Ivan Illich, catholic priest, reformer, Marxist, educator, author, visionary and missionary (4.9.1926 Vienna, Austria - 2.12.2002 Bremen, Germany), most famous and well known for his writings on education (
deschooling), writes here about language as a weapon, a tool fur suppression, an instrument of imprisonment.
Ivan Illich: writing on the web
Vernacular Values by Ivan Illich
[Note: These essays from
CoEvolution Quarterly were the basis of most of Illich's
book
Shadow Work (Marion Boyars, 1981).]
Cuernavaca, April 12
th 1980
Dear Stewart,
Three years ago you asked, what had become of my plan to write
an epilogue to the industrial age. Indeed, that is what I had
promised in 1973 in the introduction to
Tools for
Conviviality:
During the next several years I intend
to work on an epilogue to the industrial age. I want to
trace the changes in language, myth, ritual and law which
took place in the current epoch of packaging and of
schooling. I want to describe the fading monopoly of the
industrial mode of production and the vanishing of the
industrially generated professions this mode of
production serves.
Above all I want to show that
two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the
industrial age, by choosing right now a postindustrial
balance in their mode of production which the
hyper-industrial nations will be forced to adopt as an
alternative to chaos. To prepare for this task I submit
this essay for critical comment.
The comments came. The readings which came with them led me in
many directions I had never intended to go. To grapple with them,
and to deepen my understanding of this late industrial age, I
focused successively on Energy and Equity, Medical Nemesis and
Disabling Professions. These were prolegomena towards a History
of Needs that remains to be done. I am now back to the study of
history, the study of popular cultures, mentalities, practices
and tools all too often overshadowed by the history of ideas,
institutions and dominant styles. The promised epilogue is taking
shape in a dozen essays on the fate of
Vernacular Values
during the last five hundred years of warfare that has been waged
by the modern State against all forms of
Subsistence.
At your invitation I am sending you the drafts for a couple of
these essays. Thank you for accepting them in
CoEvolution
Quarterly. I guess that, in 1980, through no other Journal I
could reach a comparable motley readership of unusual critics.
For those who would like to use my drafts as outlines for study I
shall prepare within a few months an annotated guide to the
relevant bibliography distributed by Valentina Borremans,
Tecno-Politica, APD 479, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.
yours,
Ivan
NB1.
CoEvolution Quarterly is ideally suited for
facsimile reproduction. Neither the author nor the publisher have
any objection to the non-commercial reproduction by any means of
these pages, as long as each of the three parts of this article
is reproduced in its entirety and without editorial changes or
additions.
NB2 I shall polish these drafts and publish them with several
other essays in a book to be called
Vernacular Values which
Marion Boyars (18 Brewer Street, London W 1 and 99 Main Street,
Salem, New Hampshire 03079) will bring out. She therefore is
arranging for the copyright. I have told her that I wish to give
to you the right to one time and first English language
publication of these drafts.
Part 1: The Three Dimensions of Social Choice
Where the war against subsistence has led can best be seen in
the mirror of so-called development. During the 1960's,
"development" acquired a status that ranked with
"freedom" and "equality". Other peoples'
development became the rich man's duty and burden. Development
was described as a building program - people of all colors spoke
of "nation-building" and did so without blushing. The
immediate goal of this social engineering was the installation of
a balanced set of equipment in a society not yet so instrumented:
the building of more schools, more modern hospitals, more
extensive highways, new factories, power grids, together with the
creation of a population trained to staff
and need them.
Today, the moral imperative of ten years ago appears naive;
today, few critical thinkers would take such an instrumentalist
view of the desirable society. Two reasons have changed many
minds:
First,
undesired externalities exceed benefits - the
tax burden of schools and hospitals is more than any economy can
support; the ghost towns produced by highways impoverish the
urban and rural landscape. Plastic buckets from Saõ Paulo are
lighter and cheaper than those made of scrap by the local
tinsmith in Western Brazil. But first cheap plastic puts the
tinsmith out of existence, and then the fumes of plastic leave a
special trace on the environment - a new kind of ghost. The
destruction of age-old competence as well as these poisons are
inevitable
byproducts and will resist all exorcisms for a long time.
Cemeteries for industrial wastes simply cost too much, more than
the buckets are worth. In economic jargon, the "external
costs" exceed not only the profit made from plastic bucket
production, but also the very salaries paid in the manufacturing
process.
These rising externalities, however, are only one side of the
bill which development has exacted.
Counterproductivity is its
reverse side. Externalities represent costs that are
"outside" the price paid by the consumer for what he
wants - costs that he, others or future generations will at some
point be charged.
Counterproductivity, however, is a new kind of disappointment
which arises "within" the very use of the good
purchased. This internal counterproductivity, an inevitable
component of modern institutions, has become the constant
frustration of the poorer majority of each institution's clients:
intensely experienced but rarely defined. Each major sector of
the economy produces its own unique and paradoxical
contradictions. Each necessarily effects the opposite of that for
which it was structured. Economists, who are increasingly
competent to put price-tags on externalities, are unable to deal
with negative internalities, and cannot measure the inherent
frustration of captive clients which is something other than a
cost.
For most people, schooling twists genetic differences into
certified degradation; the medicalization of health increases
demand for services far beyond the possible and useful, and
undermines that organic coping ability which common sense calls
health; transportation, for the great majority bound to the rush
hour, increases the time spent in the servitude to traffic,
reducing both freely chosen mobility and mutual access. The
development of educational, medical and other welfare agencies
has actually removed most clients from the obvious purpose for
which these projects were designed and financed. This
institutionalized frustration, resulting from compulsory
consumption, combines with the new externalities. It demands an
increase in the production of scavenging and repair services to
impoverish and even destroy individuals and communities,
affecting them in a class-specific manner. In effect, the
peculiarly modern forms of frustration and paralysis and
destruction totally discredit the description of the desirable
society in terms of installed production capacity.
Defense against the damages inflicted by development, rather
than access to some new "satisfaction", has become the
most sought after privilege. You have arrived if you can commute
outside the rush hour; probably attended an elite school; if you
can give birth at home; are privy to rare and special knowledge
if you can bypass the physician when you are ill; are rich and
lucky if you can breathe fresh air; by no means poor, if you can
build your own shack. The underclasses are now made up of those
who
must consume the counterproductive packages and
ministrations of their self-appointed tutors; the privileged are
those who are free to refuse them. A new attitude, then, has
taken shape during these last years: the awareness that we cannot
ecologically afford equitable development leads many to
understand that, even if development in equity were possible, we
would neither want more of it for ourselves, nor want to suggest
it for others.
Ten years ago, we tended to distinguish social options
exercised within the political sphere from technical options
assigned to the expert. The former were meant to focus on goals,
the latter more on means. Roughly, options about the desirable
society were ranged on a spectrum that ran from right to left:
here, capitalist, over there, socialist "development".
The
how was left to the experts. This one-dimensional
model of politics is now passé. Today, in addition to "who
gets what", two new areas of choice have become
lay
issues: the very legitimacy of lay judgment on the apt means for
production, and the trade-offs between growth and freedom. As a
result, three independent classes of options appear as three
mutually perpendicular axes of public choice.
On the x-axis I place the issues related to social hierarchy,
political authority, ownership of the means of production and
allocation of resources that are usually designated by the terms,
right and left. On the y-axis, I place the technical choices
between hard and soft, extending these terms far beyond a pro and
con atomic power: not only goods, but also services are affected
by the hard and soft alternatives.
A third choice falls on the z-axis. Neither privilege nor
technique, but rather the nature of human satisfaction is at
issue. To characterize the two extremes, I shall use terms
defined by Erich Fromm. At the bottom, I place a social
organization that fits the seeking of satisfaction in
having;
at the top, in
doing. At the bottom, therefore, I place a
commodity-intensive society where needs are increasingly defined
in terms of packaged goods and services designed and prescribed
by professionals, and produced under their control. This social
ideal corresponds to the image of a humanity composed of
individuals, each driven by considerations of marginal utility,
the image that has developed from Mandeville via Smith and Marx
to Keynes, and that Louis Dumont calls
homo economicus.
At the opposite end, at the top of the z-axis, I place - in a
fan-shaped array - a great variety of societies where existence
is organized around subsistence activities. In its unique way,
each of these cannot but be skeptical about the claims of growth.
In such new societies where contemporary tools ease the creation
of use-values, commodities and industrial production in general
are deemed valuable mainly insofar as they are either resources
or instruments for subsistence. Hence, the social ideal
corresponds to
homo habilis, an image which includes
numerous individuals who are
differently competent at
coping with reality, the opposite of
homo economicus, who
is dependent on standardized "needs". Here, people who
choose their independence and their own horizon derive more
satisfaction from doing and making things for immediate use than
from the products of slaves or machines. Therefore, every
cultural project is necessarily modest. Here, people go as far as
they can toward self-subsistence, they themselves producing what
they are able, exchanging their surplus with neighbors, avoiding
- insofar as possible - the products of wage labor.
The shape of contemporary society is the result of the ongoing
choices along these three independent axes. And a polity's
credibility today depends on the degree of public participation
in each of the three option sets. The beauty of a unique,
socially articulated image of each society will, hopefully,
become the determining factor of its international impact.
Esthetic and ethical example may replace the competition of
economic indicators. Actually, no other route is open. A mode of
life characterized by austerity, modesty, constructed by hard
work and built on a small scale does not lend itself to
propagation through marketing. For the first time in history,
poor and rich societies would be effectively placed on equal
terms. But for this to become true, the present perception of
international north-south relations in terms of development must
first be superseded.
