Gregorian calendar omissions
1789, 1871, 1917. Milestone points in the political history of Europe marked by three numbers. Three numbers that automatically refer to and are now identified with a corresponding number of events: the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the October Revolution. The connection of these few numbers with the historical events in question is so deep that merely citing the dates is enough to evoke in the mind of a literate, “educated” Western European an entire universe not only of events but also of interpretations, contrasts, and emotional charges. But why do these specific numbers have such power and not others? These are, of course, dates from the so-called Gregorian calendar and as such they are nothing more than a formal convention for counting time that could “simply” be replaced by another. For example, equally usable would be the numbers 1203, 1288, and 1336, which are the same dates but based on the Islamic calendar—which is lunar, hence the discrepancies in counting the years that have passed from one date to the next (e.g., 82 years between the Commune and the French Revolution according to the Gregorian calendar, but 85 according to the Islamic).
A positively oriented mind would disentangle itself from such “pointless” discussions simply by noting the compatibility of dating systems and shrugging indifferently regarding which one is preferable. A more suspicious mind might observe that here we are dealing with a case of cultural imposition of Western-European standards upon history and dating methods, a fact not unrelated to the global dominance of Christian nations. Despite the correctness of this observation, a deeper issue remains that needs explanation. Why does this need exist to place historical events on a timeline with a strict reference point, whether this point derives from Christianity, Islam, or strictly scientific dating systems, as occurs in archaeology, paleoanthropology, or cosmology? And when exactly did this need arise?
The ignorance we have regarding the most everyday issues, as well as institutions that have permeated us so deeply as to become second nature, is indeed impressive. Equally impressive and fruitful, however, proves to be the critical resurgence of the past in order to lift the successive veils of the self-evident that cover our eyes and imperceptibly direct the tropisms of our thinking. A simple investigation of these questions concerning the origins of dating systems is enough to bring to the surface a host of issues, among which is one of crucial importance for the development of European societies over the last centuries: the issue of writing technologies and, subsequently, writing techniques. Naturally, at the same time, the closely related issue of the technical and technological management of language itself inevitably arises.
In brief, then, some preliminary observations. Although the Julian calendar – the predecessor of the Gregorian – had already been invented by the 6th century AD, its use did not spread until the late Middle Ages, between the 11th and 14th centuries. A decisive role in its spread was played by the dissemination of writing techniques at the same time, even before the advent of printing. The usual method of dating until then used events with immediate experiential content as reference points, for example, as if we were to say “one generation after October” to refer to the Second World War. By allowing events to be detached from their experiential contexts and arranged in sequence on paper, writing “discovered” the need for “objective” dating systems that transcend generations and local peculiarities.
From the very interesting book by I. Illich and B. Sanders, «The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind», North Point Press, 1988.“It was necessary to reach the 13th century for notaries to begin dating a process as trivial as the transfer of ownership of a piece of land based on the birth of Our Lord and therefore to place it within the history of man’s redemption. Through this method, the history of redemption was credited with the history of the world.
As a result of this dating, time, through the text, was transformed into something new: it was no longer the subjective experience of a relative distance within the course of the world or during the worship of the scribe, but an axis of absolute reference upon which leases and statutes could be pinned like labels. By the end of the 14th century, leases could now be linked to the mechanical clock that dominated the towers. “Circiter nona pulsatione horologi (i.e., when the clock strikes nine),” the contract announced, and at exactly nine the signature was entered. Memory sprouted a new dimension. Memories could now be placed on shelves one behind the other, not based on their significance or relevance, but based on their date of issue. And in the Dance of Death, the skeleton Charon begins to appear shaking an hourglass: Entering the 15th century, he persistently reminds us that time is now a rare commodity.”
