In the preceding chapter we discussed the development of technoeconomic
organization and the establishment of social machinery closely connected
with the evolution of techniques. Here I propose to consider the evolution
of a fact that emerged together with Homo sapiens in the development of
anthropoids: the capacity to express thought in material symbols. Countless
studies have been devoted to, respectively, figurative art and writing,
but the links between them are often ill defined. It has therefore occurred
to me that there might be some profit in attempting to analyze those links
within a general perspective. In part III we shall consider the aesthetic
aspects of rhythms and values, but here, as we near the end of a long reflection
principally concerned with the material essence of humans, it may be useful
to consider how the system that provides human society with the means of
permanently preserving the fruits of individual and collective thought
came slowly into being.
There is a most important fact to be learned from the very earliest graphic
signs. In chapters 2 and 3 we saw that the bipolar technicity of many vertebrates
culminated in anthropoids in the forming of two functional pairs (hand/tools,
face/ language), making the motor function of the hand and of the face
the decisive factor in the process of modeling of thought into instruments
of material action, on the one hand, and into sound symbols, on the other.
The emergence of graphic signs at the end of the Palaeoanthropians' reign
presupposes the establishment of a new relationship between the two operating
poles--a relationship exclusively characteristic of humanity in the narrow
sense, that is to say, one that meets the requirements of mental symbolization
to the same extent as today. In this new relationship the sense
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of vision holds the dominant place in the pairs "face/reading"
and "hand/graphic sign." This relationship is indeed exclusively
human: While it can at a pinch be claimed that tools are not unknown to
some animal species and that language merely represents the step after
the vocal signals of the animal world, nothing comparable to the writing
and reading of symbols existed before the dawn of Homo sapiens We can therefore
say that while motor function determines expression in the techniques and
language of all anthropoids, in the figurative language of the most recent
anthropoids reflection determines graphism.
The earliest traces date back to the end of the Mousterian period and become
plentiful in the Chatelperronian, toward 35,000 B.C. They appear simultaneously
with dyes (ocher and manganese) and with objects of adornment. They take
the form of tight curves or series of lines engraved in bone or stone,
small equidistant incisions that provide evidence of figurative representation
moving away from the concretely figurative and proof of the earliest rhythmic
manifestations. No meaning can be attached to the very flimsy pieces of
evidence available to us (figure 82). They have been interpreted as "hunt
tallies," a form of account keeping, but there is no substantial proof
in the past or present to support this hypothesis. The only comparison
that might possibly be drawn is with the Australian churingas, stone or
wood tablets engraved with abstract designs (spirals, straight lines, and
clusters of dots) and representing the body of the mystic ancestor or the
places where the myth unfolds (figure 83). Two aspects of the churinga
seem relevant to the interpretation of Paleolithic "hunting tallies":
first, the abstract nature of the representation, which, as we shall see,
is also characteristic of the oldest known art, and, second, the fact that
the churinga concretizes an incantatory recitation and serves as its supporting
medium, the officiating priest touching the figures with the tips of his
fingers as he recites the words. Thus the churinga draws upon two sources
of expression, that of verbal (rhythmic) motricity and that of graphism
swept along by the same rhythmic process. Of course my argument is not
that Upper Paleolithic incisions and Australian churingas are one and the
same thing, but only that among the possible interpretations, that of a
rhythmic system of an incantatory or declamatory nature may be envisaged.
If there is one point of which we may be absolutely sure, it is that graphism
did not begin with naive representations of reality but with abstraction.
The discovery of prehistoric art in the late nineteenth century raised
the issue of a "naive" state, an art by which humans supposedly
represented what they saw as a result of a kind of aesthetic triggering
effect. It was soon realized near the beginning of this century that this
view was mistaken and that magical-religious concerns were responsible
for the figurative art of the Cenozoic Era, as indeed they are for all
art except in a few rare
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83
82. Paleolithic inasions on bone, known as "hunting tallies."
(a) Chatellperronian, (b)Aurignacian, (c) Solutrean. 83.. Australian churingas
(after B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen). (1) Circles represent trees, and dotted
circles represent the cancers' steps; lines d represent rhythmically struck
sticks, and e the cancers' movements. (2, 3) Churinga of a chief of the
honey-ant totem: (a) the eye, (b) the intestines, (c) the paint on the
ant's chest, (d) the back, (e) a small bird, connected with the honey ant.
Figure 82 supports the evidence supplied by this figure that representations
relating to a verbal and gestural context, like those of the churingas,
may be completely lacking in realistic figurative content.
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periods of advanced cultural maturity. However, it was discovered more
recently that the Magdalenian records on which the idea of Paleolithic
realism is based were produced at what was already a very late stage of
figurative art: They date to between 11,000 and 8000 B.C., whereas the
true beginning belongs to before 30,000. A fact of particular relevance
in our present context is that graphism certainly did not start by reproducing
reality in a slavishly photographic manner. On the contrary, we see it
develop over the space of some ten thousand years from signs which, it
would appear, initially expressed rhythms rather than forms. The first
forms, confined to a few stereotyped figures in which only a few conventional
details allow us to hazard to identify an animal, did not appear until
around 30,000 B.C. All this suggests that in its origins figurative art
was directly linked with language and was much closer to writing (in the
broadest sense) than to what we understand by a work of art. It was symbolic
transposition, not copying of reality; in other words, the distance that
lies between a drawing in which a group agrees to recognize a bison and
the bison itself is the same as the distance between a word and a tool.
