by Ivan Illich
Walter Benjamin has invented the seductive image of the ‘Angel of History.’ He looks back and faces the gale of time that rushes him backward into the present. And before this angel’s steadfast eyes, the wreckage of time stretches out. As a crab, I move in the exact opposite way. While the present from which I come remains steadily in front of me, one after the other of my own certainties disappears from the landscape through which I move back. About the time the Romanesque atria were replaced by Gothic portals, my back collides with a door which opens as I move beyond it and stop. This is the moment which Richard Southern calls a hinge-time into European or Modern times, but which I prefer to see as the turning of a page. In fact, I like to imagine that the door which my crab’s rump has moved is a manuscript page — this allows me to continue my daydream. In the Romanesque cloister in which I have come to a stop, I can see two objects in front of me: the door that has opened inwards, and next to it many other pages of a previous time. And through the door opening in the very far distance I can still see a faint glint of neon. Keeping myself with much discipline in the crab’s posture, I continue to face two ‘texts’ which lie in the beyond, while I examine Hugh’s pagina which fits the age in which I have arrived. This discipline might help to distance both electronic and bookish categories from the text I am now examining.
Hugh’s book begins with the sentence that reading is a search, a kind of pilgrimage. It is seeking light that will enlighten his eyes. As I read him, I can see him in the choir, patiently waiting for the dawn to reveal the scenes of the stained glass. Words still light up; they each have their own luminosity, like the figures in the epoch’s miniatures painted on gold ground. Painted light, which by the time of the early printing press begins to strike the figures of Renaissance artists, is not of his time. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, can already conceive it when he speaks of lumen formate sub quo as something which we might call the ‘perspective of a discipline.’ No, Hugh wants to implant self-igniting words in the hearts of his pupils. He wants his students to memorize treasures. When placed where they belong, words can be woven, textured into historia. When well memorized, words illuminate each other mutually in the analogies of their meaning.
Whatever survived the wrath of the Creator against a humankind that got mixed up with the giants was assigned its place on the Ark of Noah. The book can thus be seen as an Ark. The heart then contains a book. The twelfth century is rich in ways to inculcate this point. We must guard what we let into the heart to preserve it from stains. Before using the brush, the heart’s surface should be softened so that the ink imbibes the substance. No one should be able to erase these traits. They should be as firm as on a parchment on which the penknife cannot dig out what has been written without creating a hole. The colors should be layed on in several coats, well polished to make them glitter.
Arca means both barge and chest. It’s a vessel for objects like words. Almost tasteless is the external book, modi cum sapita est lectio, nisi glossam sumat ex corde, unless it gets its sound (or just as well translated, ‘its tongue’) from the heart. What Hugh picks up on his way through the lines can be heard by his ear and tasted by his mouth. His lips bring out the sound of the pages, voces paginarum, as if they were the strings of a lyre. In Hugh’s writings the sharp line between things and words that some of his contemporaries try to draw is still very fuzzy. He reads orally, describing the sensation this leaves on lips and tongue: sweetness sweeter than honey. Hugh stands at the end of a mumbling, meditative, degustatory, auditory tradition of reading that was initiated by the Church Fathers, especially Augustine. It would be a grave mistake to confuse the memoria cultivated by this monkish, liturgical reading with that other, classical memoria that was fostered by Roman rhetoric teachers who prepared politicians and lawyers, training them to use words in harangues and arguments. Only when medieval memoria is understood in contrast to Ciceronian precepts will its end, around 1200, be properly understood.
Hugh is the first author I know who looks beyond his own epoch of reading; he distinguishes three kinds of reading, namely, for my own ears, for those of my listeners and that which is done by silent contemplation of the page. How he did this third kind of reading remains a mystery to me as I sit, like a crab, looking both at the page from the next century, that has opened as a door into my line of vision, and — in contrast to it — at those pages which were written before Hugh’s death in 1142. The early and high medieval page is not meant to be absorbed by mere looking. It calls for kinesthetic decipherment. Glosses invade the interlinear space. One page looks like the next. Paragraphs are rare. Titles give little help. You can go back to a physical spot in the book where the sentence you remember will be found in this particular manuscript. But scribal techniques do almost nothing to help your visual orientation within a ‘text.’ I cannot help imagining that the pagina Hugh contemplated in silence was an ark floating in his heart rather than an object before his exterior eyes. He knew into which of its rooms to move, above which door to look at a lintel to find the sentence he had attached there.