memory without writing
The connection between writing and memory had already been made since the time when Plato “cursed” writing as the technique that would lead to atrophy of human memory capabilities, even though he himself was a systematic user of writing, without which his metaphysical edifice could not have stood. 1 It took centuries all the way through to the late Middle Ages until writing finally ascended to the pedestal of mnemonic techniques and was considered the quintessentially reliable method for “storing” memories. 2 However one evaluates writing, it certainly does not constitute the sole means of handling memory, and the equation of writing with memory—according to which “societies without writing” are tantamount to “societies without memory”—acquires a kind of self-evidence only in highly literate societies that have themselves forgotten how to remember without writing—as paradoxical as that may sound. Writing thus belongs to a broad spectrum of mnemonic techniques and more specifically constitutes a distinctive way of organizing memory (and not only) according to specific patterns, with its own demands; something like a paradigm for organizing memory. 3
And from all the techniques of memory, however, those connected in some way with speech, whether oral or written, occupy a part of the spectrum but certainly not the whole; the body itself is that primary medium which in all societies, however culturally and technologically developed they may be, “accumulates” and “stores” memories. 4 Every society invents and cultivates methods of retaining collective memory (which inevitably translates into individual memory) through bodily techniques, to use Marcel Mauss’s terminology, for its most varied activities: from the simplest, such as walking, to the most complex, such as giving birth. 5 Even gestures or body posture employed on a daily basis bear the mark of collective memory; and to realize this, one only needs to observe oneself when alone at home compared to one’s behavior in a public service. The ways of good behavior, even the use of a fork at the table, are nothing else but the result of a long process of learning them, as took place in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, imbued with specific moral values. Eating with one’s hands, as still customary in many Arab countries, causes disgust only in those whose bodily collective memory has constructed the corresponding reflexes of nausea. Beyond these techniques of adapting the body to cultural imperatives, there exists simultaneously another series of practices with a more direct collective reference. Here, of course, we refer to the rich world of rituals which, especially in the more “primitive” societies, mark every critical phase of collective life and often constitute an ark of collective knowledge as well as a fundamental tool for making sense of the world. In technologically advanced societies of high labor specialization, rituals have lost much of their luster and power, but they are not completely absent. Those of you accustomed to watching matches, especially by going to the stadium, think about whether you are simply having fun or whether you are simultaneously participating in a ritual…
The concept of ritual now introduces us to forms of memory where the element of spoken word also comes into play, as these are often accompanied by recitations of liturgical hymns or even incomprehensible phrases. Yet again, ritual speech differs greatly from the concept of speech we are familiar with: that of an ordered sequence of symbols. It is a kind of speech that retains strong elements of physicality, through its repetitive structure with its strict rhythmic and metric demands which often inspire dance-like movements. Not coincidentally, it is a similar kind of speech that eventually leads to humanity’s first great – and oral – literary works: the epics. The idea that there must be an author behind the epics (or at least multiple authors who followed one another) was almost unquestioningly accepted until recent research highlighted the centrality of orality in their composition. 6 The mnemonic feats of the rhapsodes were not due to some monstrous “photographic” memory, nor was their main concern the literal reproduction of the epics. On the contrary, they immersed themselves in a collectively inherited repository of formulae – standardized phrases with specific metric forms that were easily memorized – and narrative patterns, so they could reconstruct a story accurately in general terms but never in exactly the same way. The strong doses of improvisation (as still happens in live music) were imposed not only by some inability to recall precisely, but were also deliberate, depending on the audience to which the rhapsode was addressing – and the term rhapsode, by the way, meaning one who stitches together and joins, ultimately proves far more accurate for the epics than that of “author.”
