Mihai Nadin invites his readers (page 404) to "look at all the contraptions of illiteracy filling the inventory of the modern household: radio, photo camera, TV set, video recorder, video cassette player, Walkmanª, CD player, electronic and digital games, laser disc player, CD-ROM, telephone, computer, modem." Whether one- or two-directional, all these paraphernalia have affected every aspect of our lives, even the most intimate, including sexual practices and family relationships, including also our religious practices or abandonment of them. Yet even as he proclaims the end of literacy, Nadin is offering what looks like a conventional (and easy to read, though particularly heavy at 767 pages plus references and index) printed book. Does this imply self-contradiction? Not really; this is the first book I have ever known to include an e-mail address facilitating dialogue with the author. He wishes, in his Foreword, that he could hand over the interconnected digital book that his cover illustration suggests. His text anticipates an interactive version of itself.
Decline of literacy is usually reported in terms of symptoms, explains Professor Nadin. Yet he himself, a Romanian-born computer scientist, electrical engineer, philosopher, semiotician, etc., immigrating from a culture of rigidly structured literacy into a land of new technologies, perceived people as living with immediacy rather than for permanency. (It is true that in the United States we say "that's history" about what we mean to put behind us and forget). As we hurtle onward, abandoning the Slowness that Milan Kundera, in his novel of that title, sees as enhancing pleasure, Nadin reminds us that literacy is a late acquisition in human culture, and dispensable. Acknowledgment of change allows us to make the best of it. "The ozone hole of over-information broke the protective bubble of literacy," he argues, and we become processors rather than repositories of data. Inexorably, the illiterate flourish while educational systems worldwide are in turmoil. Faster living means a glut of information from many sources, their credibility hard to sort. Yet Nadin is not dismayed by "the chasm between yesterday and tomorrow."
Is his book then meant to reassure? Hard to say, for it seems a book about everything, taking a reader from signs to language, from orality to writing, through the functioning of language and the relation of language to logic--a dazzling galaxy of subject-matter. Are the pages strictly theoretical?--no; but they are practical, as they discuss the language of the market, the language of products, transaction and advertisement, matters we deal with every day. Chapters on visualization and images, their ubiquity in our lives and their more democratic accessibility (since they require a smaller background of shared knowledge), and incorporation of visual materials in print media lead to a discussion of the complementarity of visual and verbal and a plea for visual education to enhance utilization of appropriate alternatives. Not substituting visual for verbal literacy, but moving from one dominant form of literacy to multiple adaptive sign-systems, is the goal proposed by an author who elsewhere writes in Romanian, French, and German, as well as English; who cites sources from Russian, Hebrew, Japanese; refers to the Yupik Eskimo Dictionary and the invented Klingon language for fictional characters and World Alphabets, Their Origin and Development; moves at ease among Confucius, Aristotle, Joan of Arc, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Isaac Asimov; and has published on prehistoric cave images, multimedia, virtual reality, advertising, Laurence Olivier, The Name of the Rose. In the chapter "A God for Each of Us," he encapsulates without misrepresenting the world's major faiths and can discuss how pastors use marketing techniques to form congregations. In short, Nadin's compass is global, respectful of antiquity, preparing for whatever future comes hurtling toward us.
If it is presumptuous for a reviewer who has never read Vitruvius or Le Corbusier, let alone C. S. Peirce, to criticize an expert who has advised major corporations, it is easy enough for me as author of a paper given to the Northeast Modern Language Society this past April to find useful hints in a chapter on "Unbounded Sexuality." The paper was about Francesca Mazzucato's novel called, in the original Italian, Hot Line, whose protagonist-narrator earns her livelihood doing telephone sex. What should a grandmother-scholar like me think about telephone sex? "Instead of the immediacy of the sexual urge, projected through patterns subject to natural cycles, humans experience ever more mediated forms of sexual attraction and gratification, which are not necessarily associated with reproduction" (p. 355)--this is a good starting-point. Nadin goes on, "Literacy enrolled sexuality in the quest for higher productivity and sustained consumption characteristic of the pragmatics associated with the Industrial Revolution. Once conditions making literacy necessary are overruled by new conditions, sexuality undergoes corresponding changes. Basically, sexuality seems to return to immediateness, ... It now bridges dramatically between life and death, in a world where the currency of both life and death is, for all practical purposes, devaluated" (p. 370). Is this true? All I can say is, this helps explain the novel, which, unlike Nicholson Baker's Vox or Spike Lee's film Girl 6, is an unhappy tale. Furthermore, even parents and grandparents need to be aware, as Nadin points out, "Striptease has moved from the back alleys of bigoted enjoyment into movie theaters, museums, prime-time television, the Internet. And so has the language of arousal, the voice of pleasure, the groan of post-coital exhaustion, or disappointment from teleporn services to the pay-per-session Websites, where credit card numbers are submitted without fear of their being used beyond payment for the service" (pp. 372-373). Nadin provides a remarkably strong and simple economic context for commercial sex: "It is much cheaper--and I cringe to say this so bluntly--to buy sexual pleasure, regardless how vulgar and limited it can be, than to commit oneself to a life of reciprocal responsibility, and unavoidable moments of inequity," (p. 374). Yet: "To continuously tend towards having more at the cheapest price ... means to exhaust not only the object, but also the subject. ... To want all (especially all at once) means to want nothing in particular," (p. 376). And when human sexuality is no longer profoundly subjective, deeply individual, then it cannot be an integrating factor in personal destiny.