In both signs and words, abstraction reflects a gradual adaptation of the
motor system of expression to more and more subtly differentiated promptings
of the brain. The earliest known paintings do not represent a hunt, a dying
animal, or a touching family scene, they are graphic building blocks without
any descriptive binder, the support medium of an irretrievably lost oral
context.
Prehistoric art records are very numerous, and statistical processing of
a large mass of data whose chronological order is more or less definitely
established enables us to unravel, if not to decipher, the general meaning
of what is represented. The thousand variations of prehistoric art revolve
round what is probably a mythological scene in which images of animals
and representations of men and women confront and complement each other.
The animals appear to form a couple in which the bison is contrasted with
the horse, while the human beings are identified by symbols that are highly
abstract figurative representations of sexual characteristics (figure 91
and part II, figure 143). Having arrived at such a definition of the content
of prehistoric art, we are in a far better position to understand the connection
between abstraction and the earliest graphic symbols.
Rhythmic series of lines or dots continued to be produced until the end
of the Upper Paleolithic. Parallel with these, the first figures begin
to appear in the Aurignacian period about 30,000 B.C. They are, to date,
the oldest works of art in the whole
191
of human history, and we are surprised to discover that their content implies
a conventionality inconceivable without concepts already highly organized
by language. The content then is already very complex, but the execution
is skill rudimentary: In the best samples, animal heads and sexual symbols-already
highly stylized-are superimposed on one another pell-mell.
During the next (Gravettian) stage, toward 20,000 B.C., the figures become
more deliberately organized. Animals are rendered by the outline of their
cervicodorsal curve with the addition of details characteristic of particular
species (bison's horns, mammoth's trunk, horse's mane, etc.). The content
of the groups of figures remains the same as before, but it is more skillfully
expressed. In the Solutrean period, toward 15,000 B.C., engravers or painters
are in full possession of their technical resources, which barely differ
from those of engravers or painters of today. The meaning of the figures
has not changed, and the walls or decorated slabs show countless variations
on the theme of two animals and of a man and a woman. However, a curious
development has taken place: The representations of human beings seem to
have lost all their realist/c character and are now oriented toward the
triangles, rectangles, and rows of lines or dots with which the walls of
Lascaux, for example, are covered. The animals, on the other hand, are
developing little by little toward realism of form and movement, although-for
all that may have been said and written about the realism of the animals
of Lascaux-in the Solutrean they are still far from achieving such realism.
In technical skill and mythological content these figures are indeed products
of the "Paleolithic Middle Ages," but it would be an error to
compare these groups of works to the frescoes of our medieval basilicas
or to easel paintings. They are really "mythograms," closer to
ideograms than to pictograms and closer to pictograms than to descriptive
art.
So far as human figures are concerned, the Magdalenian between 11,000 and
8000 B.C.-the period of the great series of cave paintings of Altamira
and Niaux- sometimes exhibits a still closer connection with the ideogram
and at other times a categorical return to realist/c representation. As
for the animals, they are swept along on a current in which the artist's
skill will eventually (at the time of Altamira) result in a certain academism
of form and later, shortly before the end of the period, to a mannered
realism that renders movement and form with photographic precision. The
art of this later period was the first to become known, thus giving rise
to the idea of primitive or "naive" realism.
Paleolithic art, with its enormously long time frame and its abundant records,
provides evidence that is irreplaceable for understanding the real nature
of artistic figurative representation and of writing: What appear to be
two divergent tracks start
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ing at the birth of the agricultural economy in reality form only one.
It is extreme! curious to find that symbolic expression achieves its highest
level soon after its earliest beginnings in the Aurignacian (figures 84
to 87). We see art split away from writing, as it were, and follow a trajectory
that, starting in abstraction, gradually establishes conventions of form
and movement and then, at the end of the curve, achieves realism and eventually
collapses. The development of the arts in historic times has so often followed
the same course that we are forced to recognize the existence of a general
tendency or cycle of maturation-and also to recognize that abstraction
is indeed the source of graphic expression. The question of the return
of the arts to abstraction on a newly rethought basis will be discussed
in chapter 14, where we shall see that the search for pure rhythmicity,
for the nonfigurative in modern art and poetry (born as it was of the contemplation
of the errs of living primitive peoples), represents a regressive escape
into the haven of primitive reactions as much as it does a new departure.
As we just saw, figurative art is inseparable from language and proceeds
from the pairing of phonation with graphic expression. Therefore the object
of phonation and graphic expression obviously was the same from the very
outset. A part-perhaps the most important part-of figurative art is accounted
for by what, for want of a better word, I propose to call "picto-ideography."
Four thousand years of linear writing have accustomed us to separating
art from writing, so a real effort of abstraction has to be made before,
with the help of all the works of ethnography written in the past fifty
years, we can recapture the figurative attitude that was and skill is shared
by all peoples excluded from phonetization and especially from linear writing
The linguists who studied the origins of writing often applied a mentality
born of the practice of writing to the consideration of pictograms. It
is interesting to note that the only true "pictograms" we know
are of recent origin and that most of them resulted from contacts between
ethnic groups without any writing with travelers or colonizers from countries
with writing (figures 88 to 90): Eskimo or Amerindian pictograms are therefore
not suitable terms of comparison for acquiring an understanding of the
ideograms of peoples who lived before writing was invented. Furthermore
the origins of writing have often been linked to the memorization of numerical
values (regular notches, knotted ropes, etc.). While alphabetic linearization
may indeed have been related from the start to numbering devices which
of necessity were lin-
195
ear, the same is not true of the earliest figurative symboism. That is
why I am inclined to consider pictography as something other than writing
in its "infancy."