A related high status goal of our age, full employment, must
also be reviewed. Ten years ago, attitudes toward development and
politics were simpler than what is possible today; attitudes
toward work were sexist and naive. Work was identified with
employment, and prestigious employment confined to males. The
analysis of shadow work done off the job was tabu. The left
referred to it as a remnant of primitive reproduction, the right,
as organized consumption - all agreed that, with development,
such labor would wither away. The struggle for more jobs, for
equal pay for equal jobs, and more pay for every job pushed all
work done off the job into a shadowed corner hidden from politics
and economics. Recently, feminists, together with some economists
and sociologists, looking at so-called intermediary structures,
have begun to examine the unpaid contribution made to an
industrial economy, a contribution for which women are
principally responsible. These persons discuss
"reproduction" as the complement to production. But the
stage is mostly filled with self-styled radicals who discuss new
ways of creating conventional jobs, new forms of sharing
available jobs, and how to transform housework, education,
childbearing and commuting into paid jobs. Under the pressure of
such demands, the full employment goal appears as dubious as
development. New actors, who question the very nature of work,
advance toward the limelight. They distinguish, industrially
structured work, paid or unpaid, from the creation of a
livelihood beyond the confines of employment and professional
tutors. Their discussions raise the key issues on the vertical
axis. The choice for or against the notion of man as a growth
addict decides whether unemployment, that is, the effective
liberty to work free from wages and/or salary, shall be viewed as
sad and a curse, or as useful and a right.
In a commodity-intensive society, basic needs are met through
the products of wage-labor - housing no less than education,
traffic no less than the delivery of infants. The work ethic
which drives such a society legitimates employment for salary or
wages and degrades independent coping. But the spread of
wage-labor accomplishes more - it divides unpaid work into two
opposite types of activities, while the loss of unpaid work
through the encroachment of wage-labor has often been described,
the creation of a new kind of work has been consistently ignored:
the unpaid
complement of industrial labor and services. A
kind of forced labor or industrial serfdom in the service of
commodity-intensive economies must be carefully distinguished
from subsistence-oriented work lying outside the industrial
system. Unless this distinction is clarified and used when
choosing options on the z-axis, unpaid work guided by
professionals could spread through a repressive, ecological
welfare society. Women's serfdom in the domestic sphere is the
most obvious example today. Housework is not salaried. Nor is it
a subsistence activity in the sense that most of the work done by
women was such as when, with their menfolk, they used the entire
household as the setting and the means for the creation of most
of the inhabitants' livelihood. Modern housework is standardized
by industrial commodities oriented towards the support of
production, and exacted from women in a sex-specific way to press
them into reproduction, regeneration and a motivating force for
the wage-laborer. Well publicized by feminists, housework is only
one expression of that extensive shadow economy which has
developed everywhere in industrial societies as a necessary
complement to expanding wage-labor. This shadow complement,
together with the formal economy, is a constitutive element of
the industrial mode of production. It has escaped economic
analysis, as the wave nature of elementary particles before the
Quantum Theory. And when concepts developed for the formal
economic sector are applied to it, they distort what they do not
simply miss. The real difference between two kinds of unpaid
activity - shadow-work which complements wage-labor, and
subsistence work which competes with and opposes both - is
consistently missed. Then, as subsistence activities become more
rare, all unpaid activities assume a structure analogous to
housework. Growth-oriented work inevitably leads to the
standardization and management of activities, be they paid or
unpaid.
A contrary view of work prevails when a community chooses a
subsistence-oriented way of life. There, the inversion of
development, the replacement of consumer goods by personal
action, of industrial tools by convivial tools is the goal.
There, both wage-labor and shadow-work will decline since their
product, goods or services, is valued primarily as a means for
ever inventive activities, rather than as an end, that is,
dutiful consumption. There, the guitar is valued over the record,
the library over the schoolroom, the back yard garden over the
supermarket selection. There, the personal control of each worker
over his means of production determines the small horizon of each
enterprise, a horizon which is a necessary condition for social
production and the unfolding of each worker's individuality. This
mode of production also exists in slavery, serfdom and other
forms of dependence. But it flourishes, releases its energy,
acquires its adequate arid classical form
only where the
worker is the free owner of his tools and resources; only then
can the artisan perform like a virtuoso. This mode of production
can be maintained only within the limits that nature dictates to
both production and society. There, useful unemployment is valued
while wage-labor, within limits, is merely tolerated.
The development paradigm is more easily repudiated by those
who were adults on January 10, 1949. That day, most of us met the
term in its present meaning for the first time when President
Truman announced his Point Four Program. Until then, we used
"development" to refer to species, real estate and
moves in chess - only thereafter to people, countries and
economic strategies. Since then, we have been flooded by
development theories whose concepts are now curiosities for
collectors - "growth", "catching up",
"modernization", "imperialism",
"dualism", "dependency", "basic
needs", "transfer of technology", "world
system", "autochthonous industrialization" and
"temporary unlinking". Each onrush came in two waves.
One carried the pragmatist who highlighted free enterprise and
world markets; the other, the politicians who stressed ideology
and revolution. Theorists produced mountains of prescriptions and
mutual caricatures. Beneath these, the common assumptions of all
were buried. Now is the time to dig out the axioms hidden in the
idea of development itself.
Fundamentally, the concept implies the replacement of general
competence and satisfying subsistence activities by the use and
consumption of commodities; the monopoly of wage-labor over all
other kinds of work; redefinition of needs in terms of goods and
services mass-produced according to expert design; finally, the
rearrangement of the environment in such fashion that space,
time, materials and design favor production and consumption while
they degrade or paralyze use-value oriented activities that
satisfy needs directly. And all such worldwide homogeneous
changes and processes are valued as inevitable and good. The
great Mexican muralists dramatically portrayed the typical
figures before the theorists outlined the stages. On their walls,
one sees the ideal type of human being as the male in overalls
behind a machine or in a white coat over a microscope. He tunnels
mountains, guides tractors, fuels smoking chimneys. Women give
him birth, nurse and teach him. In striking contrast to Aztec
subsistence, Rivera and Orozco visualize industrial work as the
sole source of all the goods needed for life and its possible
pleasures.
But this ideal of industrial man now dims. The tabus that
protected it weaken. Slogans about the dignity and joy of
wage-labor sound tinny. Unemployment, a term first introduced in
1898 to designate people without a fixed income, is now
recognized as the condition in which most of the world's people
live anyway - even at the height of industrial booms. In Eastern
Europe especially, but also in China, people now see that, since
1950
, the term, "working class", has been used
mainly as a cover to claim and obtain privileges for a new
bourgeoisie and its children. The "need" to create
employment and stimulate growth, by which the self-appointed
paladins of the poorest have so far squashed any consideration of
alternatives to development, clearly appears suspect.
The challenges to development take multiple forms. In Germany
alone, France or Italy, thousands of groups experiment, each
differently, with alternatives to an industrial existence.
Increasingly, more of these people come from blue-collar homes.
For most of them, there is no dignity left in earning one's
livelihood by a wage. They try to "unplug themselves from
consumption", in the phrase of some South Chicago
slum-dwellers. In the USA, at least four million people live in
the core of tiny and highly differentiated communities of this
kind, with at least seven times as many individually sharing
their values - women seek alternatives to gynecology; parents
alternatives to schools; home-builders alternatives to the flush
toilet; neighborhoods alternatives to commuting; people
alternatives to the shopping centre. In Trivandrum, South India,
I have seen one of the most successful alternatives to a special
kind of commodity dependence - to instruction and certification
as the privileged forms of learning. One thousand seven hundred
villages have installed libraries, each containing at least a
thousand titles. This is the minimum equipment they need to be
full members of Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad, and they may
retain their membership only as long as they loan at least three
thousand volumes per year. I was immensely encouraged to see
that, at least in South India, village-based and village-financed
libraries have turned schools into
adjuncts to libraries,
while elsewhere libraries during these last ten years have become
mere deposits for teaching materials used under the instruction
of professional teachers. Also in Bihar, India, Medico
International represents a grassroots-based attempt to
de-medicalize health care, without falling into the trap of the
Chinese barefooted doctor. The latter has been relegated to the
lowest level lackey in a national hierarchy of bio-control.
Besides talking such experiential forms, the challenge to
development also uses legal and political means. In an Austrian
referendum last year, an absolute majority refused permission to
Chancellor Kreisky, politically in control of the electorate, to
inaugurate a finished atomic generator. Citizens increasingly use
the ballot and the courts, in addition to more traditional
interest group pressures, to set negative design criteria for the
technology of production. In Europe, "green" candidates
begin to win elections. In America, citizen legal efforts begin
to stop highways and dams. Such behavior was not predictable ten
years ago - and many men in power still do not recognize it as
legitimate. All these grassroots-organized lives and actions in
the Metropolis challenge not only the recent concept of overseas
development, but also the more fundamental and root concept of
progress at home.
At this juncture, it is the task of the historian and the
philosopher to clarify the sources of and disentangle the process
resulting in Western needs. Only thus shall we be able to
understand how such a seemingly enlightened concept produced such
devastating exploitation. Progress, the notion which has
characterized the West for 2000 years, and has determined its
relations to outsiders since the decay of classical Rome, lies
behind the belief in needs. Societies mirror themselves not only
in their transcendent gods, but also in their image of the alien
beyond their frontiers. The West exported a dichotomy between
"us" and "them" unique to industrial society.