Changes in family life, increasing secularism, evolving diets (in a chapter that begins "Have you ever ordered a pizza over the Internet?"), commodification and consumption of sports ("Every square inch on the body of a tennis player or a track and field athlete can be rented," (p. 498) make more sense when discussed in context of literacy and illiteracy. Dissemination of scientific findings and their philosophic implications require that a comprehending person be an information integrator, in Nadin's term, with multiple literacies--including philosophic literacy. According to Nadin, "Philosophy can practically help people to free themselves from the obsession with progress--seen as a sequence of ever-escalating records (or production, distribution, expectation)--and moreover, from the fear of all its consequences. It can also focus people's attention on alternatives to everything that affects the integrity of the species and its sense of quality, including the relation to the environment," (p. 533). The very opposite of pessimistic, Nadin helps his readers to new views of much that distresses us daily, for, as he says, banalities will not do. He guides us, as agents of change and observers of change, through perplexities about art both canonized and dubious: "Never before has more kitsch been produced and more money spent to satisfy the obsession with celebrity that is the hallmark of the time," (p. 535). A shift away from artifact to process and artist (Nadin discusses work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and by Keijo Yamamoto) and to self-referential, cultural-quoting, self-ironic art, and technological elaboration of artistic skills like drawing and composition to fashion new challenges, entertainments, and inspirations (he discusses MTV) make more sense in the post-literate contexts he lays out.
He does not predict the demise of the book, since people derive pleasure and profit from the printed word, but he insists that the book "is only one among may literary and non-literary domains of interaction," (p. 572). Yet he warns, and none too soon, "The demand for more at the lowest price that heralds the multi-headed creature called the civilization of illiteracy affects more than the production of clothes and dishes, or of cars and an insatiable appetite for travel. It affects our ways of writing, reading, painting, singing, dancing, composing, interpreting, and acting--our entire aesthetic experience," (p. 573). Tracing out political implications (one passage is called "Of Tribal Chiefs, Kings, and Presidents" and another, "Judging Justice"), and military implications, the book concludes by balancing collapse and catastrophe against hope and "unprecedented possibilities"--and votes for "alternative media that support the empowerment of individuals, not the further consolidation of power structures that were relevant in the past but which prevent the unfolding of the future," (p. 703). As against media-bashing, Nadin invokes what could be called "media-ocracy" to allow for fuller democracy. Practical hints are offered in "Coping with Choice," "Trade-Off," and other sections meant to help readers navigate alarming realities that may even seem like science fiction. Reasonably, he would like educators to face their own apprehensions and encourage self-definition and diversity of skills among students, acknowledging greater complementarity of the ways in which we learn.
We will still have to prefer our own choices in the information marketplace. Another 1997 book on What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives, by the head of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, projects a "21st- century village marketplace where people and computers buy sell and freely exchange information and information services." As a vastly more evolved Internet and the world economy converge in an automated utopia, says one reviewer of that work, "I'm not so sure I want to live there. ... There seems to be little room for crankiness, randomness or messes." Meanwhile we can minimize distress over the upheaval and transition.
Mihai Nadin, whose book helps us enjoy what we cannot avoid or dismiss, currently heads the program in Computational Design (a discipline he founded) at the University of Wuppertal. While he was still teaching in Providence, before he went to Ohio State University, I took a one-week summer Workshop in Semiotics Applied to Design devised by him, during which I learned to understand advertisement as a semiotic activity, the sign being seen as mediating element between the interpreted object and the interpreter; and I produced an analysis of a Sears ad. This analysis appears in a 1994 book Nadin co-authored with Richard D. Zakia, Creating Effective Advertising Using Semiotics (on pages 104-110). That workshop was my wake-up alert to a non-literacy-based culture evolving around me, and so I was not unprepared when a freshman student of mine at Clark University, whose English seemed, to put it kindly, basic, told me that he knew eleven machine languages and had a patented game in production in New York. Books will always be basic, for me, because, as Sven Birkerts put it in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, "The time of reading ... is not the world's time, but the soul's," and "The books that matter to me ... are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself." A Stan Mack cartoon sequence in Modern Maturity (November-December 1997) pokes fun at the body-builder who says "I do my reading with audiobooks while jogging. It's exciting and you don't use up your optic nerves." For this earnest athlete, humor and pathos are out: "Laughing and sobbing waste oxygen." He says, jogging off in the last panel, "For me, a good book is like a good pair of sneakers." The culture of literacy is not threatened; according to the New York Times of 19 October 1997, about 350,000 books are added every year to the groaning shelves of the Library of Congress. One of these "books," however, Tom Wolfe's novella Ambush at Fort Bragg, was released as "An Audio Exclusive Not Available in Print;" and other book-books were accompanied by musical tapes or separate illustrations. Well, we don't have to join the culture of illiteracy, but it helps to understand it--and we have Professor Nadin's support in that.
Blossom S. Kirschenbaum's translations from contemporary Italian fiction will appear in a Yale University Press Anthology edited by Massimo Riva. She wrote about Ginevra Bompiani in NEMLA Italian Studies 1998. An essay on playwright Joe Pintauro came out in VIA, Fall/1998. Her doctorate is from Brown University, where she is currently based in the Department of Comparative.