Through an increasingly precise process of analysis, human thought is capable
of abstracting symbols from reality. These symbols constitute the world
of language which parallels the real world and provides us with our means
of coming to grips with reality. By the time of the Upper Paleolithic,
reflective thought-which had found concrete expression, probably from the
very start, in the vocal language and mimicry of the anthropoids-was capable
of representation, so humans could now express themselves beyond the immediate
present. Two languages, both springing from the same source, came into
existence at the two poles of the operating field- the language of hearing,
which is linked with the development of the sound-coordinating areas, and
the language of sight, which in turn is connected with the development
of the gesture-coordinating areas, the gestures being translated into graphic
symbols. If this is so, it explains why the earliest known graphic signs
are stark expressions of rhythmic values. Be that as it may, graphic symbolism
enjoys some independence from phonetic language because its content adds
further dimensions to what phonetic language can only express in the dimension
of time. The invention of writing, through the device of linearity, completely
subordinated graphic to phonetic expression, but even today the relationship
between language and graphic expression is one of coordination rather than
subordination. An image possesses a dimensional freedom which writing must
always lack. It can trigger the verbal process that culminates in the recital
of a myth, but it is not attached to that process; its context disappears
with the narrator. This explains the profuse spread of symbols in systems
without linear writing. Many authors of works on primitive Chinese culture,
Australian aborigines, North American Indians, or certain peoples of Black
Africa speak of their mythological way of thinking in which the world order
is integrated in an extraordinarily rich system of symbolic relationships.
A number of these authors mention the very rich systems of graphic representation
available to the peoples they observed. In each case, except perhaps that
of the early Chinese where the records postdate the invention of writing,
the groups of figures represented are coordinated in accordance with a
system that is completely foreign to linear organization and consequently
to any possibility of continuous phonetization. The contents of the figures
of Paleolithic art, the art of the African Dogons, and the bark paintings
of Australian aborigines are, as it were, at the same remove from linear
notation as myth is from historical narration. Indeed in primitive societies
mythology and multidimensional graphism usually coincide. If I had the
courage to use words
196
in their strict sense, I would be tempted to counterbalance "mytho-logy"--a
multidimensional construct based upon the verbal--with "mytho-graphy,"
its strict counterpart based upon the manual.
The forms of thought that existed during the longest period in the evolution
of Homo sapiens seem strange to us today although they continue to underlie
a significant part of human behavior. Our life is molded by the practice
of a language whose sounds are recorded in an associated system of writing:
A mode of expression in which the graphic representation of thought is
radial is today practically inconceivable. One of the most striking features
of Paleolithic art is the manner in which the figures on the cave walls
are organized (figure 91). The number of animal species represented is
small, and their topographic relationships constant: Bison and horse occupy
the center of the panel, ibex and deer form a frame round them at the edges,
lion and rhinoceros are situated on the periphery. The same theme may be
repeated several times in the same cave and recurs in identical form, although
with variations, from one cave to another. What we have here therefore
is not the haphazard representation of animals hunted, nor "writing,"
nor "imagery." Behind the symbolic assemblage of figures there
must have been an oral context with which the symbolic assemblage was associated
and whose values it reproduced in space (figures 92 and 93). The same fact
is evident in the spiral figures Australian aborigines draw on sand as
symbolic expressions of the unfolding of their myths of the lizard or the
honey ant, or in the carved wooden bowls of the Ainus that give material
expression to the mythified narration of their sacrifice of the bear (figure
94).
Such a mode of representation is almost naturally connected with cosmic
symbolism, and we shall consider its development in chapter 13 in connection
with the humanization of time and space. This mode has resisted the emergence
of writing, upon which it exerted considerable influence, in those civilizations
where ideography has prevailed over phonetic notation (figures 95 to 97).
It is still alive in areas of thought that came into being in the early
days of linear written expression, and many religions offer many examples
of spatial organization of figures symbolizing a "mythological"
context in the strict ethnological sense (figure 98). It still prevails
in the sciences, where the linearization of writing is actually an impediment,
and provides algebraic equations or formulas in organic chemistry with
the means of escaping from the constraint of one-dimensionality through
figures in which phonetization is employed only as a commentary and the
symbolic assemblage "speaks" for itself. Lastly, it reappears
in advertising which appeals to deep, infraverbal, states of mental behavior
(figure 99).
200
Thus the reason why art is so closely connected with religion is that graphic
expression restores to language the dimension of the inexpressible-the
possibility of multiplying the dimensions of a fact in instantly accessible
visual symbols. The basic link between art and religion is emotional, yet
not in a vague sense. It has to do with mastering a mode of expression
that restores humans to their true place in a cosmos whose center they
occupy without trying to pierce it by an intellectual process which letters
have strung out in a needle-sharp, but also needle-thin, line.
Only agricultural peoples are known for certain to have had a graphic system
even remotely identifiable as linear writing.. Eskimos and Plains Indians,
often cited as examples to the contrary, created pictographies as a result
of exposure to alphabets. The chief distinguishing feature of "mythographic"
writing is its two-dimensional structure which puts it at a remove from
linearly emitted spoken language. In many nonalphabetic forms of writing,
on the other hand, the skeleton of the first system of notation is formed
by survivals from the old multidimensional system of figurative representation:
This is so for Egypt and China, as well as for the Mayas and the Aztecs.