This peculiar attitude towards self and others is now worldwide,
constituting the victory of a universalist mission initiated in
Europe. A redefinition of development would only reinforce the
Western economic domination over the shape of formal economics by
the professional colonization of the informal sector, domestic
and foreign. To eschew this danger, the six-stage metamorphosis
of a concept that currently appears as "development"
must first be understood.
Every community has a characteristic attitude towards others.
The Chinese, for example, cannot refer to the alien or his
chattel without labeling them with a degrading marker. For the
Greek, he is either the house guest from a neighboring polis, or
the barbarian who is less than fully man. In Rome, barbarians
could become members of the city, but to bring them into it was
never the intent or mission of Rome. Only during late antiquity,
with the Western European Church, did the alien become someone in
need, someone to be brought in. This view of the alien as a
burden has become consititutive for Western society; without this
universal mission to the world outside, what we call the West
would not have come to be.
The perception of the outsider as someone who must be helped
has taken on successive forms. In late antiquity, the
barbarian
mutated into the
pagan - the
second stage toward
development had begun. The pagan was defined as the unbaptized,
but ordained by nature to become Christian. It was the duty of
those within the Church to incorporate him by baptism into the
body of Christendom. In the early Middle Ages, most people in
Europe were baptized, even though they might not yet be
converted. Then the Muslim appeared. Unlike Goths and Saxons,
Muslims were monotheists, and obviously prayerful believers; they
resisted conversion. Therefore, besides baptism, the further
needs to be subjected and instructed had to be imputed. The pagan
mutated into the
infidel, our
third stage.
By the late Middle Ages, the image of the alien mutated again.
The Moors had been driven from Granada, Columbus had sailed
across the ocean, and the Spanish Crown had assumed many
functions of the Church. The image of the
wild man who
threatens the civilizing function of the humanist replaced the
image of the infidel who threatens the faith. At this time also,
the alien was first described in economy-related terms. From many
studies on monsters, apes and wild men, we learn that the
Europeans of this period saw the wild man as
having no needs.
This independence made him noble, but a threat to the designs of
colonialism and mercantilism. To impute needs to the wild man,
one had to make him over into
the native, the
fifth
stage. Spanish courts, after long deliberation, decided that
at least the wild man of the New World had a soul and was,
therefore, human. In opposition to the wild man, the native has
needs, but needs unlike those of civilized man. His needs are
fixed by climate, race, religion and providence. Adam Smith still
reflects on the elasticity of native needs. As Gunnar Myrdal has
observed,
the construct of distinctly native needs was
necessary both to justify colonialism and to administer colonies.
The provision of government, education and commerce for the
natives was for four hundred years the white man's assumed
burden.
Each time the West put a new mask on the alien, the old one
was discarded because it was now recognized as a caricature of an
abandoned self-image. The pagan with his naturally Christian soul
had to give way to the stubborn infidel to allow Christendom to
launch the Crusades. The wild man became necessary to justify the
need for secular humanist education, The native was the crucial
concept to promote self-righteous colonial rule. But by the time
of the Marshall Plan, when multinational conglomerates were
expanding and the ambitions of transnational pedagogues,
therapists and planners knew no bounds, the natives' limited
needs for goods and services thwarted growth and progress. They
had to metamorphose into
underdeveloped people, the
sixth
and present stage of the West's view of the outsider.
Thus decolonization was also a process of conversion: the
worldwide acceptance of the Western self-image of
homo
economicus in his most extreme form as
homo industrialis, with
all needs commodity-defined. Scarcely twenty years were enough to
make two billion people define themselves as underdeveloped. I
vividly remember the Rio Carnival of 1963 - the last before the
Junta imposed itself. "Development" was the motif in
the prize-winning samba, "development" the shout of the
dancers while they jumped to the throbbing of the drums.
Development based on high per capita energy quanta and intense
professional care is the most pernicious of the West's missionary
efforts - a project guided by an ecologically unfeasible
conception of human control over nature, and by an
anthropologically vicious attempt to replace the nests and
snakepits of culture by sterile wards for professional service.
The hospitals that spew out the newborn and reabsorb the dying,
the schools run to busy the unemployed before, between and after
jobs, the apartment towers where people are stored between trips
to the supermarkets, the highways connecting garages form a
pattern tatooed into the landscape during the short development
spree. These institutions, designed for lifelong bottle babies
wheeled from medical centre to school to office to stadium begin
now to look as anomalous as cathedrals, albeit unredeemed by any
esthetic charm.
Ecological and anthropological realism are now necessary - but
with caution. The popular call for soft is ambiguous; both right
and left appropriate it. On the z-axis, it equally serves a
honied beehive, or the pluralism of independent actions. The soft
choice easily permits a recasting of a maternal society at home
and another metamorphosis of missionary zeal abroad. For example,
Amory Lovins argues that the possibility of further growth now
depends on a rapid transition to the soft path. Only in this way,
he claims, can the real income of rich countries double and that
of poor countries triple in this generation. Only by the
transition from fossil to sun can the externalities of production
be so cut that the resources now spent on making waste and hiring
scavengers to remove it be turned into benefits. I agree. If
growth is to be, then Lovins is right; and investments are more
secure with windspinners than with oil derricks. For the
traditional right
and left, for managerial democrats or
socialist authoritarians, soft process and energy become the
necessary rationale to expand their bureaucracies and to satisfy
escalating "needs" through the standardized production
of goods and services.
The World Bank makes the matching argument for services. Only
by choosing labor-intensive, sometimes less efficient forms of
industrial production can education be incorporated in
apprenticeship. More efficient plants create huge and costly
externalities in the formal education they presuppose, while they
cannot teach on the job.
The World Health Organization now stresses prevention and
education for self care. Only thus can population health levels
be raised, while expensive therapies - mostly of unproven
effectiveness, although still the principal work of physicians -
can be abandoned. The liberal egalitarian utopia of the 18
th
century, taken up as the ideal for industrial society by the
socialists of the 19th, now seems realizable only on the soft and
self-help path. On this point, right and left converge. Wolfgang
Harich, a highly cultured communist, refined and steeled in his
convictions by two stretches of eight years in solitary
confinement - once under Hitler and once under Ulbricht - is the
one East European spokesman for the soft path. But while for
Lovins the transition to decentralized production depends on the
market, for Harich the necessity of this transition is an
argument in favor of Stalinist ecology. For right
and
left, democrats
or authoritarians, soft process and energy
become the necessary means to satisfy escalating
"needs" through the standardized production of goods
and services.
Thus, the soft path can lead either towards a convivial
society where people are so equipped to do on their own whatever
they judge necessary for survival and pleasure, or towards a new
kind of commodity-dependent society where the goal of full
employment means the political management of activities, paid or
unpaid. Whether a "left" or "soft" path leads
towards or away from new forms of "development" and
"full employment" depends on the options taken between
"having" and "being" on the third axis.
We have seen that wherever wage-labor expands, its shadow,
industrial serfdom, also grows. Wage-labor, as the dominant form
of production, and housework, as the ideal type of its unpaid
complement, are both forms of activity without precedent in
history or anthropology. They thrive only where the absolute and,
later, the industrial state destroyed the social conditions for
subsistence living. They spread as small-scale, diversified,
vernacular communities have been made sociologically and legally
impossible - into a world where individuals, throughout their
lives, live only through dependence on education, health
services, transportation and other packages provided through the
multiple mechanical feeders of industrial institutions.
Conventional economic analysis has focused on only one of
these complementary industrial age activities. Economic analysis
has focused on the worker as wage-earning producer. The equally
commodity-oriented activities performed by the unemployed have
remained in the shadow of the economic searchlight. What women or
children do, what occupies men after "working hours",
is belittled in a cavalier fashion. But this is changing rapidly.
Both the weight and the nature of the contribution made by unpaid
activities to the industrial system begin to be noticed.
Feminist research into the history and anthropology of work
has made it impossible to ignore the fact that work in an
industrial society is sex-specific in a manner which cuts deeper
than in any other known society. In the 19
th century,
women entered the wage-labor force in the "advanced"
nations; they then won the franchise, non-restricted access to
schooling, equal rights on the job. All these
"victories" have had precisely the opposite effect from
that which conventional wisdom assigns them. Paradoxically,
"emancipation" has heightened the contrast between paid
and unpaid work; it has severed all connections between unpaid
work and subsistence. Thus, it has redefined the structure of
unpaid work so that this latter becomes a new kind of serfdom
inevitably borne by women.
Gender-specific tasks are not new; all known societies assign
sex-specific work roles. For example, hay may be cut by men,
raked by women, gathered by men, loaded by women, carted away by
men, fed to cows by women and to horses by men. But no matter how
much we search other cultures, we cannot find the contemporary
division between two forms of work, one paid and the other
unpaid, one credited as productive and the other as concerned
with reproduction and consumption, one considered heavy and the
other light, one demanding special qualifications and the other
not, one given high social prestige and the other relegated to
"private" matters. Both are equally fundamental in the
industrial mode of production. They differ in that the surplus
from paid work is taxed directly by the employer, while the added
value of unpaid work reaches him only via wage-work. Nowhere can
we find two such distinct forms through which, in each family,
surplus is created and expropriated.
This division between unpaid work off the job and paid work
through employment would have been unthinkable in societies where
the whole house served as a framework in which its inhabitants,
to a large extent, did and made those things by which they also
lived. Although we can find traces of both wage-work and its
shadow in many societies, in none could either become the
society's paradigm of work, nor be used as the key symbol for
sex-specific tasks. And since two such types of work did not
exist, the family did not have to exist to couple these kinds of
opposites. Nowhere in history is the family, nuclear or extended,
the instrument for linking two complementary but mutually
exclusive species of work, one assigned primarily to the male,
the other to the female. This symbiosis between opposite forms of
activity, inseparably wedded through the family, is unique to
commodity-intensive society. We now see that it is the inevitable
result of the pursuit of development and full employment. And
since such kinds of work did not exist, sex-roles could not be
defined with such finality, distinct natures could not be
attributed to male and female, families could not be transformed
into a solder to weld the two together.