In any case, one could enumerate many similar mnemonic practices, but there is a crucial observation that must be made at this point. The use of the words “accumulation” and “storage,” as done above, can only be made entirely metaphorically when referring to such practices, hence the quotation marks. In such bodily techniques, physical or even verbal memories are not arranged in a sequence to be recalled at will, nor is a memory an abstract and symbolized piece of information stored somewhere; rather, its recall is inextricably tied to the performance of an act. Memory is identified with an action, which means that any form of storage or accumulation is either impossible or, in other words, memory possesses an inherent and irreducible use-value. At the same time, the identification of recall with action is accompanied by another identification, that between collective and individual memory, without this implying that forms of individual memory do not exist, but rather that these do not carry significant social meaning (e.g., the concept of a personal diary or autobiography is unthinkable). It is the collective present that imposes what and how something is worth retaining, transforming, and reproducing; as if to say that the past has never been definitively judged but always awaits the present to find its meaning. 7 It took something as simple as a piece of paper and a pen, two simple tools that introduce suspension and distance (as always with tools), to shift the meaning of discourse. 8
writing, language and memory
Speaking about writing so far, we have essentially referred to a specific definition of it, the one that sees it consisting of a series of visual symbols from which words or more or less precise meanings can be derived. For analytical and methodological reasons we will stick to this definition, however some clarifications are needed. From a historical point of view, this type of writing probably appeared around 3500 BC in the region of Mesopotamia in the form of cuneiform symbols and the purposes it served were probably of an accounting nature (e.g., counting products). But this does not mean that it appeared suddenly, as an invention of some merchants or bureaucrats. Before cuneiform writing, there was a long evolution in the techniques of visual representation and depiction of meanings and the reality is that there is no strict criterion that separates what should be considered writing and what visual representation that does not have the characteristics of writing. It seems quite likely that the ancestor of writing was painting itself, as early as 35,000 years ago, initially in the form of rhythmic engraved patterns and subsequently in more naturalistic versions of it.9 Its primary function therefore was not accounting, but ritualistic – magical. Seeing today remnants of this type of “live-writing” (living writing), such as in the famous cave paintings of Lascaux, it is difficult to extract any meaning and to perceive them as (dead) writing. However, the signs of spears on the painted animals provide a clue: these were depictions that were parts of magical practices and therefore the reconstruction of meaning still required the active presence of the painter – “author” and his group.
Writing as a system of symbols with unambiguous meaning emerged through multiple stages of abstraction, stripping external meanings from primitive pictorial representations, eventually leading to the type of alphabetic writing familiar to us. Even in this case, echoes of that “primitive” past are sometimes retained. Semitic alphabets, for example, contain symbols only for consonants, while vowels must be supplied by the reader himself. It is as if we were writing in Greek “ββλ” and “ββλθκ” and the reader had to orally reconstruct the words “βιβλίο” (book) and “βιβλιοθήκη” (library). This is a type of alphabet that is not as difficult to handle as it might seem at first glance; however, there is one condition: that the reader already commands the language of the text, having first spoken it himself so that the completion of the vowels occurs effortlessly. It was precisely this requirement that the phonetic writing of the ancient Greeks finally managed to eliminate with their complete alphabet. And this is not merely a curious historical detail, but a genuine turning point in writing techniques. Try to read the word “λμπρρ.” And then the same word, filled in with the missing vowels: “λάιμπραρυ.” The “λάιμπραρυ” could easily be read by a Greek speaker, without knowing a single English word; not so the “λμπρρ.” This is not wordplay, but an example of how phonetic writing allows the pronunciation of a word even if the reader does not recognize it. Or, put differently, how phonetic writing can extract a word from its context and from its experiential references. If pictography was the primary, living script, phonetic writing was the primary digitization of language, the medium of transition from the living and ephemeral to the dead and reusable language – borrowing the Marxist schema of living–dead labor. It is the point at which memory itself can now be stored and subsequently recalled without the presence of the author, without the (Benjaminian) “aura” of the original utterance. And if memory can now be identified with (dead) language, it takes only a small step for thought itself to be identified with this kind of language, and ultimately for the abstract Reason (Logos) to be placed at the apex of the philosophical structures of ancient Greece.
