Mihai Nadin

“ Belonging, in this new sense, means going beyond the powerless viewing of political events that seem as alien as almost all the mass-media performances they are fed with. Belonging itself is redefined, becoming a matter of choice, not accident. Belonging goes beyond watching the news and political events on TV, beyond the impotence we feel with respect to the huge political machine. All these can happen as a private, very intense experience, or as interaction with others, physically present or not. To see the world differently can lead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint. ”

“ Not by any stretch of the imagination is politics a harmonizing activity, because to live with others, to enter a contract and pursue one's individual goals within its limitations, means to accept a condition of a sui generis trade-off. Political experiences involve, in various degrees, skills and knowledge for giving life and legitimacy to trade-offs. Language is the blood that flows through the arteries of the political animal. When tamed by literacy, this language defines a very precise realm of political life. ”

“ At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequence of questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacy hold in terms of helping us to process information? What does reading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot be obtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that we cannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method of communication, where we use television and its still unexploited resources of communication? [...] Is it impossible to conceive of a generation that has received its knowledge of the world and itself through television?" ”

“ To preach that in order to be a good architect one has to know history and biology and mathematics, and to know who Vitruvius was, equals preaching the rules of literacy in a world that effectively does not need them. To create an environment for the revelation of such a need, if indeed it is acknowledged as humans discover new ways to deal with their questions, is a very different task. How much reading, how much writing, mathematics, drawing, foreign language, or chemistry an architect needs is the wrong question. ”

“ Equal representation, as applied to members of minority students or faculty, ethnic groups, sexes or sexual preferences, and the handicapped, introduces a false sense of democracy in education. It takes away the very edge of their specific chances from the people it pretends to help and encourage. Instead of acknowledging distinctions, expectations of equal representation suggest that the more melting in the pot, the better for society, regardless of whether the result is uniform mediocrity or distributed excellence. ”

“ To what extent does the desire to have a family reveal characteristics of human self-constitution in the current context? In a world in which there is a high rate of births out of wedlock, a world in which the traditional family is no guarantee of relationships free of abuse and exploitation, a world with great numbers of children in orphanages or in foster care, any desire to place children in a loving family context is worthy of attention.
What constitutes a family in an age whose pragmatics is not defined by the values perpetuated in and through literacy? ”

“ Betting, with its partial literacy involving its own mediating elements that render reading and writing useless, is not a new institution. People were challenged by the odds down through history. But once the structural change that entailed means of networking, task distribution, and almost instant access to any event in the world was in place, the experience of betting totally took over that of competing. All our unfulfilled desires and drives are now embodied by those we choose to represent us, and for whose victory we not only root, but also invest in. ”

“ From whatever angle we look at language and literacy, we come back to the people who commit themselves in the practical experience of their self-constitution. While the relation of people to language is symptomatic of their general condition, to understand how and why this relation changes is to understand how and why human beings change. With the ideal of literacy, we inherited the illusion that to understand human beings is to understand human language. It is actually the other way around-if we understand language as a dynamic practical experience in its own right. ”

“ In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seems demonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain for the environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced by new machines. That people eventually become addicted to the products of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designer fashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At other times, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize the efficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting a challenging sense of quality against the background of our obsession with more at the lowest price. ”

“ Nevertheless, as much as we would like to be considered as individuals, each with our own dignity, personality, opinions, emotions, and pains, we ourselves undermine our expectations in our striving for more and more, at a price lower than what it costs society to distinguish us. Scale dictates anonymity, and probably mediocrity. Ignorance of literacy's role in centuries of productive human life dictates that it is time to unload the literacy-reflected experiences for which there is no reference in the new pragmatic context. ”

“ One can imagine a city built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire. One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials, even new human beings. ”

“ The shorter fashion cycles, the permanent renewal of design forms, the 30-second drama or comedy of advertisement-more appropriate to the rhythms of existence than never-ending soap-operas-the new VLSI board, the craze for designer non-alcoholic beer or low-fat pork-all testify to a renewal speed met by what seems an inexhaustible appetite on the side of our current commercial democracy. The refresh rate of images on our TV sets and computer monitors, predicated by the intrinsic characteristics of technology and human biology, is probably the extreme at which cycles of change can settle. ”

“ Lawyers, journalists, the military, and politicians worry about the role and functions of language in society. Probably most concerned with their own roles in the social structure and with the legitimacy of their institutions, they would preserve those structures of human activity that justify literacy and thus their own positions of power and influence. The few who believe that literacy comprises not only skills, but also ideals and values, say that the destiny of our civilization is at stake, and that the decline in literacy has dreadful implications. ”

“ 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 anticipate, 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. ”

“ In no other part of the world, and under no other regime, were so many people subjected to literacy. That the system failed should not lead anyone to ignore some of the achievements of the people regimented under a flag they did not care for: fascinating art, interesting poetry and music, the massive collection and preservation of folklore, spectacular mathematics, physics, and chemistry arose from beneath terror and censorship. To survive as an artist, writer, or scientist meant to force creativity where almost no room for it was left. ”