A feminist analysis of the history of industrial work thus
removes the blindspot of economics:
homo economicus has
never been sexually neutral;
homo industrialis appeared
from the beginning in two genders:
vir laborans, the
workingman, and
femina domestica, the hausfrau. In no
society that developed toward the goal of full employment has
shadow-work not grown apace with that employment. And shadow-work
provided a device, effective beyond every precedent, to degrade a
type of activity in which women cannot but predominate, while it
supported one which privileged men.
Quite recently, the orthodox distinction between production
and consumption functions ceased to hold. Suddenly, opposing
interests turn the importance of unpaid work into a public issue.
Economists put shadow prices on what happens in the
"informal" sector: S. - the contribution that the work
done by the client in choosing, paying for and carrying his cake
adds to the value of the cake; G. B. - the calculus of marginal
choices made in sexual activities; L. - the value of jogging over
heart surgery.
Housewives claim pay for housework at the rate for such
services in motels and restaurants. Teachers transmogrify mothers
into trained but unpaid supervisors of their own children's
homework. Government reports recognise that basic needs as
professionally defined can be met only if laymen also produce
these services, with competence but without pay. If growth and
full employment retain their status as goals, the management of
disciplined people motivated by non-monetary rewards will open up
as the latest form of "development" in the 1980's.
Rather than life in a shadow economy, I propose, on top of the
z axis, the ideas of
vernacular work: unpaid activities
which provide and improve livelihood, but which are totally
refractory to any analysis utilizing concepts developed in formal
economics. I apply the term, "vernacular" to these
activities, since there is no other current concept that allows
me to make the same distinction within the domain covered by such
terms as "informal sector", "use value",
"social reproduction".
Vernacular is a Latin term that we use in English only for the
language that we have acquired without paid teachers. In Rome, it
was used from 500 B. C. to 600 A. D. to designate any value that
was homebred, homemade, derived from the commons, and that a
person could protect and defend though he neither bought nor sold
it on the market. I suggest that we restore this simple term,
vernacular, to oppose to commodities and their shadow. It allows
me to distinguish between the expansion of the shadow economy and
its inverse - the expansion of the vernacular domain.
The tension and balance between vernacular work and industrial
labor - paid and unpaid - is the key issue on the third dimension
of options, distinct from political right and left and from
technical soft and hard. Industrial labor, paid and otherwise
exacted, will not disappear. But when development, wage-labor and
its shadow encroach upon vernacular work, the relative priority
of one or the other constitutes the issue. We are free to choose
between hierarchically managed standardised work that may be paid
or unpaid, self-selected or imposed on the one hand and, on the
other, we can protect our freedom to choose ever newly invented
forms of simple, integrated subsistence actions which have an
outcome that is unpredictable to the bureaucrat, unmanageable by
hierarchies and oriented to the values shared within a specific
community.
If the economy expands, which the soft choice can permit, the
shadow economy cannot but grow even faster, and the vernacular
domain must further decline. In this case, with rising job
scarcity, the unemployed will be integrated into newly organised
useful activities in the informal sector. Unemployed men will be
given the so-called privilege to engage in those
production-fostering types of unpaid activity that, since their
emergence as housework in the 19th century, have been
considerately earmarked for the "weaker sex" - a
designation that was also first used at that time, when
industrial serfdom rather than subsistence was defined as the
task of women. "Care" exacted for the sake of love will
lose its sex-specific character, and in the process become
manageable by the state.
Under
this option, international development is here to
stay. Technical aid to develop the informal sector overseas will
reflect the new sexless unpaid domestication of the unemployed at
home. The new experts pushing French rather than German self-help
methods or windmill designs already crowd airports and
conferences. The last hope of development bureaucracies lies in
the development of shadow economies.
Many of the dissidents that I have mentioned take a stand
against all this - against the use of soft technology to reduce
the vernacular domain and to increase professional controls over
informal sector activities. These new vanguards conceive
technical progress as one possible instrument to support a new
type of value, neither traditional nor industrial but both
subsistence-oriented and rationally chosen. Their lives, with
more and less success, express a critical sense of beauty, a
particular experience of pleasure, a unique view of life
cherished by one group, understood but not necessarily shared by
the next. They have found that modern tools make it possible to
subsist on activities which permit a variety of evolving life
styles, and relieve much of the drudgery of old time subsistence.
They struggle for the freedom to expand the vernacular domain of
their lives.
Examples from Travancore to Wales may soon free those
majorities who were recently captivated by the modern
"demonstration model" of stupefying, sickening and
paralyzing enrichment. But two conditions must be met. First, the
mode of life resulting from a new relation between people and
tools must be informed by the perception of man as
homo
habilis and not
homo industrialis. Second,
commodity-independent life styles must be shaped anew by each
small community, and not be imposed. Communities living by
predominantly vernacular values have nothing much to offer to
others besides the attractiveness of their example. But the
example of a poor society that enhances modern subsistence by
vernacular work should be rather attractive to jobless males in a
rich society now condemned, like their women to social
reproduction in an expanding shadow economy. The ability, however
not only to live in new ways, but to insist on this freedom
demands that we clearly recognise what distinguishes the
perception of
homo economicus from all other human beings.
To this end I choose the study of history as a privileged road.
Part 2: The War Against Subsistence
What may not be done is tabu; even more so what may not be
thought. The unthinkable is a tabu of the second order. Ibn tells
of a saintly Muslim who would have died rather than eat pork; he
did die of hunger, with his dog watching beside him. Pork would
have defiled his faith - eating the dog would have destroyed his
self image as a man. Succulent pork is forbidden; dog or clay or
begonias are simply non-food. Old Mexicans, however, appreciated
all three! Watch out for your begonias if you have a Mexican
peasant for tea.
Just as the environment is divided by each society differently
into food, poison and what is never considered as digestible, so
issues are divided by us into those which are legitimate, those
one leaves to the fascists, and those which nobody raises.
However, these latter are not actually illegitimate.
But if you raise them you risk being thought a fiend, or
impossibly vain. The distinction between vernacular and
industrial values is of this kind. With this essay, I want to
draw this distinction into the realm of permissible discussion.
Since 1973, the annual commemoration of Yom Kippur reminds us
of the war which triggered the energy crises. But a more lasting
effect of that war will be its impact on economic thought. Since
then economists have begun to eat pork, to violate a tabu which
had been implicit in formal economics. They add to the Gross
National Product goods and services for which no salary is paid
and to which no price tag is attached. One after another they
reveal the good news that one-third, one-half or even two-thirds
of all goods and services in late industrial societies are
produced outside the market by housework, private study,
commuting, shopping and other unpaid activities.
Economists can only deal with realms they can measure. For
forays into the non-marketed, they need new sticks. To function
where money is not the currency, the concepts must be
sui
generis. But to avoid splitting their science, the new tools
must be consistent with the old. Pigou defined the shadow price
as one such tool. It is the money needed to substitute through a
good or service something which is now done without pay. The
unpaid and, perhaps, even the priceless thus become consistent
with the realm of commodities, enter a domain that can be
operationalized, managed and bureaucratically developed. The
unpaid becomes part of a shadow economy and is related to the
wares in supermarkets, classrooms, and medical clinics as the
wave to the particle - electrons are not intelligible unless one
examines both theories.
Close analysis reveals that this shadow economy mirrors the
formal economy. The two fields are in synergy, together
constituting one whole. The shadow economy developed a complete
range of parallel activities, following the brightly illuminated
realm where labor, prices, needs and markets were increasingly
managed as industrial production increased. Thus we see that the
housework of a modern woman is as radically new as the wage-labor
of her husband; the replacement of home-cooked food by restaurant
delivery is as new as the definition of most basic needs in terms
which correspond to the outputs of modern institutions.
I argue elsewhere that the new competence of some economists,
enabling them to analyze this shady area, is more than an
expansion of their conventional economic analysis - it is the
discovery of new land which, like the industrial market, emerged
for the first time in history only during the last two centuries.
I feel sorrow for such economists who do not understand what they
are doing. Their destiny is as sad as that of Columbus. With the
compass, the new caravel designed to follow the route the compass
opened, and his own flair as a mariner, he was able to hit on
unexpected land. But he died, unaware that he had chanced on a
hemisphere, firmly attached to the belief that he had reached the
Indies.
In an industrial world, the realm of shadow economics is
comparable to the hidden side of the moon, also being explored
for the first time. And the whole of this
industrial
reality is in turn complementary to a substantive domain which I
call the
vernacular reality, the domain of subsistence.
In terms of 20
th century classical economics, both
the shadow economy and the vernacular domain are outside the
market, both are unpaid. Also, both are generally included in the
so-called informal sector. And both are indistinctly viewed as
contributions to "social reproduction." But what is
most confusing in the analysis is the fact that the unpaid
complement of wage-labor which, in its structure, is
characteristic of industrial societies only, is often completely
misunderstood as the survival of subsistence activities, which
are characteristic of the
vernacular societies and which
may continue to exist in an industrial society.