One might be tempted to suppose that these "scripts" had a pictographic
origin, with signs for concrete objects such as an ox or a walking man
being aligned one after the other to reproduce the linear thread of language.
Except for some bookkeeping enumerations in proto-historic China or in
Near Eastern tablets, there in fact is no known pictographic evidence of
the origins of writing. From groups of mythographic figures-simple "rock
paintings" or decorations on objects-we go straight to linearized
symbols already fully set upon the process of phonetization.
The pictographic hypothesis presupposes a "cold" start, an initial
idea of aligning images in such a way as to match the thread of spoken
language. It would be acceptable if no other symbolic system had existed
previously, but may prove false if we apply the "favorable circumstances"
rule and posit that what took place did not do so all at once but represented
a transition. Writing did not happen in a void any more than did agriculture.
The stages that precede both have to be taken into account. At a certain
moment in time, which was not the same moment in different parts of the
world, the system of organized representation of mythical symbols appears
to have combined with the system of elementary bookkeeping (figure 100),
the result being the primitive Sumerian or Chinese writing in which images
borrowed from the regular repertory of figurative representation were drastically
sim-
202
plified and arranged to form a sequence. The procedure did not yet produce
any actual texts but helped to keep count of animals or objects. The simplification
of the figures, necessitated by the nonmonumental, provisional nature of
the records, was responsible for their gradually becoming detached from
the initial material context. From being symbols with extensible implications,
they developed into signs, genuine tools in the service of memory, on the
one hand, and bookkeeping, on the other.
Preparation of written bookkeeping or genealogical accounts is foreign
to the primitive social apparatus. Not until the consolidation of urbanized
agricultural societies did social complexity begin to be reflected in documents
whose authenticity was attested by humans or by gods. Whereas we can conceive
of a bookkeeping system in which figures and simplified drawings of animals
or measures of grain are sequentially aligned, it is difficult to imagine
linearized pictographic signs expressing actions (rather than objects)
from which the phonetic element has been entirely excluded. The "mythogram"
in fact is already an ideogram, as we must realize if we look at such traces
as still survive today: A cross next to a lance and a reed with a sponge
on the end of it are enough to convey the idea of the Passion of Christ.
The figure has nothing to do with phoneticized oral notation but it has
an extensibility such as no writing can have. It contains every possibility
of oral exteriorization, from the word "passion" to the most
complex commentaries on Christian metaphysics. Ideography in this form
precedes pictography, and all Paleolithic art is ideographic.
A system in which three lines are followed by a drawing of an ox or seven
lines by a drawing of a bag of corn is also readily conceivable. In this
case phonetization is spontaneous, and reading becomes practically inevitable.
This form of pictography is probably the only one that existed at the time
of the birth of writing, and writing was bound to merge immediately with
this preexisting ideographic system. The spontaneous confluence of the
two would explain why the earliest forms of Mediterranean, Far Eastern,
and American writing begin with numerical or calendar notations and, at
the same time, with notations of the names of gods or of distinguished
individuals in the form of figures assembled in small groups after the
fashion of successive mythograms. We think of Egyptian, Chinese, and Aztec
writing as lines of phoneticized mythograms rather than as aligned pictograms
(figures 100 to 102). Most recent authors have been well aware of the difficulty
of fitting the pictographic stage into the development of phoneticized
writing, but they do not seem to have perceived the connection between
very early mythographic notation systems, which implies an ideography without
an oral dimension and a form of writing whose phonetization apparently
began with numbers and quantities.
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For all the variety of known phonetic scripts, the number of scripts that
developed into fully elaborated phonetic systems is very limited. Those
of America disappeared before they had a chance to develop beyond the earliest
stages. The writing of the Indus has no known descendants. Once the Near
Eastern group of scripts had been created, there was no further reason,
save very exceptionally, for any fresh departures, and the languages of
Eurasia moved directly to syllabic or consonantal scripts or to alphabets.
Only Egypt and China remained as the two poles of the ancient civilizations
to develop phoneticized ideographic systems. Since the seventh century
B.C. Egyptian writing has lost much of its archaicism, and China alone
has maintained until the present day a system of graphic symbols that has
more than one dimension.
The Chinese system combines the two contrasting aspects of graphic notation
(figure 103). It is a script in the sense that each character contains
the elements of its phoneticism and occupies a position in a linear relationship
with other characters so that sentences can be read easily. The phonetic
reference of the word, however, is an approximation. In other words, an
ideogram now used only to represent a sound-a stage that alphabetic languages
too went through at one time. Chinese as a phonetic tool corresponds approximately,
though with greater subtlety, to a graphic pun or rebus whereby the word
"rampage," say, might be rendered by the signs for "ram"
and "page." Imperfect as it is, this tool has, because of the
multiplicity of its signs, proved a satisfactory means of language notation.
We should note, however, that oral tradition is there to ensure phonetic
continuity: Without it, Chinese characters would become hopelessly unpronounceable,
even if recordings of the spoken language were available. Be that as it
may, Chinese writing in its phonetic role complies with the rule that governs
all writing by recording sounds in an order that reconstitutes the flow
of spoken language.
