6 Language
Symbols
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.
The Birth of Graphism
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
188
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
189
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.
190
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.
The Early
Development of Graphism
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
192
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.
The Spread of
Symbols
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.
Writing
and the Linearization of Symbols
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.
204
Chinese
Writing
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.
207
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.
Linear
Graphism
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
210
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 Constriction of
Thought
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.,
211
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
212
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
213
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
214
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-
215
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.
216
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.