Certain changes can now be discerned. The distinction between
the market economy and its shadow weakens. The substitution of
commodities for subsistence activities is not necessarily
experienced as progress. Women ask whether the unearned
consumption which accompanies homemaking is a privilege or
whether they are actually forced into degrading work by the
prevailing patterns of compulsory consumption. Students ask if
they are in school to learn or to collaborate in their own
stupefaction. Increasingly, the toil of consumption overshadows
the relief consumption promised. The choice between
labor-intensive consumption, perhaps less inhuman and less
destructive, better organized, and modern forms of subsistence is
personally known to more and more people. The choice corresponds
to the difference between an expanding shadow economy and the
recovery of the vernacular domain. But it is precisely this
choice which is the most resistant blind spot of economics, as
unpalatable as dog or clay. Perhaps the most unlikely candidate
can help dispel some of the darkness. I propose to throw light on
this issue through an examination of
everyday-speech. I
shall proceed by contrasting the economic nature of this speech
in industrial society with its counterpart in pre-industrial
epochs. As I shall show, the distinction finds its origin in a
little-known event which occurred at the end of the 15
th
century in Spain.
Columbus Finds the Nightingale
Early on August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed from
Palos. The neighboring and much more important Cadíz was
congested that year - it was the one port from which Jews were
allowed to leave. Granada had been reconquered, and Jewish
service was no longer needed for a struggle with Islam. Columbus
headed for Cipangu, the name for Cathay (China) during the short
reign of the long dead Tamerlane. He had calculated the earth's
degree as equivalent to forty-five miles. This would place
Eastern Asia 2,400 miles west of the Canaries, somewhere close to
the Antilles in the Saragossa Sea. He had reduced the ocean to
the range of the ships he could master. Columbus had on board an
Arabic interpreter to enable him to speak to the great Khan. He
set out to discover a route, not new land, not a new hemisphere.
His project, however, was quite unreasonable. No learned man
of the early Renaissance doubted that the earth was a globe -
some believing that it rested at the center of the universe, and
some that it whirled in its sphere. But not since Eratosthenes
had anyone underestimated its size as badly as Columbus. In 255,
Eratosthenes of Cyrene measured the distance from the great
library that he directed in Alexandria to Syene (now the site of
the Aswan dam) as 500 miles. He measured the distance using the
camel caravan's remarkably steady gait from sunrise to sunset as
his "rod." He had observed that on the day of the
summer solstice, the rays of the sun fell vertically at Syene,
and seven degrees off the vertical at Alexandria. From this he
calculated the earth's circumference to about 5 percent of its
real dimension.
When Columbus sought Isabella's support for his venture, she
asked Talavera, the sage, to evaluate its feasibility. An expert
commission reported that the West-to-the-Orient project lacked a
firm foundation. Educated authorities believed its goal to be
uncertain or impossible. The proposed voyage would require three
years; it was doubtful that even the newest kind of ship, the
caravel - designed for distant explorations - could ever return.
The oceans were neither as small nor as navigable as Columbus
supposed. And it was hardly likely that God would have allowed
any uninhabited lands of real value to be concealed from his
people for so many centuries. Initially, then, the queen rejected
Columbus; reason and bureaucratic expertise supported her. Later,
swayed by zealous Franciscan friars, she retracted her earlier
decision and signed her "stipulations" with Columbus.
She, who had driven Islam from Europe, could not refuse her
Admiral who wanted to plant the Cross beyond the Ocean Seas. And,
as we shall see, the decision for colonial conquest overseas
implied the challenge of a new war at home - the invasion of her
own people's vernacular domain, the opening of a five-century war
against vernacular subsistence, the ravages of which we now begin
to fathom.
For five weeks Columbus sailed well-known waters. He put in at
the Canary Islands to repair the rudder of the Pinta, to replace
the lateen sail of the Niña, and to pursue a mysterious affair
with Dona Beatriz de Peraza. Only on September 10, two days out
of the Canaries, he picked up the Easterlies, tradewinds on which
he chanced, and which carried him rapidly across the ocean. In
October, he came upon land that neither he nor the queen's
counselors had expected. In his diary entry for October 13, 1492,
he beautifully described the song of the nightingale that
welcomed him on Santo Domingo, though such birds never lived
there. Columbus was and remained
gran marinero y mediocre
cosmógrafo. To the end of his life he remained convinced of
having found what he had sought - a Spanish nightingale on the
shores of China.
Nebrija Engineers The
Artifact: August 18, 1492
Let me now move from the reasonably well known to the
unreasonably overlooked - from Columbus, immediately associated
with 1492, to Elio Antonio de Nebrija, outside of Spain almost
forgotten. During the time Columbus cruised southwest through
recognizable Portuguese waters and harbors, in Spain the
fundamental engineering of a new social reality was proposed to
the queen. While Columbus sailed for foreign lands to seek the
familiar - gold, subjects, nightingales - in Spain Nebrija
advocates the reduction of the queen's subjects to an entirely
new type of dependence. He presents her with a new weapon,
grammar, to be wielded by a new kind of mercenary, the
letrado.
I was deeply moved when I felt Nebrija's Gramatica Castellana
in my hands - a quarto volume of five signatures set in Gothic
letters. The epigraphy is printed in red, and a blank page
precedes the Introduction:
A la muy alta e assi esclarecida princesa dona Isabela
la tercera deste nombre Reina i senora natural de espana e
las islas de nuestro mar. Comienza la gramática que
nuevamenta hizo el maestro Antonio de Nebrixa sobre la lengua
castellana, e pone primero el prólogo. Léelo en buena hora.
The Conqueror of Granada receives a petition, similar to many
others. But unlike the request of Columbus, who wanted resources
to establish a new route to the China of Marco Polo, that of
Nebrija urges the queen to invade a new domain at home. He offers
Isabella a tool to colonize the language spoken by her own
subjects; he wants her to replace the people's speech by the
imposition of the queen's
lengua - her language,
her tongue.
Empire Needs "Language" as Consort
I shall translate and comment on sections of the six-page
introduction to Nebrija's grammar. Remember, then, that the
colophon of the
Gramática Castellana notes that it came
off the press in Salamanca on the 18
th of August, just
fifteen days after Columbus had sailed.
My lllustrious Queen. Whenever I ponder over the tokens of
the past that have been preserved in writing, I am forced to
the very same conclusion. Language has always been the
consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate.
Together they come into being, together they grow and flower,
and together they decline.
To understand what
la lengua, "language,"
meant for Nebrija, it is necessary to know who he was. Antonio
Martinez de la Cala, a
converso, descendant of Jewish
converts, had decided at age nineteen that Latin, at least on the
Iberian peninsula, had become so corrupted that one could say it
had died of neglect. Thus Spain was left without a language
(una
lengua) worthy of the name. The
languages of Scripture
- Greek, Latin, Hebrew - clearly were something other than the
speech
of the people. Nebrija then went to Italy where, in his opinion,
Latin was least corrupted. When he returned to Spain, his
contemporary Herñan Nunez wrote that it was like Orpheus
bringing Euridice back from Hades. During the next twenty years,
Nebrija dedicated himself to the renewal of classical grammar and
rhetoric. The first full book printed in Salamanca was his Latin
grammar (1482).
When he reached his forties and began to age -as he puts it -
he discovered that he could make a language out of the speech
forms he daily encountered in Spain - to engineer, to synthesize
chemically, a language. He then wrote his Spanish grammar, the
first in any modern European tongue. The
converso uses his
classical formation to extend the juridic category of
consuetudo
hispaniae to the realm of language. Throughout the Iberian
peninsula, crowds speaking various languages gather for pogroms
against the Jewish outsider at the very moment when the
cosmopolitan
converso offers his services to the Crown -
the creation of one language suitable for use wherever the sword
could carry it.
Nebrija created two rule books, both at the service of the
queen's regime. First, he wrote a grammar. Now grammars were not
new. The most perfect of them, unknown to Nebrija, was already
two thousand years old - Panini's grammar of Sanskrit. This was
an attempt to describe a dead language, to be taught only to a
very few. This is the goal pursued by Prakrit grammarians in
India, and Latin or Greek grammarians in the West. Nebrija's
work, however, was written as a tool for conquest abroad and a
weapon to suppress untutored speech at home.
While he worked on his grammar, Nebrija also wrote a
dictionary that, to this day, remains the single best source on
Old Spanish. The two attempts made in our lifetime to supersede
him both failed. Gili Gaya's
Tesauro Lexicográfico, begun
in 1947, foundered on the letter E, and R.S. Boggs (
Tentative
Dictionary of Medieval Spanish) remains, since 1946, an often
copied draft. Nebrija's dictionary appeared the year after his
grammar, and already contained evidence of the New World - the
first Americanism,
canoa (canoe), appeared.
Castilian Passes Through Its Infancy
Now note what Nebrija thinks about Castilian.
Castilian went through its infancy at the time of the
judges... it waxed in strength under Alfonso the Learned. It
was he who collected law and history books in Greek and Latin
and had them translated.
Indeed, Alfonso (1221 - 1284) was the first European monarch
to use the vulgar or vernacular tongue of the scribes as his
chancery language. His intent was to demonstrate that he was not
one of the Latin kings. Like a caliph, he ordered his courtiers
to undertake pilgrimages through Muslim and Christian books, and
transform them into treasures that, because of their very
language, would be a valuable inheritance to leave his kingdom.
Incidentally, most of his translators were Jews from Toledo. And
these Jews - whose own language was Old Castilian - preferred to
translate the oriental languages into the vernacular rather than
into Latin, the sacred language of the Church.
Nebrija points out to the queen that Alfonso had left solid
tokens of Old Spanish; in addition, he had worked toward the
transformation of vernacular speech into language proper through
using it to make laws, to record history, and to translate from
the classics.
