In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  To demonstrate how one such axiom fitting literate space has expanded and acquired a certain dominance, I offer as example ‘the text.’ The word is classical: in Latin textus is a woven fabric and — only rarely — the composition of well-running words. At the time of the Lindisfarne Bible, the word is first used as an equivalent for Holy Scripture. Then, in the fourteenth century, it is actually used for the concept which we now take for granted, a concept which — as I will immediately show — under different designations had already appeared 200 years earlier. I want to speak about the emergence of the idea or concept, not about the use of the term.

  Revolution by the text

  I choose the idea of the text for two reasons: the idea is important in educational theory, and — thoroughly transmogrified — it is also central to communication theory. From the mid-twelfth century onward, the text is past speech, so encoded that the eye can pick it up from the page; in communication theory, the term stands for any binary sequence. The text, as a hinge element within the literate mind, has a beginning and an end.

  By definition, the alphabet is a technique to record speech sounds in visible form. In this sense it is much more than any other notational system. The reader who is faced by ideograms, hieroglyphs, or even the non-vocalized Semitic betabet, must understand the sense of the line before he can pronounce it. Only the alphabet makes it possible to read correctly without any understanding. And, in fact, for well over 2000 years, the decoding of the alphabetic record could not be performed by the eye alone. ‘Reading’ meant loud or mumbled recitation. Augustine, the champion orator of his time, was surprised when he discovered that it was possible to engage in silent reading. In the Confessions he tells of his discovery: he learned to read without making a noise and without waking his brethren.

  While occasionally practiced, silent reading would have been normally impossible until the seventh century; the break or empty space between words was unknown. Only a few monumental inscriptions spoke to the eye by separating word from word. On wax tablets, papyrus or parchment, each line was an uninterrupted sequence of letters. There was almost no other way of reading than rehearsing the sentences aloud and listening to hear whether they made sense. Mere dicta — speech fragments out of context — were practically unreadable. A sentence, meant for the record, was ‘dictated’; it was spoken in cursus, the classical prose-rhythm which we have now lost. By getting the hang of the cursus that the dictator had chosen, reading by sight became possible. The sense remained buried on the page until it had been voiced.

  Word breaks were introduced in Bede’s time (672–735) as a didactic device. They were meant to facilitate the acquisition of Latin vocabulary by ‘thickheaded Scottish novices.’ As a side effect, the procedure of copying manuscripts changed. Thus far, either the original had to be dictated by one monk to several scribes, or each scribe had to read aloud as many words as he could keep in his auditory memory, and then write them down while ‘dictating to himself.’ Spaces between words made silent copying possible; the copyist could now transcribe word for word. The earlier line, made up of an uninterrupted sequence of thirty to fifty minuscules, just could not have been copied at sight.

  Even though the codex of the Middle Ages then contained visibly separated words rather than the unbroken Indian line of letters, it still did not make the text visible. This new reality takes shape only after the death of Bernard and Abelard. It is brought forth by the convergence of two dozen techniques, some with Arabic, others with Classical antecedents, some entirely new. These innovations together conspire to support and shape a substantially new idea: that of a text which is distinct both from the book and from its readings.

  Chapters get titles, and these are divided by sub-titles. Chapter and verse are now numbered; quotations are marked by underlining with a different color ink; paragraphs are introduced and, occasionally, marginal glosses summarize their subject; miniatures become less ornamental and more illustrative. Thanks to these new devices, a table of contents and an alphabetical subject index now could be prepared, and references from one part to the other could be made within chapters. The book that formerly could only be read through is now made accessible at random: the idea of consultation acquires a new meaning. Books can now be chosen and picked up in a new mode. At the beginning of the twelfth century, it was still the custom that on certain feast days of each season, the abbot would solemnly take the books from the treasury where they were kept with jewels and relics of saints, and lay them out in the chapter room. Each monk then picked one for his lectio during the following months. By the end of this same century, books were moved out of the ark in the sacristy and begin to be stored in a separate library, well titled, on shelves. The first catalogs are made of the monastery’s holdings, and by the end of the next century Paris and Oxford each boast of a union catalog.

  Thanks to these technical changes, consultation, the checking of quotations and silent reading become common, and scriptoria ceased to be places where each one tried to hear his own voice. Neither the teacher nor the neighbor can now hear what is being read and, partly as a result, both bawdy and heretical books multiply. As the old habit of quoting from a well-trained memory palace was replaced by the new skill of citing right out of the book, the idea of a text which is independent from this or that manuscript becomes visible. Many of the social effects which have often been attributed to the printing press were in fact already the result of a text that can be looked up. The old clerical skill of taking dictation and reading out lines is now complemented by the skills of contemplating and searching the text with the eyes. And, in a complex way, the new reality of the text and the new clerical skill affect the literate mind, common to clerisy and laity alike.

  For most practical purposes, penmanship and clerical status coincided until well into the fourteenth century. The mere ability to sign and spell was taken as proof of clerical privilege, and anyone who could demonstrate such capacity escaped capital punishment — he enjoyed clerical privilege. But while the majority of clerics were still much too unskilled to ‘look up’ the text of a book, ‘the text’ became a constitutive metaphor for a vast lay population’s entire mode of existence during the fifteenth century.