From the linguistic point of view, Chinese is regarded as word writing,
each sign representing the sound of a word rather than a letter. This is
an ambiguous situation because the Chinese word has changed over the centuries
from being polysyllabic to being monosyllabic, with the following results:
(1) Chinese literary writing is practically a series of syllable-words,
difficult to understand without visually or mentally reading the signs
that correspond to them, and (2) in the joining together of monosyllables,
the spoken language has reconstituted a large number of disyllabic or trisyllabic
words so that the written notation of the spoken language is, in the final
analysis, a syllabic script. In both of these aspects Chinese clearly dem-
205
onstrates that writing was born of the complementary interaction of two
systems: "mythograms" and phonetic linearization. The somewhat
strained and often laborious, but ultimately successful, adaptation of
Chinese writing to phoneticism has resulted in preserving a particular
form of mythographic notation rather than simply the remote memory of a
"pictographic" stage.
The earliest Chinese inscription (twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.),
like the first Egyptian inscriptions and Aztec glyphs, have come to us
in the form of figures assembled in groups that provide the object or action
they describe with a "halo" much wider than the narrow meaning
words have assumed in linear writing. To write the words an ("peace")
or chia ("family") in letters is to state the two concepts reduced
to their skeleton: To convey the idea of peace by representing a woman
under a roof opens up perspectives that are, properly speaking, "mythographic"
in that the sign is neither a transcription of a sound nor a pictographic
representation of an action or a quality but an assemblage of two images
whose interplay reflects the full depth of their ethnic context. This becomes
still more patently evident when we see that an assemblage composed of
the signs for "roof" and "pig" stands for "family,"
a foreshortened image with the whole technoeconomic structure of ancient
China for its background.
One might see little difference between such writing and pictography in
the sense of a succession of drawings showing actions or objects wholly
outside a phonetic context. Chinese writing may seem to come close to this
definition because of its basic principle, which is that one-half of each
character is "pictographic" and the other phonetic. But to see
in the Chinese character nothing more than a category indicator (the radical)
stuck on to a phonetic particle would be an unwarranted restriction of
its meaning. We need only take a modern example like the word "flashlight"
to realize how flexible the images still are (figures 103 and 104). To
the speaker, tien-ch'i-teng means "flashlight" and nothing else.
But to the attentive reader, the juxtaposition of the three characters
for "lightning", "steam," and "lamp" opens
a whole world of symbols that form a halo round the banal image of the
flashlight: lightning issuing forth from a rain cloud, for the first; steam
rising over a pan of rice, for the second; and fire and a receptacle, or
fire and the action of rising, for the third. Parasitic images, no doubt,
and likely to cause the reader's thoughts to stray in a manner irrelevant
to the real object of notation, worthless images, indeed, in the context
of a modern object-yet even an example as commonplace as this gives us
an inkling of a mode of thought based on diffuse multidimensional configurations
rather than on a system that has gradually imprisoned language within linear
phoneticism.
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It is interesting to note that in a sense the combination of idiographic
with phonetic notation in ideograms emptied of their meaning has deepened
the role of mythographic notation in the Chinese language by deviating
it from its course. It has created a highly symbolized relationship between
the sound that is noted (auditive poetic matter) and its notation (a swarm
of images), thus offering Chinese poetry and calligraphy their superb possibilities.
The rhythm of the words is counterbalanced by that of the subtly interrelated
lines, creating images in which each part of each character, as well as
the relationship of every character to every other, sparkles with allusive
meaning.
The two aspect-ideographic and phonetic-of Chinese writing are so mutually
complementary and, at the same time, so foreign to one another that each
has engendered separate different notation systems outside China. The manner
in which Chinese writing was borrowed by the Japanese is difficult to describe
in terms comprehensible to a European mentality (figures 104 and 105).
The two languages are much further removed from one another than Latin
is from Arabic, and the manner in which Chinese writing fits Japanese spoken
language is something like trying to write French by selecting from among
postage stamps the picture that approximately corresponds to the meaning
of the words to be transcribed, and assembling them in rows: Both grammar
and the phonetic content are completely lost. The characters were borrowed
at a strictly ideographic level, with Japanese phoneticism expressed by
signs emptied of their sound in Chinese, much as the phoneticism of the
figure 3 is different in every language. Here, however, the borrowing does
not involve a mere ten signs, as in our numerical system, but thousands
of signs, ultimately expelling the sound matter of language from the scope
of writing. As for the ideological matter, it is confined to concepts,
grammatical inflexions being completely left aside and unaccounted for.
To compensate for this shortcoming, the Japanese language borrowed from
the Chinese, in the eighth century A.D., forty eight characters that are
used exclusively for their phonetic value, and from these it has created
a syllabic notation register that has inserted itself between the ideograms.
In consequence, the Chinese system of writing composed of multidimensional
elements, each group forming a character contains the means whereby it
can be ren
(caption from 103 continued)
ily. (h, i, j) tiench'i ten": electric bulb. Tien: thunder = rain,
lightning, ch'i steam = cloud, rice; ten". lamp = fire + mount + pedestal.
104 Japanese writing (a) Two Chinese characters: sung-shen, "mountain
of pines. " (b Japanese reading: matsu-yama, expressed in syllabic
characters. (c) Fragment of a dramatic text including Chinese characters
held together by a syntactic "binder" in cursive syllabic characters
and annotated by phonetic elements.
209
dered phonetically, Japanese first stripped the characters of their phonetic
coloring and then attached a distinctive phonetic sign to each one.
The Chinese system, like the Japanese, is said to be "impractical"
and ill-suited for the purpose of translating spoken language into graphic
terms. This is true only to the extent that writing is viewed as an economical
method of transcribing narrow but precise concepts-an object achieved most
efficiently by linear alignment. The language of science and technology
meets such a definition, and alphabets meet its requirements. It seems
to me that other procedures for expressing thought should not be overlooked,
and in particular those that reflect the flexibility of images, the halo
of associations, and all the complementary or conflicting representations
that gravitate round the central point of a concept. Chinese writing represents
a state of balance unique in human history: Whatever one may say, it renders
mathematical or biological concepts faithfully enough, while still preserving
the possibility of using the oldest system of graphic expression-the juxtaposing
of symbols to create, not sentences, but meaningful groups of images.