He continues:
This our language followed our soldiers whom we sent
abroad to rule. It spread to Aragon, to Navarra, even to
Italy ... the scattered bits and pieces of Spain were thus
gathered and joined into one single kingdom.
Nebrija here reminds the queen of the new pact possible
between sword and book. He proposes a covenant between two
spheres,
both within the secular realm of the Crown, a covenant distinct
from the medieval pact between Emperor and Pope, which had been a
covenant bridging the secular and the sacred. He proposes a pact,
not of sword and cloth - each sovereign in its own sphere - but
of sword and expertise, encompassing the engine of conquest
abroad and a system of scientific control of diversity within the
entire kingdom. And he knows well whom he addresses: the wife of
Ferdinand of Aragon, a woman he once praised as the most
enlightened of all men (sic). He is aware that she reads Cicero,
Seneca, and Livy in the original for her own pleasure; and that
she possesses a sensibility that unites the physical and
spiritual into what she herself called "good taste."
Indeed, historians claim that she is the first to use this
expression. Together with Ferdinand, she was trying to give shape
to the chaotic Castile they had inherited; together they were
creating Renaissance institutions of government, institutions apt
for the making of a modern state, and yet, something better than
a nation of lawyers. Nebrija calls to their minds a concept that,
to this day, is powerful in Spanish -
armas y letras. He
speaks about the marriage of empire and language, addressing the
sovereign who had just recently - and for a painfully short time
- seized from the Church the Inquisition, in order to use it as a
secular instrument of royal power. The monarchy used it to gain
economic control of the grandees, and to replace noblemen by the
letrados
of Nebrija on the governing councils of the kingdom. This was
the monarchy that transformed the older advisory bodies into
bureaucratic organizations of civil servants, institutions fit
only for the execution of royal policies. These secretaries or
ministries of "experts," under the court ceremonial of
the Hapsburgs, were later assigned a ritual role in processions
and receptions incomparable to any other secular bureaucracy
since the times of Byzantium.
Language Now Needs Tutors
Very astutely, Nebrija's argument reminds the queen that a new
union of
armas y letras, complementary to that of church
and state, was essential to gather and join the scattered pieces
of Spain into a single absolute kingdom.
This unified and sovereign body will be of such shape
and inner cohesion that centuries will be unable to undo
it. Now that the Church has been purified, and we are
thus reconciled to God [does he think of the work of his
contemporary, Torquemada?] , now that the enemies of the
Faith have been subdued by our arms [he refers to the
apogee of the Reconquista], now that just laws are
being enforced, enabling all of us to live as equals
[perhaps having in mind the Hermandades] , what
else remains but the flowering of the peaceful arts. And
among the arts, foremost are those of language, which
sets us apart from wild animals; language, which is the
unique distinction of man, the means for the kind of
understanding which can be surpassed only by
contemplation.
Here, we distinctly hear the appeal of the humanist to the
prince, requesting him to defend the realm of civilized
Christians against the domain of the wild. "The wild man's
inability to speak is part of the Wild Man Myth whenever we meet
him during the middle ages....... in a morally ordered world, to
be wild is to be incoherent mute ... sinful and accursed."
Formerly, the heathen was to be brought into the fold through
baptism; henceforth, through language. Language now needs tutors.
A Loose and Unruly Language
Nebrija then points out:
So far, this our language has been left loose and unruly
and, therefore, in just a few centuries this language has
changed beyond recognition. If we were to compare what we
speak today with the language spoken five hundred years ago,
we would notice a difference and a diversity that could not
be any greater if these were two alien tongues.
Nebrija describes the evolution and extension of vernacular
tongues, of the
lengua vulgar, through time. He refers to
the untutored speech of Castile - different from that of Aragon
and Navarra, regions where soldiers had recently introduced
Castilian - but a speech also different from the older Castilian
into which Alfonso's monks and Jews had translated the Greek
classics from their Arabic versions. In the fifteenth century
people felt and lived their languages otherwise than we do today.
The study of Columbus’ language made by Menendez Pidal helps
us to understand this. Columbus, originally a cloth merchant from
Genoa, had as his first language Genovese, a dialect still not
standardized today. He learned to write business letters in
Latin, albeit a barbarous variety. After being shipwrecked in
Portugal, he married a Portuguese and probably forgot most of his
Italian. He spoke, but never wrote a word of Portuguese . During
his nine years in Lisbon, he took up writing in Spanish. But, he
never used his brilliant mind to learn Spanish well, and always
wrote it in a hybrid, Portuguese-mannered style. His Spanish is
not Castillan but is rich in simple words picked up all over the
peninsula. In spite of some syntactical monstrosities, he handles
this language in a lively, expressive, and precise fashion.
Columbus, then, wrote in two languages he did not speak, and
spoke several. None of this seems to have been problematic for
his contemporaries. However, it is also true that none of these
were languages in the eyes of Nebrija.
Unbound and Ungoverned Speech Finds a New Ally in Printing
Continuing to develop his petition, he introduces
the
crucial element of his argument:
La lengua suelta y fuera de
regla, the unbound and ungoverned speech in which people
actually live and manage their lives, has become a challenge to
the Crown. He now interprets an unproblematic historical fact as
a problem for the architects of a new kind of polity - the modern
state.
Your Majesty, it has been my constant desire to see our
nation become great, and to provide the men of my tongue with
books worthy of their leisure. Presently, they waste their
time on novels and fancy stories full of lies.
Nebrija proposes to regularize language to stop people from
wasting time on frivolous reading,
"quando la emprenta
aun no informaba la lengua de los libros." And Nebrija
is not the only late fifteenth-century person concerned with the
"waste" of leisure time made possible through the inventions of paper and movable
type. Ignatius of Loyola, twenty-nine years later, while
convalescing in Pamplona with a leg shattered by a cannonball,
came to believe that he had disastrously wasted his youth. At
thirty, he looked back on his life as one filled with "the
vanities of the world", whose leisure had included the
reading of vernacular trash.
...And Must Be Repressed
Nebrija argues for standardizing a living language for the
benefit of its printed form. This argument is also made in our
generation, but the end now is different. Our contemporaries
believe that standardized language is a necessary condition to
teach people to read, indispensable for the distribution of
printed books. The argument in 1492 is the opposite: Nebrija is
upset because people who speak in dozens of distinct vernacular
tongues have become the victims of a reading epidemic. They waste
their leisure, throwing away their time on books that circulate
outside of any possible bureaucratic control. A manuscript was so
precious and rare that authorities could often suppress the work
of an author by literally seizing
all the copies.
Manuscripts could sometimes be extirpated by the roots. Not so
books. Even with the small editions of two hundred to less than a
thousand copies - typical for the first generation of print - it
would never be possible to confiscate an entire run. Printed
books called for the exercise of censorship through an
Index
of Forbidden Books. Books could only be proscribed, not
destroyed. But Nebrija's proposal appeared more than fifty years
before the
Index was published in 1559. And he wishes to
achieve control over the printed word on a much deeper level than
what the Church later attempted through proscription. He wants to
replace the people's vernacular by the grammarian's language. The
humanist proposes the standardization of colloquial language to
remove the new technology of printing from the vernacular domain
- to prevent people from printing and reading in the various
languages that, up to that time, they had only spoken. By this
monopoly over an official and taught language, he proposes to
suppress wild, untaught vernacular reading.
Vernacular Allied to Printing Would Challenge the Nation State
To grasp the full significance of Nebrija's argument - the
argument that compulsory education in a standardized national
tongue is necessary to stop people from wanton reading that gives
them an easy pleasure - one must remember the status of print at
that time. Nebrija was born before the appearance of movable
type. He was thirteen when the first movable stock came into use.
His conscious adult life coincides with the Incunabula. When
printing was in its twenty-fifth year, he published his Latin
grammar; when it was in its thirty-fifth year, his Spanish
grammar. Nebrija could recall the time before print, as I can the
time before television. Nebrija's text, on which I am commenting,
was by coincidence published the year Thomas Caxton died. And
Caxton's work itself furthers our understanding of the
vernacular
book.
Thomas Caxton was an English cloth merchant living in the
Netherlands. He took up translating, and then apprenticed himself
to a printer. After publishing a few books in English, he took
his press to England in 1476. By the time, he died (1491), he had
published forty translations into English, and nearly everything
available in English vernacular literature, with the notable
exception of William Langland's
Piers Plowman. I have
often wondered if he left this important work off his list
because of the challenge it might present to one of his best
sellers -
The Art and Crafte to Knowe Well to Dye.
This volume of his Westminster Press belongs to the first series
of self-help books. Whatever would train for a society well
informed and well mannered, whatever would lead to behavior
gentle and devout, was gathered in small folios and quartos of
neat Gothic print - instructions on everything from manipulating
a knife to conducting a conversation, from the art of weeping to
the art of playing chess to that of dying. Before 1500, no less
than 100 editions of this last book appeared. It is a
self-instruction manual, showing one how to prepare to die with
dignity and without the intervention of physician or clergy.
Four categories of books first appeared in the peoples'
languages: vernacular, native literature; translations from
French and Latin; devotional books; and already there were the
how-to-do-it manuals that made teachers unnecessary. Printed
books in Latin were of a different sort, comprising textbooks,
rituals, and lawbooks - books at the service of professional
clergymen and teachers. From the very beginning, printed books
were of two kinds: those which readers independently chose for
their pleasure, and those professionally prescribed for the
reader's own good. It is estimated that before 1500, more than
seventeen hundred presses in almost three hundred European towns
had produced one or more books. Almost forty thousand editions
were published during the fifteenth century, comprising somewhere
between fifteen and twenty million copies. About one-third of
these were published in the various vernacular languages of
Europe. This portion of printed books is the source of Nebrija's
concern.