“ We can use a hammer or a computer, but we are our language. The experience of language extends to the experience of the logic it embodies, as well as to that of the institutions that language and literacy made possible. These, in turn, influence what we are and how we think, what we do and why we do. So does every tool, appliance, and machine we use, and so do all the people with whom we interact. Our interactions with people, with nature, or with artifacts we ourselves generated further affect the pragmatic self-constitution of our identity. ”

“ Each of us is so different that the main function of education should be not to minimize differences through literacy and literacy-based strategies that support a false sense of democracy, but to identify and maximize differences. This will provide the foundation for an education that allows each student to develop according to possibilities evinced through the relations, language-based or not, that people enter into. The content of education, understood as process, should be the experience, and the associated means of creating and understanding it. ”

“ Is it permissible, indeed responsible, to assume that a new philosophy of education will generate new student attitudes, especially in view of the reality of metal detectors installed in schools to prevent students from carrying weapons? Is it credible to describe experiences in discovery involving high aesthetic quality, while mediocrity makes the school system appear hopelessly damned? Self-motivation is described as though teenage pregnancy and classes where students bring their babies are the concern of underpaid teachers but not of visionaries. ”

“ And as the Internet effectively maps our journey through a maze of data, information, and sources of knowledge, we can ask whether such cognitive maps are not too valuable to be abandoned to marketing experts, instead being utilized for understanding what makes us tick as we search for a word, an image, an experience. Data regarding how and what we buy is not always representative of what we are. For many people, buying a book or a work of art, a fashionable shirt, a home, or a car is only an experience in mediation performed by the agents of these objects. ”

“ Without an understanding that encompasses our values and ways of thinking, we cannot perceive how a civilization can progress to illiteracy. Many people are willing to be part of post- literate society, but by no means are they willing to be labeled members of a civilization qualified as illiterate.
By civilization of illiteracy I mean one in which literate characteristics no longer constitute the underlying structure of effective practical experiences. Furthermore, I mean a civilization in which no one literacy dominates, as it did until around the turn of the century, and still does. ”

“ In the context in which efficiency expectations translate into a practical experience of an unprecedented degree of specialization, will philosophy turn into another mediating activity among people? Or will it be, as it was considered in the culture of a Romantic ideal, humanity's self-consciousness, as expressed in Hegel's philosophy? If indeed philosophy is absorbed into science, what can its purpose be?
As with literacy, the inclination is to suggest that, regardless of the new condition of language, philosophy remains possible and is indeed relevant. ”

“ In order to function effectively in a society of very specialized patterns of interaction, people realize that a trade-off between liberties and constraints is inescapable. On the level of social and cultural life, people realize that constraints, represented by accepted prejudices and ideologies, impinge upon their limited space of decision-making and infringe upon individual integrity. Language turned out to be not only the medium for expressing liberating ideals, but also a stubborn embodiment of old and new prejudices. ”

“ Literacy is not a prerequisite for sports performance. It might actually interfere with it. In the world of competitions, sportsmen and sportswomen are either jetting around the globe or traveling from one exhibition game to another, barely able to breathe, never mind to take care of their literacy or their private lives. Their language is one of pitiful limitation, always inferior to the energy spent in the effort or externalized in frustration when the rules don't work in their favor. They don't read, they don't write. ”

“ While some fail to notice the decreased role of literacy and the deterioration of language in our life today, others surrender to illiteracy without even being aware of their surrender. We live in a world in which many people-especially those with more than undergraduate college education-complain about the low level of literacy while they simultaneously acquiesce to methods and necessities that make literacy less and less significant. Furthermore, when invoking literacy, people maintain a nostalgia for something that has already ceased to affect their lives. ”

“ Think of the Mullah chanting evening prayers at the top of a minaret; or of the priest addressing a congregation; of the president of a nation using the powerful means of television, or of a spammer on the Internet, distributing messages to millions of e-mail addresses. Each communication is framed in a context constituting its parameters of pre-understanding. To the majority, spam means no more than chopped meat in a can. Even today, over 50% of the world's people have never used a telephone. And with some 50 million people on the Internet, Netizenship is more vision than reality. ”

“ Humanity has reached a new stage: We are less grounded in nature and tradition. This condition takes some of the wind out of the sails of memetics. Practical experiences of human self-constitution extended the human phenotype beyond that of any other known species. But this extension is not the sum total of genetic and cultural evolution. It is of a different quality that neither genetic nor memetic replication suggests, let alone explains. Our obsession is to surpass the limitations of the past, cultural as well as natural. ”

“ In a different vein, the sanctity of life celebrated in Taoism, as well as in Judaism and Christianity, ends at the doors of the shiny palace of cheap, replaceable values of planned obsolescence, eventually of the human being itself. In hope of redemption, many give their lives, probably not understanding that they close the cycle of potential practical experiences just as drug addicts, suicidals, and murderers do, obviously in different contexts and with different motivations. ”