There is no need here to go into the details of the history of linear writing.
The Sumero-Accadian scripts, which before 3000 B.C. already contained a
very large number of ideograms in process of development toward phonetic
transcription, were followed by consonantal scripts, of which the Phoenician
(around 1200 B.C.) is the earliest example, and later by the Greek alphabet
of the eighth century B.C. This continuous development included every possible
stage-from realistic representation of an object to render the word for
that object, through the same representation to render the equivalent sound
in other words according to the principle of the picture puzzle, through
the process of simplification whereby the object is made unidentifiable
and becomes a purely phonetic symbol, to assembling discrete symbols in
order to transcribe sounds through the association of letters. The development
has been described many times; it is regarded as the glory of the great
civilizations, and rightly so for it was this development that put them
in possession of the means for their ascent.
There indeed is a direct link between the technoeconomic development of
the Mediterranean and European group of civilizations and the graphic tool
they perfected. We saw earlier that the role of the hand in toolmaking
counterbalanced the role of the facial organs in creating verbal language;
we also saw that at a certain moment just before the emergence of homo
sapiens, the hand began to play a part
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in creating a graphic mode of expression that counterbalanced verbal language.
The hand thus became a creator of images, of symbols not directly dependent
on the progression of verbal language but really parallel with it. The
language that, for lack of a better term, E have called "mythographic"
because the mental associations it arouses are of an order parallel to
that of verbal myths, both Iying outside the scope of strict coordinates
in space and time, belongs to this period. Writing in its earliest phase
preserved a great deal of this multidimensional vision; it continued to
suggest mental images that, though not imprecise, were "haloed"
and could point in several divergent directions. Although our anatomical
evolution had been overtaken by the evolution of technical means, the global
evolution of humankind remained perfectly consistent with itself. The brain
of the man of Cro-Magnon may have been as good as ours-at any rate, there
is nothing to prove the contrary-but his means of expressing himself were
far from equal to his neuronal apparatus. The greatest development has
been in the means of expression. In primates the actions of the hands are
in balance with those of the face, and a monkey makes wonderful use of
this balance. It even goes so far as to make its cheeks serve to carry
food, which its hands, still required for walking, cannot do. In early
anthropoids a kind of divorce takes place between the hand and the face.
Thereafter the one contributes to the search for a new balance through
gesticulation and tools, the other through phonation. With the emergence
of graphic figurative representation, the parallelism is reestablished.
The hand has its language, with a sight-related form of expression, and
the face has its own, which relates to hearing. Between the two is the
halo that confers a special character upon human thought before the invention
of writing proper: The gesture interprets the word, and the word comments
upon graphic expression.
At the linear graphism stage that characterizes writing, the relationship
between the two fields undergoes yet another development: Written language,
phoneticized and linear in space, becomes completely subordinated to spoken
language, which is phonetic and linear in time. The dualism between graphic
and verbal disappears, and the whole of human linguistic apparatus becomes
a single instrument for expressing and preserving thought-which itself
is channeled increasingly toward reasoning.
The transition from mythological to rational thinking was a very gradual
shift exactly synchronous with the development of urban concentrations
and of metallurgy. The earliest beginnings of Mesopotamian writing date
back to about 3500 B.C.,
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some 2,500 years after the appearance of the first villages. Two thousand
years later, toward 1500 B.C., the first consonantal alphabet appeared
in Phoenicia, toward 750 B.C. alphabets were being used in Greece, and
by 350 B.C. Greek philosophy was advancing by leaps-and bounds.
Available evidence of the organization of primitive thought is difficult
to interpret, either because it comes to us from very fragmentary prehistoric
evidence or because our records about the thinking of Australian aborigines
or Bushmen have been filtered by ethnographers who did not always take
the trouble to analyze them. What we do know suggests a process wherein
contradictions between different values are ordered within a participatory
logic that at one time gave rise to the concept of "pre-logical"
reasoning. Primitive thought appears to take place within a temporal and
spatial setting which is continually open to revision (see chapter 13).
The fact that verbal language is coordinated freely with graphic figurative
representation is undoubtedly one of the reasons for this kind of thinking,
whose organization in space and time is different from ours and implies
the thinking individual's continuing unity with the environment upon which
his or her thought is exercised. Discontinuity begins to appear with agricultural
sedentarization and with early writing. The basis now is the creation of
a cosmic image pivoted upon the city. The thinking of agricultural peoples
is organized in both time and space from an initial point of reference-omphalos-
round which the heavens gravitate and from which distances are ordered.
The thinking of pre-alphabetic antiquity was radial, like the body of the
sea urchin or the starfish. It only just began to master rectilinear progression
in archaic forms of writing, whose means of expression were still very
diffuse except for the purposes of account keeping. The process of the
world's subsequent imprisonment in the toils of "exact" symbols
had barely begun, and the summit of perfection in the handling of mythological
thought was reached in the Mediterranean or in the China of the first millennium
before our era. It was a time when the vault of heaven and the earth were
joined together within a network of unlimited connections, a golden age
of prescientific knowledge to which our memory still seems to hark back
nostalgically today.