This is completely different when I look at a page one hundred years younger. The page has become the support for a graphically articulated text. The page is no longer a storage place for objects, nor an espalier of word-bearing vines. The carefully articulated page on the backturned door that faces me, results from the fusion of a dozen technical innovations. What would have startled Hugh are paragraphs, indentures, numbering of arguments ad primum… ad quintum, the space between the lines that has been cleared of glosses. Stars or crockets refer to where the gloss fits. The main text is written in a larger script. The scribe must have calculated carefully how much of it fits on each page so the corresponding volume of marginal notes would still fit. Mercury red is used to mark quotations as distinct from the author’s own words. On the first page I find a table of contents which refers to the chapter number, or even the verse. Titles and subtitles strike the eye. There might even be an index at the end of the book which lists not only names but also things in alphabetical order. The idea of ordering things by the first letter of the corresponding word would have struck Hugh’s generation as quirky. This is hard for us to grasp until we remember that we too would be maddened by a list of months, weekdays or street numbers in alphabetical order. But we also have difficulty keeping in mind how new random access was to a society in which reading was always a pilgrimage, a route meandering from here to there. The more I look at the two pages next to each other, the clearer I see here the birth of a visible something: a verbal texture fixed by writing to be taken in at a glance. The text can now be visualized, imagined, conceived as something which has real existence apart from its incarnation within these covers or those.
Moving counter to the Angel of History, I have reached that point at which the text was born. The idea of the text is something comparable to the idea of the alphabet. Once the alphabet had been invented, it was there, one of those things which, once born, is mature — like the wheel, the horse collar, or the rudder placed into the axis of the ship. They cannot be significantly improved, but they can be used in totally unexpected ways. This is what happened to letters when they became the stuff from which visualized text was made. And since the text took off from the page, it has remained a powerful metaphor. And just as letters were the stuff out of which the new entity was then made, so the text has now become the stuff from which an entirely new set of concepts is derived.
In physics, Max Planck resurrected the metaphor of the world as a book and of the scientist as a ‘reader’ of nature. He compared the physicist to the archaeologist trying to make sense of the traces left by a totally alien culture that has neither the intent to reveal to, nor the desire to hide, something from the reader. The first to use writing no longer as a metaphor but as an explanatory analogy was also a physicist, the Jewish emigrant Erwin Schrodinger. From Dublin in 1943, he suggested that genetic substance could best be understood as a stable text whose occasional variations had
to be interpreted as textual variations. As a physicist, Schrodinger stepped completely beyond his domain formulating this biological model. Only a few months later, the biologist Avery demonstrated for the first time that genomes could be ‘inserted’ into bacteria, almost like a gloss that slips into the manuscript’s main text. Each individual at the moment of fertilization could now be visualized as an original text.
Schrodinger’s idea affected the notion of text at least as deeply as the scribal revolution did around 1200. He brought into existence something new, a sequence of ‘letters’ that exercises power without coming from or addressing a mind. Since Schrodinger, ‘text’ is a meaningless and senseless program which acts as a determinant for the organization of a process.
The first person to have understood the extraordinary semantic consequence of this re-formulation of text as authorless command not destined to be given meaning in the act of reading, is Erwin Chargaff. Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the first isolation of ‘nucleic acids’, (by Miescher in 1869) Chargaff says that upon reading Schrodinger in the light of Avery’s experiments ‘though obscurely, I saw before me, in very rough lines, a “grammar” of biology.’ Chargaff understood that by transforming Schrodinger’s animistic analogy into an explanatory model, just four ‘bases’ — rather than a great variety of ‘letters’ — would be sufficient to encode the variability of living nature. It was also Chargaff who made me understand the two-fold symbolic consequence of the new language of biology. First, the nightmare of universal literacy is now being anchored in the ability of organic molecules ‘to read’ each other. Second, progress henceforth means that man re-programs the book of nature.
By this comment the crab has vaulted through the open door that separates Romanesque and Gothic pages and landed again in front of the computer.
Computer Literacy and the Cybernetic Dream
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Lecture given at the Second National Science, Technology and Society Conference on ‘Technological Literacy’ organized by Science through Science, Technology and Society project of Pennsylvania State University Washington D.C., February 1987
Technological Literacy has been placed on the agenda for a second year at this meeting of educators, engineers and scientists. This year, the theme is technology and the imagination. Imagination works day and night. I want to speak about the imagination in daytime when people are immersed in neon lights. Only indirectly will I refer to that mini-competence on keyboards, at switches and in face of graphs which makes everyone feel a little bit of a hacker. As useful as it might be, I look at this kind of pseudo-literacy mainly as a condition to keep your sense of humor in a world that has been programmed. I will deal with the machine and its cybernetic logic only insofar as these induce a vaguely dream-like mental state. I am concerned about how to keep awake in the computer age.
It is helpful to distinguish three ways in which a technique affects the human condition. Technical means can be tools in the hand of the engineer. The engineer is faced with a task and for it selects, improves and applies a tool. In a second way, tools have a way of affecting social relations. A telephone-society engenders something new, still called ‘trust’ — toward people whom you address but cannot face. Finally, all tools tend to be themselves powerful metaphors which affect the mind. This is as true for the clock as it is for the motor or the engine; it is as true for the page covered with alphabetic signs as it is for a string of binary bits. The first two effects of tools, namely the technical use and its fallout on social structure, I want to bracket for today. I want to focus on cybernetics as a dominant metaphor, I want to speak of the computer as a potentially mind-boggling device.