Once it became possible to master language through its segmentation into consonants and vowels, the path to its standardization was open. The first grammars, although heavily philological in character, already appeared in Hellenistic times. Medieval societies, however, remained to a large extent oral, with writing primarily concerning sacred texts. As already mentioned in the introduction, only toward the end of the Middle Ages (and before printing), with the help of technical advances in paper production, did writing acquire a new status, as legal validity began to be attributed to documents – until then, a written text not only lacked reliability but was also a target of suspicion, since what it stated could not be supported through live presence. Shortly after the invention of printing 10, the first grammar of a modern European language made its appearance: the famous Gramática Castellana by Antonio de Nebrija. The difference was that this grammar now had clear legal-regulatory intentions, since its explicit purpose was to impose a uniform, “correct” language on the subjects of the Spanish Crown, as it began to be structured according to the logic of the state, purged of the idiosyncrasies of local dialects. The dead language now enters the service of the state.
the reproduction of language… and its production
We took a somewhat extended journey through the history of writing because without it, it would probably be difficult to see that the complex interplay of writing–memory–language has multiple nuances beyond simple identification. Memory has bodily dimensions that transcend the limits of language, whether oral or written. Thought, only under a very narrow and essentially tautological definition, can coincide with language, unless one considers memory as thought… But language itself can be perceived from different perspectives, and its grammatical understanding already presupposes writing—and indeed, a specific kind of writing. Moreover, this retrospective helps bring into clearer view the dichotomy between living and dead language, a dichotomy that does not necessarily aspire to carry evaluative overtones. It is, to begin with, an analytical distinction. One could convincingly argue that a purely oral society, such as the majority of human societies until today, sets certain unacceptable limits upon itself, since without writing it seems impossible to develop abstract, analytical thinking, science itself, or even history. Yet the question can also be reversed: What would it mean for a society if its functions were subordinated to the logic of writing and of dead language? Is this perhaps a sophistic question or a thought exercise without substance? In our view, no—and this is precisely what we will argue, initially in the form of a programmatic stance: one of the stakes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the subordination of social functions to the logic of dead language.
Until the advent of photography, the phonograph, and cinema, the medium of the written word was fundamental for the “transmission of information,” and rightly one could speak of a dominance of writing. Since then, especially after television first entered homes and computers followed, an endemic proliferation of audio and visual stimuli occurred, to such an extent that one could speak of a return to orality. 11 Indeed, this becomes evident at first glance when comparing the power of television relative to newspapers or the popularity of films relative to novels; not to mention the multimedia stream of the internet.
However, because phenomena tend to be deceptive sometimes, a deeper examination of this issue is needed. The escape from writing and the return to orality could indeed be considered as real phenomena… until the 3rd industrial revolution: the (first) information revolution. In the decades that have elapsed since then, the process of digitization has advanced to such a degree that no “type of information” whatsoever, neither (still or moving) images nor sound, is conceivable unless it has first been converted into digital form. What may not always be obvious is that when we talk about digitization, we are essentially also talking about linguification. The language of computers differs considerably from any natural language, yet it does not cease to be a language. In fact, it has all the characteristics of a dead language, and moreover in its purest form. It consists of sequences of discrete symbols, storable and potentially reproducible ad infinitum with perfect accuracy, where meaning has reached the maximum possible degree of clarity – in fact, univocity is not merely a result of digitization but a condition of its operation. Therefore, when reference is made to “multimedia,” an asterisk should always be added indicating that, at a meta-level, what is essentially happening is the intensive monoculture of one medium: that of written, dead language.