The process set in motion by settled agriculture contributed, as we have
seen, to putting the individual more and more firmly in control over the
material world. This gradual triumph of tools is inseparable from that
of language-indeed the two phenomena are but one, just as technics and
society form but one subject. As soon as writing became exclusively a means
of phonetic recording of speech, language was placed on the same level
as technics; and the technical efficacy of language today
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is proportional to the extent to which it has rid itself of the halo of
associated images characteristic of archaic forms of writing.
Writing thus tends toward the constriction of images, toward a stricter
linearization of symbols. For classical as well as modern thinking, the
alphabet is more than just a means of committing to memory the progressive
acquisitions of the human mind; it is a tool whereby a mental symbol can
be noted in both word and gesture by a single process. Such unification
of the process of expression entails the subordination of graphism to spoken
language. It avoids the wastefulness of symbols that is still characteristic
of Chinese writing, and it parallels the process adopted by technics over
the course of its development.
However, it also entails an impoverishment of the means of nonrational
expression. If we take the view that the course humankind has followed
thus far is wholly favorable to our future-if, in other words, we have
complete confidence in settled agriculture and all its consequences-then
we should not view the loss of multidimensional symbolic thought otherwise
than we do the improvement achieved in the running ability of Equidae consequent
upon the reduction of the number of their digits to one. But if, conversely,
we tend to believe that human potentiality would be more fully realized
if we achieved a balanced contact with the whole of reality, then we may
ask ourselves whether the adoption of a regimented form of writing that
opened the way to the unrestrained development of technical utilitarianism
was not a step well short of the optimum.
Beyond Writing: The Audiovisual
With alphabetic writing, a certain level of personal symbolism is still
preserved. The reconstruction that the eye performs in reading the written
word is still an individual one. There is a margin which, though limited,
is indisputably present, and it ensures a personal interpretation of phonetic
matter. Moreover the images evoked by reading remain the property of the
reader's imagination, which may or may not be very rich. When it replaced
ideographic symbols by letters-when, as it were, it changed levels-the
alphabet did not abolish all possibilities of recreation. To put it differently,
alphabetic writing, while meeting the needs of social memory, still allows
the individual to reap the benefits of the interpretative effort he or
she has to make.
We could ask ourselves whether, despite the current vast increase in the
output of printed matter, the fate of writing is not already sealed. The
emergence of sound recording, films, and television in the past half-century
forms part of a trajectory that
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began before the Aurignacian. From the bulls and horses of Lascaux to the
Mesopotamian markings and the Greek alphabet, representative signs went
from mythogram to ideogram and from ideogram to letter. Material civilization
rests upon symbols in which the gap between the sequence of emitted concepts
and their reproduction has become ever more narrow. This gap or interval
is narrowed still further by the recording of thought and its mechanical
reproduction. We might wonder what the consequences of this narrowing will
be. Curiously enough, the mechanical recording of images has, in less than
a century, covered the same ground as the recording of the spoken word
did over several thousands of years. First, two-dimensional visual images
became automatically reproducible through photography. Then, as with writing,
came the turn of the spoken word, reproduced by means of the phonograph.
Up to that point the mechanism of mental assimilation had remained undistorted:
Photography, being purely static and visual, left as much room for freedom
of interpretation as the bisons of Altamira had left to the humans of the
Paleolithic. The auditive sequence imposed by the phonograph likewise allowed
room for personal and free mental vision.
This traditional state of affairs was not appreciably altered by the arrival
of silent films. The silent reel was supported by sound ideograms of an
indeterminate nature supplied by a musical accompaniment that maintained
a distance between the individual and the image imposed from the outside.
A radical change occurred, however, with the coming of sound film and television,
both of which address the faculties of sight, motion, and hearing at the
same time and so induce the whole field of perception to participate passively.
The margin for individual interpretation is drastically reduced because
the symbol and its contents are almost completely merged into one and because
the spectator has absolutely no possibility of intervening actively in
the "real" situation thus recreated. The spectator's experience
is different from a Neanderthalian's in that it is purely passive, and
different from a reader's in that it is totally lived through both sight
and hearing. From this dual point of view, audiovisual techniques really
seem to represent a new stage of human development-a stage that has direct
bearing on our most distinctive possession, that of reflective thought.
From the social point of view, the audiovisual indisputably represents
a valuable gain inasmuch as it facilitates the transmission of precise
information and acts upon the mass of people receiving it in ways that
immobilize all their means of interpretation. In this respect language
follows the general evolution of the collective superorganism and reflects
the increasingly perfect conditioning of its individual cells. Can a genuine
return by the individual to earlier stages of figurative representation
still be envisaged? Writing is unquestionably a most efficient adaptation
of
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audiovisual behavior, which is our fundamental mode of perception, yet
it is also a very roundabout way of achieving the desired effect. The situation
now apparently becoming generalized may therefore be said to represent
an improvement in that it eliminates the effort of "imagining"
(in the etymological sense). But imagination is the fundamental property
of intelligence, and a society with a weakened property of symbol making
would suffer a concomitant loss of the property of action. In the modern
world the result is a certain imbalance, or rather a tendency toward the
same phenomenon as that taking place in the arts and crafts: the phenomenon
of loss of the exercise of the imagination in vital operating sequences.