  For those who are not medievalists but still desire a solid introduction to what is known to historians about the growing lay literacy of the West at that time, I recommend a book by Martin Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. He stresses not what clerical literacy contributed to literature and science, but how the spread of letters changed the self-perception of the age and ideas about society. In England, for instance, the number of charters used in the transfer of properties increased by a factor of one hundred or more between the early twelfth and the late thirteenth century. Further, the written charter replaced the oath, which is oral by its very nature. The ‘testament’ replaced the clod of soil which the father had formerly put into the hand of the son whom he had chosen as heir to his lands. In court, a writ got the last word! Possession, an activity exercised by sitting upon, sedere, was overshadowed in importance by the ‘holding’ (tenancy, maintenance) of a title, something one does with the hand. Formerly, you solemnly walked with the buyer around the property that you wanted to sell; now you learned to point it out with your finger, and had the notary describe it. Even the illiterate acquired the certainty that the world is owned by description: ‘thirty steps from the rock shaped like a dog, and then to the brook in a straight line…’ Everyone now tended to become a dictator, even though scribes remained few. Surprisingly, even serfs carried seals, to put beneath their dictation.

  Everyone now keeps records, even the devil. Under the new guise of a hellish scribe, portrayed as the ‘writing devil,’ he appears in late Romanesque sculpture. He squats on his coiled tail and prepares the record of every deed, word and thought of his clients for the final reckoning. Simultaneously, a representation of the Final Judgment appears in the tympanum above the main entrance of the parish church. It represents Christ, enthro
ned as a judge between the gates of heaven and the jaws of hell, with an angel holding the Book of Life opened at the page corresponding to the individual Poor Soul. Even the rudest peasant and humblest charwoman can no longer enter the church portal without learning that their name and deeds appear in the text of the heavenly Book. God, like the landlord, refers to the written account of a past which, in the community, has been mercifully forgotten. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council makes auricular confession obligatory. The Counciliar text is the first canonical document which explicitly states that an obligation is binding on all Christians, both men and women. And confession interiorizes the sense of the text in two distinct ways: it fosters the sense of ‘memory’ and of ‘confession.’ For a millennium, Christians had recited their prayers as they picked them up within the community, with great local and generational variants. Sentences were often so corrupted that they might foster piety, but certainly did not make sense. The twelfth-century Church Synods tried to remedy this state of affairs. Their canons imposed on the clergy the duty of training the laity’s memory by having them repeat the words of the Pater and Credo word for word as they are in the Book. When the penitent went to confession, he had to prove to the priest that he knew his prayers by heart, that he had acquired the kind of memory on which words could be engraved. Only after this memory test could he proceed to the examination of another spot of his heart, henceforth called his conscience, in which the account of his evil deeds, words and thoughts had been kept. Even the illiterate ‘I’ that speaks in confession now perceives through new, literate eyes its own ‘Self’ in the image of a text.

  Lay self, lay conscience, lay memory

  The new kind of past, frozen in letters, is cemented as much in the self as in society, in memory and conscience as much as in charters and account books, in descriptions and signed confessions. And the experience of an individual self corresponds to a new kind of subject of the law which takes shape in the law schools of Bologna and Paris, and becomes normative, over the centuries, for the conception of person, wherever Western society extends its influence. This new self and this new society are realities which can arise only within the literate mind.

  In an oral society a past statement can only be recalled by a similar one. Even in societies where non-alphabetic notations are kept, speech does not lose its wings; once uttered, it is gone forever. Pictographic or ideographic notation suggests to the reader an idea for which he must, anew, find a word. The alphabetic text fixes the sound. When it is read, the past dictator’s sentences become present. A new kind of building material for the present has come into being; it is made up of the actual words of speakers long dead. And, in the late Middle Ages, the constitution of the visible text brings whole constructions from the past, in a new way, into the present.

  In an oral society, a man has to stand by his word. He confirms his word by taking an oath, which is a conditional curse called upon himself in the event that he should become unfaithful. While swearing he grasps at his beard or his balls, pledging his flesh as a troth. When a freeman swears, any case against him comes to rest. But under a literate regime, the oath pales before the manuscript; it is no longer recall, but the record that counts. And if there is no record, the judge is empowered to read the heart of the accused. So torture is introduced into the proceedings. The question is applied and pries open the heart. Confession under torture now takes the place of oath and ordeal. Inquisitorial techniques teach the accused to accept the identity between the text that the court reads out to him and that other text which is etched in his heart. Only in the visual comparison of two texts can the identity of the two contents — that of the original and that of the copy — be imagined. A miniature of 1226 preserves the first picture of the ‘corrector,’ a new official who leans over the shoulder of the scribe to certify the ‘identity’ between two charters. It is again a clerical technique which is reflected in the new law of judicial evidence which demands that the judge check the defendant’s utterance against the truth at the bottom of his heart.

