alphabetic scribe carries what is spoken from the ever-passing moment and sets down what he has heard in the permanent space of language. Only with this act can knowledge, separate from speech, be born.

As literates, we think of speech as the use of language, and we think of this language as outliving speech, as leaving traces—if not on paper, then in our selves. Before the concept of recording sounds through the alphabet had come into being, speech could not be imagined to leave such a trail. Without a listener (who might be an angel or God), speech could not be perceived as anything but madness, because speech courts attention. And before this sound-recording through the alphabet, a listener could not be perceived as a recorder. The nod indicated that the other person had understood, not that he had recorded the message, accepted the information.

How different speech is from language is made clear by the fact that language is always neuter, while speech is always gendered. With every utterance, the speaker refers back to himself and his gender. It is always the total quality of speech that refers the listener to the speaker’s gender, not the grammatical gender of the pronoun “I.” (Nowhere, with the possible exception of the oasis of Hadramut, does the personal pronoun have grammatical gender.) In a culture, what sounds feminine and what sounds masculine is determined by convention, and not by the biological nature of the vocal cords. The way men and women speak contrasts in many ways: linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists recognize about two dozen criteria describing these contrasts. In no two places is their configuration the same. The gender contrast in speech is just as fundamental as the contrast in phonemes, but it has barely been remarked. At the very best, recently, linguists have examined the discrimination against women in the so-called “use” of language, which is genderless.

This gender contrast in speech is lost when it congeals as language on the page. It does not survive the jump from pure time of speech into the permanent, spatial dimension of script. To return to Herodotus: The historian’s task starts “with those whom we call the human race” that script has brought into being; with men and women when they begin to speak the same language. (We have been tempted to speculate that the story of the Tower of Babel tells of this event.)

If alphabetic writing can be spoken of as bringing the human race into existence, it is only because this kind of writing is unique, as a study of the history and phenomenology of phonetic writing will reveal. Pure, mature phonetic writing, which was discovered only once, albeit in stages, is an oddity among writing systems in the same way that the loudspeaker is an oddity among trumpets. The alphabet records only sounds, and it is only through sounds that it provides meaning. The alphabet does exactly the opposite of what most hieroglyphics and ideograms and, most importantly, what Semitic letters were created to do.

In writing systems using hieroglyphics and ideograms, the reader is expected to speak; the ideogram itself is silent. The statement “1 × 1” says “once one,” or “one times one,” or even “multiplication table.” But it can equally be read “jedan put jedan.” In all these scripts the reader must find the spoken expression from recollecting what has been said before: Mayan hieroglyphics, for example, provide the clues so that the reader may speak aloud from memory. Through landmarks that are more than just pictograms, they help him find his way orally along an often-traveled path. Ideograms, too, originally point toward utterance. They presuppose that the reader is familiar with the content of ideas whose individual elements are strung in a row before him to be named. Reading thus means retelling the familiar content depicted in accordance with more or less precise rules. Even when—as in the third millennium B.C.—the individual Egyptian hieroglyph or Mesopotamian ideograph become logograms, so that from that point on they had to be named with one and only one word, the word presents itself to the reader without any indication about its sound; the ending and inflection that make it audible must be supplied by the reader.

The early part of the second millennium B.C. saw a series of faltering attempts here and there in the Middle East to bind speech more closely to writing. Convention came to dictate that a particular pictogram or ideogram, which had become a logogram, could be used as a syllable sign. The reader put aside any recognizable meaning of the word and read it into the text for its sound only. As a syllable sign it came to be placed beside the thing sign, making it easier to decipher. Reading became somewhat like solving a rebus. Nowhere, however, did a true syllabary evolve out of this custom—the Indian syllabic alphabet is of considerably more recent origin than the Greek. It is an admirable system of phonetic notation that grew out of the Greek invention.

Quite suddenly, around 1400 B.C., an entirely new kind of script made its appearance on the border between the Egyptian hieroglyphic tradition and the cuneiform of Mesopotamia. This North Semitic alphabet was the first to have signs for sounds only, and only one sign for each group of sounds. Some archaeologists have speculated on a single inventor for this alphabet, so completely does it accomplish both requirements for script from the first moment of its appearance: the universe of heard sounds—an almost infinite variety of sounds in every language, with men and women, children and dotards, singers and ragmen all sounding different—is reduced to a limited number, each of which is then labeled.

However, this Byblos alphabet whose letters stand only for sounds does not have any letters for vowels. The freely voiced qualities of breathing are not indicated, only the consonants, the harsh or soft obstacles the breath encounters. Its script does not yet transform the page into a mirror of speech, but is rather a burial ground for the skeleton of language. Being a purely phonetic notation, it differs radically from all previous scripts, but it can still be read only by someone trained for a special kind of analysis. Only a person who has developed the ability to recognize within the uninterrupted string of consonants groups of two to five elements that act as “roots” can breathe those roots into life. The roots grow into words only when the reader makes them resound according to the semantic function they ought to play in the environment in which they stand.

In a prophetic vision, Ezekiel describes the process: “The hand of the Lord carried me out … in the midst of a valley which was full of bones that, lo, were very dry … and I prophesied as I was commanded, and the bones came together: bone to bone … but there was as yet no breath in them … and the Lord said, ‘Breathe upon the slain [literally: Give thy soul, nefesh, to them] that they may live’ … and as I did, they stood upon their feet” (Ezek. 37:1-10). It is astounding with what audacity a clutch of pastoral tribes in Canaan claimed the invention as their own. As Exodus relates, Israel overcame “Egypt” intellectually and emotionally with the invention of phonetic writing. The mummies in their tombs are supplanted by roots. No longer is it only priests who can promise the continuation of life after death by deciphering the hieroglyphs. The invention of the Semitic script makes possible a new relationship to the life and death of Osiris.