Audiovisual language tends to concentrate image making entirely in the
minds of a minority of specialists who purvey a completely figurative substance
to the individual. Image makers-painters, poets, or technical narrators-have
always, as far back as in the Paleolithic, been a social exception, but
their work always remained incomplete because it called for the participation
of the image users, whatever their cultural levels. Today a separation
(extremely profitable to the collective) is in process of being wrought
between a small elite acting as society's digestive organ and the masses
acting purely as its organs of assimilation. This development is not confined
to the audiovisual media, which are merely the end point of a general process
that involves the whole of human graphic activity. Photography did not
at first cause any change in the intellectual perception of images; like
all innovations, it was supported by what already existed. Just as the
first motor cars were horseless carriages, so the first photographs were
portraits and scene paintings without color. The process of "predigestion"
did not begin until the emergence of cinematography, which completely changed
the concept of photography and drawing in the purely pictographic sense.
The sports photograph and the comic strip, together with the "digest,"
have also contributed to separating the image maker from the image consumer
within the social organism.
The impoverishment is not in the themes but in the loss of personal imaginative
versions. The number of themes in popular (as indeed in highbrow) literature
has always been limited, so there is nothing extraordinary about seeing
the same very handsome and exceptionally strong superman, the same amazingly
attractive woman, and the same more or less stupid giant appear successively
in the midst of Sioux Indians and bisons, in a pitched battle during the
Hundred Years' War, on board a pirate ship, in a police car roaring off
in pursuit of gangsters, or in a space rocket traveling between two planets.
Endless repetition of an unchanging stock of images goes hand in hand with
the tiny amount of free space that the exercise of emotions related in
one way or another to aggressivity or sexuality leaves in the indi-
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vidual consciousness. That the comic strip's ability to render action in
a convincing manner is far greater than the old "penny dreadful's
is not in doubt: In the latter a punch in the face was an incomplete symbol,
whereas Superman's left hook to the traitor's jaw leaves nothing to be
added by way of traumatic precision. Everything assumes a totally naked
reality, to be absorbed without the least effort, the recipient's brain
perfectly slack.
In this first part of the book language has been considered on the same
footing as technics, from an entirely practical point of view and as a
product of the biological entity called the "human being." The
initial balance between the two poles of the field of responsiveness connects
our evolution with that of all animals in which the performance of operations
is divided between the face and the forelimb. But by implication it also
connects the existence of language with that of manual techniques. What
we know about the evolution of the brain allows us-so far as new techniques
are concerned-to analyze the connection between erect posture, the freeing
of the hand, and the opening up of areas of the brain that were the preconditions
for the exercise of physical abilities, on the one hand, and the development
of human activity on the other. The proximity, inside the brain, between
the two manifestations of human intelligence is so striking that despite
the lack of fossil evidence, we must accept that human language was from
the very outset different in nature from the language of animals-that it
was the product of reflection between the two mirrors of technical gesture
and phonic symbolism. This hypothesis concerning humans who existed before
Homo sapiens-humans going as far back as the remotest Australanthropians-becomes
a certainty when we discover the close synchronism between the evolution
of techniques and that of language. The certainty is confirmed when we
see how closely, even for the very purpose of expressing thought, hand
and voice remain intimately linked.
Parallel with the extraordinary acceleration of the development of material
techniques following the emergence of Homo sapiens, the abstract thought
we find reflected in paleolithic art implies that language too had reached
a similar level. Graphic or plastic figurative representation should therefore
be seen as the means of expression of symbolic thinking of the myth-making
type, its medium being graphic representation related to verbal language
but independent from phonetic notation. Although no fossil records of late
Paleolithic languages have come down to us, evidence fashioned by the hands
of humans who spoke those languages clearly suggests that their symbolizing
activities-inconceivable without language-were on a level with their technical
activities, which in turn are unimaginable without a verbalized intellectual
supporting structure.
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The parallelism continued at every stage: When agricultural sedentarization
gave rise to a hierarchical and specialized social system, a fresh impetus
was imparted simultaneously to technics and language. If the topographical
structure of the cerebral cortex of primitive anthropoids accommodated
the joint development of the material and the verbal, the topographical
structure of the urban superorganism reflected the same contiguousness.
When the economic system became transformed into capitalism based on metallurgy
and grain, the transformation engendered both science and writing. When
techniques within the city walls began to prepare the ground for the world
of today, when space and time became organized within a geometrical network
that captured both the earth and the heavens, then rationalizing thought
began to overtake mythical thought. Symbols were linearized and gradually
adapted to the flow of verbal language until graphic phonetization finally
culminated in the alphabet. From the beginning of written history, as in
still earlier times, there has been a complete reciprocal linkage between
technics and language, and the whole of human development depends upon
this fact. The expression of thought through language found an instrument
with infinite possibilities in the use of alphabets, which totally subordinated
the graphic to the phonetic. All previous forms remain alive, however,
although to varying degrees. Further on in this book we shall try to demonstrate
that a significant portion of our thought diverges from linearized language
in the effort to grasp that which does not lend itself to strict notation.
Although the interplay between the two poles of figurative representation-
between the auditive and the visual-changed considerably with the adoption
of phonetic scripts, the individual's capacity to visualize the verbal
and the graphic remained intact. The present stage is characterized simultaneously
by the merging together of the auditive and the visual, leading to the
loss of many possibilities of individual interpretation, and by a social
separation between the functions of symbol making and of image receiving.
Here again the parallelism between technics and language is clearly apparent.
Tools detached themselves from the human hand, eventually to bring forth
the machine: In this latest stage speech and sight are undergoing the same
process, thanks to the development of technics. Language, which had separated
itself from the human through art and writing, is consummating the final
divorce by entrusting the intimate functions of phonation and sight to
wax, film, and magnetic tape.