  The literate mind implies a profound reconstruction of the lay self, the lay conscience, the lay memory, no less than the lay conception of the past and the lay fear of having to face the Doomsday Book at the hour of death. All of these new features, of course, the laity and the clergy share: and they are effectively transmitted outside of schools and scriptoria. So far, this point has been largely neglected by historians of education. They have mainly focused on the evolution of clerical literacy and have seen in these transformations of mental space but a side-product of chancellery skills. Historians have well explored the style of letters, of abbreviation, of integration between text and ornament. They have enlarged our knowledge of the impact that paper-making and the new smooth writing surface had on the evolution of a cursive script in the thirteenth century, something which enabled scholastic masters to lecture from notes written by their own hand rather than dictated. They have observed the enormous increase in sealing wax used in chancelleries. They can tell us that, for a typical court session in the mid-twelfth century, barely a dozen sheep would lose their skin, while a century later several hundred hides would be needed to make the necessary parchment.

  If historians have paid attention to the evolution of lay literacy, or more generally to the new configuration taken by the literate mind, they have usually observed how it takes shape among clerics, how the new self came to be explored as a new psychological domain in the autobiographies of someone like Guibert and Abelard, how new scholastic logic and grammar presupposed the visual textualization of the page. At best, some historians have attempted to understand how the increasing frequency with which fabliaux romances, travelogues and homilies were written for reading in front of a large public had affected the style in which these were composed. Yet, obviously, while schools and scriptoria and the new technical notions of clerical literacy were essential to the spread of the literate mind among clerics, these were not the means through which lay literacy spread.

  The details I have given, taken from the later twelfth century which I know best, all illustrate what I mean by the impact which one particular literate technique can have on the shape of an epoch’s literate mind. They illustrate the effect which the visible text had at that moment on a web of other concepts which, in their formation, are dependent on the alphabet. I point to such notions as self, conscience, memory, possessive description, identity. It would be the historian’s task to establish the epochs of this web, its transformation under the influence of late medieval narratio, of ‘fiction,’ of Renaissance critical text editions, of the printing press, of vernacular grammar, of the ‘reader.’ At each stage, the historian of education would get new inspiration by starting his inquiry from the evidence of new forms of lay literacy rather than from new ideals and techniques of teachers. However, my plea for research is not primarily motivated by my interest in this neglected side of educational research, dealing with phenomena that take place within the alphabetic culture space. My main reason for pleading for this research is concerned with the exploration of that space itself. I feel my very self threatened by the waning of this space.

  Exile of the literate mind

  I still remember a shock I had in Chicago in 1964. We were sitting around a seminar table; opposite me sat a young anthropologist. At the critical point of what I thought was a conversation, he said to me, ‘Illich, you can’t turn me on, you do not communicate with me.’ For the first time in my life I became aware that I was being addressed not as a person but as a transmitter. After a moment of disarray, I began to feel outrage. A live person, to whom I thought that I had been responding, experienced our dialogue as something more general, namely as ‘one form of human communication.’ I immediately thought of Freud’s description of three instances of sickening outrage which were experienced in Western culture: the Kränkungen when the heliocentric system, the theory of evolution, and the postulate of the unconscious had to be integrated into everyday thinking. It is then, twe
nty-five years ago, that I began to reflect on the depth of the epistemological break which I propose for examination. I suspect that it goes deeper than the breaks suggested by Freud — and it is certainly more directly related to the subject with which educators deal.

  Only after several years of research on the history of the conceptual space which emerged in archaic Greece did I grasp the depth to which the computer-as-metaphor exiles anyone who accepts it — far from the space of the literate mind. I then began to reflect on the emergence of a new mental space whose generating axioms are no longer based on the encoding of speech sounds through alphabetic notation, but rather on the power to store and manipulate ‘information’ in bytes.

  I do not propose that we examine the effects which the computer as a technical tool has on the keeping of and access to written records; nor how it can be used for teaching ‘the three R’s.’ Further, I do not ask for a study on the traces the computer leaves on modern style and compositions. Rather, I call for reflection on a web of terms and ideas which connects a new set of concepts whose common metaphor is the computer, and which does not seem to fit into the space of literacy, where pedagogics originally took shape.

  In calling for such attention I want to avoid the temptation to assign any causal function to the electronic machine. Just as those historians made a major mistake who maintained that the printing press was necessary to have the Western mind molded by ‘linear thought,’ so it would be a mistake to believe that the computer itself threatens the survival of the literate mind. A combination of small techniques in the scriptoria of twelfth-century monasteries created the visible text in which a very complex evolution of literate lifestyles and imagery found its appropriate mirror, centuries before Gutenberg cut his first font. And I suspect that a future historian will see the relationship between the computer and the waning of literate space in a similar way. Under circumstances much too complex even to suggest, at the height of economic and educational development — during the second quarter of the twentieth century — the web of literate axioms was weakened, and a new mental space or ‘structure’ found its metaphor in the Turing Machine. It would be unwise, in this plea, to propose how this new break should be studied. But by recalling a story told by Orwell I hope to make it plausible that the exploration of the break we are witnessing is central to the concern of any research on what ‘education’ might be about.