A different name for this necro-translation of stimuli could also be the “commodification of the senses.” Since every stimulus can be fragmented, stored, and accumulated, only a small step remains until the imposition of an exchange value upon it—an inevitable step that has of course already been taken. It is not merely about labor power that has become a commodity, nor about products that are forcibly consumed through the senses. At the center are the senses themselves: a total immersion of the body into the logic of exchange, even when not directly participating in the traditional circuits of commodities. 12 Now, in a second phase, the issue of meaning emerges insistently—that is, the integration of stimuli into an explanatory and coherent framework. Despite declarations about the interactivity of new media, it is no coincidence that when attempts at participatory inclusion of users occur on a mass scale, the final results are extremely poor. Participation is exhausted in choosing from a pre-fabricated list of alternatives. Even a simple browsing session on the internet, without active participation—especially when done absentmindedly rather than purposefully—can reveal more than what initially meets the eye. How many have actually considered what it means that the next YouTube video is already prepared for consumption in the recommended list, and that autoplay selection is already enabled? And how often have you let YouTube “take you on a journey” to new music? Given that stimuli have already been linked together in a sequence on behalf of the user without them even having (directly) participated in constructing it, how far is this from the logic of ready-made meaning?
Taking this line of thought one step further, an even more provocative question arises: are we perhaps facing a paradigm shift in the very functioning of memory itself, a transitional phase from memory as “metabolism” to memory as “reproduction of the same”? To put it more simply, there is a particular conception of memory, as we have already noted, which sees it as keeping the past in a state of non-definitive signification, a battlefield of contestation that must remain open and be judged anew in every present moment through a continuous process of “metabolism.” 13 We are of course speaking about an eminently political memory that refuses to consign the past to the winners of history because it refuses to regard the signification of the past as a concluded event. Yet when meaning arrives on the computer screen with delivery, pre-cooked and packaged, memory is rendered lifeless within a logic of recall and reproduction of what already exists.
And if what we have already described as “gloomy” could be attributed to the logic of reproduction in general, without necessarily presupposing digitization and glossification, there is another dimension of the issue that would probably not exist without them. We refer to the possibility of programming, that is, to the possibility of repetitive application of the same (linguistic) processing on a massive scale. It is rather obvious what possibilities of handling and control are opened up through programming, especially from the moment when a universal subsumption of the social within the digital language is attempted.
Here we will pause on a historical “paradox” of writing that may bring to the surface a challenge of pivotal significance for the 4th industrial revolution. We have become accustomed to perceiving mass production as the ultimate result of the “refinement” of production methods developed during the 1st and 2nd industrial revolutions—and from both historical and social perspectives, such a perception is indeed justified. However, the first machine of mass production was not some mechanical loom or the assembly line of an automobile industry, but the printing press. The first product of mass reproduction was the written word. Where does the paradox lie in this observation? In the fact that, while the written word was at the forefront of mass reproduction, it did not follow this development to its final consequence, known as mass production. It retained a distinction that in other sectors had already begun to be abolished from the early 20th century: the distinction between the production of an original crafted by a human and the mechanical reproduction of copies. In mass automobile production, for instance, such a distinction makes no sense; production and reproduction essentially coincide, thus rendering production meaningless if it is not carried out on a mass scale.
What the 3rd industrial revolution managed to do was to enhance to the extreme the capabilities of reproducing written, digital language and to subordinate to it the most diverse aspects of reality, always requiring, however, at the beginning of the digitization process, the presence of a human programmer who crafts the original algorithm. What the 4th industrial revolution promises, on the other hand, is the development of smart algorithmic systems that will be able to learn on their own, that will be able to linguistically articulate reality automatically, minimizing the presence of the language craftsman and the need for a prototype. From another perspective, what seems to be promised is the ultimate “logical” consequence of the evolution of language techniques and technologies: the unification of the production and reproduction of language within a single process. And here another “paradox” arises, which, from a capitalist point of view, is absolutely expected. The inevitable inflation of such a mass-produced language cannot but lead to its devaluation and transformation into a general communicative equivalent; and, as with all general equivalents, its undervaluation in the first instance and its revaluation in the second. The natural languages of the future may not need to be stretched on the Procrustean bed of a homogeneous grammar; it is quite unlikely that there will also be a revival of interest in local dialects and exotic languages. However, this will have become possible only after all natural languages have first passed through the deathbed of their digitization.
Separatrix
cyborg #12 – 6/2018