Books Henceforth Shall Be Seen and Not Heard
To appreciate more fully his worry about the freedom to read,
one must remember that reading in his time was not silent. Silent
reading is a recent invention. Augustine was already a great
author and the Bishop of Hippo when he found that it could be
done. In his
Confessions he describes the discovery.
During the night, charity forbade him to disturb his fellow monks
with noises he made while reading. But curiosity impelled him to
pick up a book. So, he learned to read in silence, an art that he
had observed in only one man, his teacher, Ambrose of Milan.
Ambrose practiced the art of silent reading because otherwise
people would have gathered around him and would have interrupted
him with their queries on the text. Loud reading was the link
between classical learning and popular culture.
Habitual reading in a loud voice produces social effects. It
is an extraordinarily effective way of teaching the art to those
who look over the reader's shoulder; rather than being confined
to a sublime or sublimated form of self-satisfaction, it promotes
community intercourse; it actively leads to common digestion of
and comment on the passages read. In most of the languages of
India, the verb that translates into "reading" has a
meaning close to "sounding." The same verb makes the
book and the vina sound. To read and to play a musical instrument
are perceived as parallel activities. The current, simpleminded,
internationally accepted definition of literacy obscures an
alternate approach to book, print, and reading. If reading were
conceived primarily as a social activity as, for example,
competence in playing the guitar, fewer readers could mean a much
broader access to books and literature.
Reading aloud was common in Europe before Nebrija's time.
Print multiplied and spread opportunities for this infectious
reading in an epidemic manner. Further, the line between literate
and illiterate was different from what we recognize now. Literate
was he who had been taught Latin. The great mass of people,
thoroughly conversant with the vernacular literature of their
region, either did not know how to read and write, had picked it
up on their own, had been instructed as accountants, had left the
clergy or, even if they knew it, hardly used their Latin. This
held true for the poor and for many nobles, especially women. And
we sometimes forget that even today the rich, many professionals,
and high-level bureaucrats have assistants report a verbal digest
of documents and information, while they call on secretaries to
write what they dictate.
To the queen, Nebrija's proposed enterprise must have seemed
even more improbable than Columbus' project. But, ultimately, it
turned out to be more fundamental than the New World for the rise
of the Hapsburg Empire. Nebrija clearly showed the way to prevent
the free and anarchic development of printing technology, and
exactly how to transform it into the evolving national state's
instrument of bureaucratic control.
At the Queen's Service, Synthetic Castillian Shall Replace the People's Speech
Today, we generally act on the assumption that books could not
be printed and would not be read in any number if they were
written in a vernacular language free from the constraints of an
official grammar. Equally, we assume that people could not learn
to read and write their own tongue unless they are taught in the
same manner as students were traditionally taught Latin. Let us
listen again to Nebrija.
By means of my grammar, they shall learn artificial
Castilian, not difficult to do, since it is built up on
the base of a language they know; and, then, Latin will
come easily…
Nebrija already considers the vernacular as a raw material
from which his Castilian art can be produced, a resource to be
mined, not unlike the Brazilwood and human chattel that, Columbus
sadly concluded, were the only resources of value or importance
in Cuba.
Speech Nurtured from Roots is Replaced by Language Dispensed from the Crown
Nebrija does not seek to teach grammar that people learn to
read. Rather, he implores Isabella to give him the power and
authority to stem the anarchic spread of reading by the use of
his grammar.
Presently, they waste their leisure on novels and
fancy stories full of lies. I have decided, therefore,
that my most urgent task is to transform Castilian speech
into an artifact so that whatever henceforth shall be
written in this language may be of one standard tenor.
Nebrija frankly states what he wants to do and even provides
the outline of his incredible project. He deliberately turns the
mate of empire into its slave. Here the first modern language
expert advises the Crown on the way to make, out of a people's
speech and lives, tools that befit the state and its pursuits.
Nebrija's grammar is conceived by him as a pillar of the
nation-state. Through it, the state is seen, from its very
beginning, as an aggressively productive agency.
The new state takes from people the words on which they
subsist, and transforms them into the standardized language which
henceforth they are compelled to use, each one at the level of
education that has been institutionally imputed to him.
Henceforth, people will have to rely on the language they receive
from above, rather than to develop a tongue in common with one
another. The switch from the vernacular to an officially taught
mother tongue is perhaps the most significant - and, therefore,
least researched - event in the coming of a commodity-intensive
society.
The radical change from the vernacular to taught language
foreshadows the switch from breast to bottle, from subsistence to
welfare, from production for use to production for market, from
expectations divided between state and church to a world where
the Church is marginal, religion is privatized, and the state
assumes the maternal functions heretofore claimed only by the
Church. Formerly, there had been no salvation outside the
Church; now, there would be no reading, no writing - if possible,
no speaking - outside the educational sphere. People would have
to be reborn out of the monarch's womb, and be nourished at her
breast. Both the citizen of the modern state and his
state-provided language come into being for the first time - both
are without precedent anywhere in history.
The Bosom of Alma Mater
But dependence on a formal, bureaucratic institution to obtain
for every individual a service that is as necessary as breast
milk for human subsistence, while radically new and without
parallel outside of Europe, was not a break with Europe's past.
Rather, this was a logical step forward - a process first
legitimated in the Christian Church evolved into an accepted and
expected temporal function of the secular state. Institutional
maternity has a unique European history since the third century.
In this sense, it is indeed true that Europe is the Church and
the Church is Europe. Nebrija and universal education in the
modern state cannot be understood without a close knowledge of
the Church, insofar as this institution is represented as a
mother.
From the very earliest days, the Church is called
"mother". Marcion the Gnostic uses this designation in
144. At first, the community of the faithful is meant to be
mother to the new members whom communion, that is, the fact of
celebrating community, engenders. Soon, however, the Church
becomes a mother outside of whose bosom it is hardly worthwhile
to be called human or to be alive. But the origins of the
Church's self-understanding as mother have been little
researched. One can often find comments about the role of mother
goddesses in the various religions scattered throughout the Roman
Empire at the time Christianity began to spread. But the fact
that no previous community had ever been called mother has yet to
be noticed and studied. We know that the image of the Church as
mother comes from Syria, and that it flourished in the third
century in North Africa. On a beautiful mosaic near Tripoli,
where the claim is first expressed, both the invisible community
and the visible building are represented as mother. And Rome is
the last place where the metaphor is applied to the Church. The
female personification of an institution did not fit the Roman
style; the idea is first taken up only late in the fourth century
in a poem by Pope Damasus.
This early Christian notion of the Church as mother has no
historical precedent. No direct gnostic or pagan influence, nor
any direct relationship to the Roman mother cult has thus far
been proven. The description of the Church's maternity is,
however, quite explicit. The Church conceives, bears, and gives
birth to her sons and daughters. She may have a miscarriage. She
raises her children to her breast to nourish them with the milk
of faith. In this early period, the institutional trait is
clearly present, but the maternal authority exercised by the
Church through her bishops and the ritual treatment of the Church
building as a female entity are still balanced by the insistence
on the motherly quality of God's love, and of the mutual love of
His children in baptism. Later, the image of the Church as a
prototype of the authoritarian and possessive mother becomes
dominant in the middle ages. The popes then insist on an
understanding of the Church as
Mater, Magistra, and
Domina
- mother, authoritative teacher, sovereign. Thus Gregory VII
(1073-1085) names her in the struggle with the emperor Henry IV.
Nebrija's introduction is addressed to a queen intent on
building a modern state. And his argument implies that,
institutionally, the state must now assume the universally
maternal functions heretofore claimed only by the Church.
Educatio,
as a function first institutionalized at the bosom of Mother
Church, becomes a function of the Crown in the process of the
modern state's formation.
Educatio prolis is a term that in Latin grammar calls
for a female subject. It designates the feeding and nurturing in
which mothers engage, be they bitch, sow, or woman. Among humans
only women educate. And they educate only infants, which
etymologically means those who are yet without speech. To educate
has etymologically nothing to do with "drawing out" as
pedagogical folklore would have it. Pestalozzi should have heeded
Cicero: educit obstetrix - educat nutrix:
the midwife draws - the nurse nurtures, because men do neither
in Latin. They engage in
docentia (teaching) and
instructio
(instruction). The first men who attributed to themselves
educational functions were early bishops who led their flocks to
the
alma ubera (milk-brimming breasts) of Mother Church
from which they were never to be weaned. This is why they, like
their secular successors, call the faithful
alumni - which
means sucklings or suckers, and nothing else. It is this transfer
of woman's functions to specialized institutional spheres
governed by clergies that Nebrija helped to bring about. In the
process the state acquired the function of a many-uddered
provider of distinct forms of sustenance, each corresponding to a
separate basic need, and each guarded and managed by the clergy,
always male in the higher reaches of the hierarchy.
Bureaucratic Control as the Stone of Wisdon
Actually, when Nebrija proposes to transform Castilian into an
artifact, as necessary for the queen's subjects as faith for the
Christian, he appeals to the hermetic tradition. In the language
of his time, the two words he uses -
reducir and
artificio
have both an ordinary and a technical meaning. In the latter
case, they belong to a language of alchemy.
