This is the sixth in a series of notes to eleven lectures for my class Technology and Culture.

 

F o s c o a s e v e

y e a
a g o o u f a

t h e b r o u f o o t h i c o t i n e a n u n a t i o n c o n c e i v e i n l i b e t y a d e d i c a t e t o t h e p r o p o s i t i o n t h a t a m e a c r e a t e e q u

 

  1. Two related arguments addressed to all theoreticians of the inevitable consequences of
     
    1. scripting (recording speech through technological means)
    2. printing (industrializing the production of "scripted" language)
    3. literacy (access to scripted language)

      4.  

    against

    1. a primary focus on efficiency ("the best" script for a language, or for communication in general)
    2. an emphasis on progressive possibilities (examination systems in China and Euro- America, institutionalization of esoteric forms in Korea, etc.)

      3.  
  2. Two views of the core of human existence: utilitarian (developed) vs. poetic (cultured).
     
    1. From Wittfogel and Goody even unto the humanist Ong a sense that humanity has been driven by something that allows it to transcend original conditions in a direction of further complexity, interdependence and, altogether, progress even if, in the historical movement, massive individual suffering does occur.
    2. With McDermott, among many others, the realization that the drive to transform conditions may be driven less by necessity than by play if not poetry, but play that is "deep" in the sense of "depth" that Geertz brought forward into anthropology from economics and political science:

      Bentham's concept of "deep play" is found in his The Theory of Legislation (1931). By it he means play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint irrational for men to engage in it at all. If a man whose fortune is a thousand pounds wages five hundred of it on an even bet, the marginal utility of the pound he stands to win is clearly less than the marginal disutility of the one he stands to lose... Having come together in search of pleasure [both participants] have entered into a relationshipw which will bring the participants, considered collectively, net pain rather than net pleasures. (Geertz 1973 [1972]: 432)

      (and more on causality in human productions)
       

  3. The ethnographic examples:
     
    1. the Hanunoo: "reading for love" a script badly suited for the language that people use for nothing else than love.

      2. Note that while this case may seem "odd" when presented as characteristic of a whole society, it is quite common a case in complex societies as potentialities within a group or age-categories: many people used their letter writing (poetry writing) skills mostly during their own courtships (and may have preserved this production much longer and with more care than any other). One might wonder about the use of e-mail in courtship...

    2. the Chinese (Euro-America): "reading to fail" scripts more or less well suited for languages but made ever more esoteric in various ways with mechanisms to evaluate the competence of individuals with major social consequences being attached to the evaluation.
      3. (See Varenne & McDermott, 1998)
       
    The emphasis here is on the extent to which
     
    1. "scripting" (writing before the printing press) and
    2. "printing" (literacy after the full development of print technologies, including the printing press and cheap paper both in the literal (machines) and metaphorical (distribution of opinion) senses,

      3.  

    can be used to do much more than what they appear to be most useful for, or than what they may have been invented for.

    Thus the invention of the printing press to publish the Bible obviously had massive implication for Christianity first, and now perhaps for other religions as their texts are also made easily available. While this has been said repeatedly, while literacy may liberate individuals from certain elites, it may produce new forms of elites controlling access to power through other means--e.g. exams measuring literacy.

  4. In other words, the power of a technology like script-print-press is not inherent in the technology but in the manner of its sequencing within a social world. In that sense the technology is not determinant. Rather it is a resource, an aspect of the human ecology at a particular time that must be taken into account by all involved, whatever their positions. All have to take it into account, and have to take into account what others in a divided, complex, society might make with the technology.
    1. The indeterminacy of weapons:
      1. firearms in Japan
      2. the Chinese fleet of 1421