However, before I get to this subject, I want to clarify one more point: I am not speaking about this ominous power of the computer in a general, world-wide, way. I am not saying what the computer as a metaphor does to Japanese children who have studied cangi-ideograms three hours daily for eleven years. I want to orient our discussion on the fit between the cybernetic metaphor and a particular mental state, the characteristically European, Western mental space which over a thousand years has been shaped by the alphabet and the alphabetic text as a dominant metaphor. I suggest this restriction for three reasons: first, because what I know about is mainly history; second, because I am studying the function of alphabetic notations, insofar as they have been considered as generators of post-medieval typically European unexamined axioms; and, thirdly, because I want to invite you to discuss with me the impact of the computer-as-metaphor not as a sociological, but as a literary and historical phenomenon.
Classical science has been created by people who recorded the sound of words by which they discussed nature. It was not created by Chinamen who for millennia have graphically expressed unsounding abstractions. Until recently natural scientists were, above all, literary men. Modern science therefore is an outgrowth of the literate mind, in the sense in which this term has been used by Milman Parry or Walter Ong. Turing’s universal machine appears as a singularity within this mental space during that fateful year 1932/1933. I propose that we explore how the cybernetic metaphor proposed by Norbert Wiener has affected the mental topology of the alphabetic mind. I want to describe the disembodied mode of perception which corresponds to the computer-boggled mindstate in contrast to the perception characteristic of the literate mind.
For this mode of conceiving and communicating among people who are high on the cybernetic metaphor, Maurice Berman has coined an excellent term. He calls this state ‘the cybernetic dream.’ Many of you will know Berman from his ‘Reenchantment of the World’ published in 1981. He is now working on a new book, on the ‘Body of History’. An article published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology gives an attractive foretaste of what is to come.
Berman recognizes the dimming of those implicit certainties by which the classical literal mind had been shaped. He calls attention to many attempts to recognize alternative modes of consciousness and observation. Most of these — in one way or another — place themselves under the umbrella of ‘New Age’ and, according to Berman, most of them have one thing in common: they encourage their followers to abandon themselves to the cybernetic dream.
Berman, in this article, comes to this conclusion by examining a set of North American authors who have recently been influential in the general public and tend to pose as disenchanted scientists. He recognizes the enormous difference in language, logic and style between Douglas Hofstadter, Frank Capra and Ken Wilber, Jeremy Rifkin or Rupert Sheldrake. Deftly he sketches their respective petterms: holographic paradigms, morphogenetic fields, real time, implicate order. And convincingly he argues that all of them rush into the same trap into which even Bateson ended when he reduced the body — towards the end of his life — into part of a monistic, mental process.
All of these authors at one point claim to offer an epistemological approach to reality that would be an alternative to the mechanistic, empiricist, value-free consciousness which each one of these authors ascribes to ‘current science’ or ‘the scientific establishment.’ In fact, however, according to Berman, these authors do nothing of this kind. Each of them, albeit in different words, interconnects another set of concepts that are related to information theory and thus creates a purely formal, abstract, disembodied system of reference which he identifies with what is going on in his own mind. This state of mind, for Berman, is best called the ‘cybernetic dream.’ It puts the mind into a state which can be accommodated to any situation at all. For Berman, the cybernetic dream brings the logic of 300 years of mechanistic science to its full fruition. I would rather say: it represents a ‘singularity’ — in the sense in which a black hole is a singularity in time-space.
Berman tells the story of a friend called Susan. It so impressed me that I cannot but elaborate on it. Susan teaches high school in Northern Florida. Many of her students have home computers. When Susan assigns a paper to these students, they run off to their machines. They feed it Susan’s ke
y words, have it retrieve materials from data banks, string these together and present them to the teacher as their homework. One afternoon, Frank, one of these students, stayed on with Susan after class. The paper that week had been on drought and hunger south of the Sahara. Frank wanted to show her more of his printouts, and at one point Susan interrupted him. She said, ‘Frank, tell me, what do you feel about this?’ Frank stared at her for a moment and then replied: ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ At this moment the abyss between Susan and Frank comes into view. Michel Foucault would have spoken about an epistemological chasm. Let me sketch her mind and his.
For Susan, a statement is an utterance; behind each utterance there is somebody who means what she says. And further, Susan cannot mean anything without feeling how this meaning is embodied. When she spells out ‘hopeless hunger’ she senses something, which she does not when she operates on ‘33.’ Therefore, for Susan, the words that make up a sentence are like the planks of a bridge to the feelings of another.