According to Nebrija's own dictionary,
reducir in
fifteenth-century Spanish means "to change", "to
bring into obeisance," and "to civilize." In this
last sense, the Jesuits later understood the
Reducciones de
Paraguay. In addition,
reductio -throughout the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - means one of the seven stages
by which ordinary elements of nature are transmuted into the
philosopher's stone, into the panacea that, by touch, turns
everything into gold. Here,
reductio designates the fourth
of seven grades of sublimation. It designates the crucial test
that must be passed by grey matter to be promoted from the
primary to the secondary grades of enlightenment. In the first
four grades, raw nature is successively liquefied, purified, and
evaporated. In the fourth grade, that of
reductio, it is
nourished on philosopher's milk. If it takes to this substance,
which will occur only if the first three processes have
completely voided its unruly and raw nature, the chrysosperm, the
sperm of gold hidden in its depth, can be brought forth. This is
educatio.
During the following three stages, the alchemist can
coagulate his
alumnus - the substance he has fed with his
milk - into the philosopher's stone.
The precise language used here is a bit posterior to Nebrija.
It is taken almost literally from Paracelsus, another man born
within a year of the publication of the
Gramatica Castellana.
The Expert Needed by the Crown
Now let us return to the text. Nebrija develops his argument:
I have decided to transform Castilian into an artifact so
that whatever shall be written henceforth in this language
shall be of one standard tenor, one coinage that can outlast
the times. Greek and Latin have been governed by art, and
thus have kept their uniformity throughout the ages. Unless
the like of this be done for our language, in vain Your
Majesty's chroniclers … shall praise your deeds. Your
labor will not last more than a few years, and we shall
continue to feed on Castilian translations of foreign tales
about our own kings. Either your feats will fade with the
language or they will roam among aliens abroad, homeless,
without a dwelling in which they can settle.
The Roman Empire could be governed through the Latin of its
elite. But the traditional, separate elite language used in
former empires for keeping records, maintaining international
relations, and advancing learning - like Persian, Arabic, Latin,
or Frankish - is insufficient to realize the aspirations of
nationalistic monarchies. The modern European state cannot
function in the world of the vernacular. The new national state
needs an
artificio, unlike the perennial Latin of
diplomacy and the perishable Castilian of Alfonso the Learned.
This kind of polity requires a standard language understood by
all those subject to its laws and for whom the tales written at
the monarch's behest (that is, propaganda) are destined.
Social Status from Taught Language Rather than Blood
However, Nebrija does not suggest that Latin be abandoned. On
the contrary, the neo-Latin renaissance in Spain owed its
existence largely to his grammar, dictionary, and textbooks. But
his important innovation was to lay the foundation for a
linguistic ideal without precedent: the creation of a society in
which the universal ruler's bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and
peasants all pretend to speak one language, a language the poor
are presumed to understand and to obey. Nebrija established the
notion of a kind of ordinary language that itself is sufficient
to place each man in his assigned place on the pyramid that
education in a mother tongue necessarily constructs. In his
argument, he insists that Isabella's claim to historical fame
depends on forging a language of propaganda - universal and fixed
like Latin, yet capable of penetrating every village and farm, to
reduce subjects into modern citizens.
How times had changed since Dante! For Dante, a language that
had to be learned, to be spoken according to a grammar, was
inevitably a dead tongue. For him, such a language was fit only
for schoolmen, whom he cynically called
inventores grammaticae
facultatis. What for Dante was dead and useless, Nebrija
recommends as a tool. One was interested in vital exchange, the
other in universal conquest, in a language that by rule would
coin words as incorruptible as the stones of a palace:
Your Majesty, I want to lay the foundations for the
dwelling in which your fame can settle. I want to do for
our language what Zeno has done for Greek, and Crates for
Latin. I do not doubt that their betters have come to
succeed them. But the fact that their pupils have
improved on them does not detract from their or, I should
say, from our glory - to be the inventors of a necessary
craft just when the time for such invention was ripe.
Trust me, Your Majesty, no craft has ever arrived more
timely than grammar for the Castilian tongue at this
time.
The expert is always in a hurry, but his belief in progress
gives him the language of humility. The academic adventurer
pushes his government to adopt his idea now, under threat of
failure to achieve its imperial designs. This is the time!
Our language has indeed just now reached a height from
which we must fear more that we sink, than we can ever hope
to rise.
The Expert as Tutor of the Subject's Interest
Nebrija's last paragraph in the introduction exudes eloquence.
Evidently the teacher of rhetoric knew what he taught. Nebrija
has explained his project; given the queen logical reasons to
accept it; frightened her with what would happen if she were not
to heed him; now, finally, like Columbus, he appeals to her sense
of a manifest destiny.
Now, Your Majesty, let me come to the last advantage that
you shall gain from my grammar. For the purpose, recall the
time when I presented you with a draft of this book earlier
this year in Salamanca. At this time, you asked me what end
such a grammar could possibly serve. Upon this, the Bishop of
Avila interrupted to answer in my stead. What he said was
this:
"Soon Your Majesty will have placed her yoke upon
many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues. By this, your
victory, these people shall stand in a new need; the need for
the laws the victor owes to the vanquished, and the need for
the language we shall bring with us." My grammar shall
serve to impart to them the Castilian tongue, as we have used
grammar to teach Latin to our young.
Nebrija's Project Scandalizes Her Majesty
We can attempt a reconstruction of what happened at Salamanca
when Nebrija handed the queen a draft of his forthcoming book.
The queen praised the humanist for having provided the Castilian
tongue with what had been reserved to the languages of Scripture
- Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. (It is surprising and significant
that the
converso, in the year of Granada, does not
mention the Arabic of the Koran!) But while Isabella was able to
grasp the achievement of her
letrado - the description of
a living tongue as rules of grammar - she was unable to see any
practical purpose in such an undertaking. For her, grammar was an
instrument designed solely for use by teachers. She believed,
however, that the vernacular simply could not be taught. In her
royal view of linguistics, every subject of her many kingdoms was
so made by nature that during his life time he would reach
perfect dominion over his tongue
on his own. In this
version of "majestic linguistics," the vernacular is
the subject's domain. By the very nature of things, the
vernacular is beyond the reach of the Spanish Monarch's
authority. But the ruler forging the nation state is unable to
see the logic inherent in the project. Isabella's initial
rejection underscores the originality of Nebrija's proposal.
This discussion of Nebrija's draft about the need for
instruction to speak one's mother tongue must have taken place in
the months around March, 1492, the same time Columbus argued his
project with the queen. At first, Isabella refused Columbus on
the advice of technical counsel - he had miscalculated the
circumference of the globe. But Nebrija's proposal she rejected
out of a different motive: from royal respect for the autonomy of
her subject's tongues. This respect of the Crown for the juridic
autonomy of each village, of the
fuero del pueblo, the
judgement by peers, was perceived by people and sovereign as the
fundamental freedom of Christians engaged in the reconquest of
Spain. Nebrija argues against this traditional and typically
Iberic prejudice of Isabella - the notion that the Crown cannot
encroach on the variety of customs in the kingdoms - and calls up
the image of a new, universal mission for a
modern Crown.
Ultimately, Columbus won out because his Franciscan friends
presented him to the queen as a man driven by God to serve her
mystical mission. Nebrija proceeds in the same fashion. First, he
argues that the vernacular must be replaced by an
artificio to
give the monarch's power increased range and duration; then, to
cultivate the arts by decision of the court; also, to guard the
established order against the threat presented by wanton reading
and printing. But he concludes his petition with an appeal to
"the Grace of Granada" - the queen's destiny, not just
to conquer, but to civilize the whole world.
Both Columbus and Nebrija offer their services to a new kind
of empire builder. But Columbus proposes only to use the recently
created caravels to the limit of their range for the expansion of
royal power in what would become New Spain. Nebrija is more basic
- he argues the use of his grammar for the expansion of the
queen's power in a totally new sphere: state control over the
shape of people's everyday subsistence. In effect, Nebrija drafts
the declaration of war against subsistence which the new state
was organizing to fight. He intends the teaching of a mother
tongue - the first invented part of universal education.
Part 3: The Imposition of Taught Mother Tongue
Historians have chosen Columbus' voyage from Palos as a date
convenient for marking the transition from the Middle Ages to
modern times, a point useful for changing editors of textbooks.
But the world of Ptolemy did not become the world of Mercator in
one year, nor did the world of the vernacular become the age of
education overnight. Rather, traditional cosmography was
gradually adjusted in the light of widening experience. Columbus
was followed by Cortéz, Copernicus by Kepler, Nebrija by
Comenius. Unlike personal insight, the change in world view that
generated our dependence on goods and services took 500 years.
The Rise of Commodity-Intensive Society
How often the hand of the clock advances depends on the
language of the ciphers on the quadrant. The Chinese speak of
five stages in sprouting, and dawn approaches in seven steps for
the Arabs. If I were to describe the evolution of
homo
economicus from Mandeville to Marx or Galbraith, I would come
to a different view of epochs than if I had a mind to outline the
stages in which the ideology of
homo educandus developed
from Nebrija through Radke to Comenius. And again, within this
same paradigm, a different set of turning points would best
describe the decay of untutored learning and the route toward the
inescapable miseducation that educational institutions
necessarily dispense.
It took a good decade to recognize that Columbus had found a
new hemisphere, not just a new route. It took much longer to
invent the concept "New World" for the continent whose
existence he had denied.
A full century and a half separated the claim of Nebrija - in
the queen's service he
had to teach all her subjects to
speak - and the claim of John Amos Comenius - the possession of a
method by which an army of schoolteachers would teach everybody
everything perfectly.
By the time of Comenius
(1592 - 1670), the ruling
groups of both the Old and New Worlds were deeply convinced of
the need for such a method. An incident in the history of Harvard
College aptly illustrates the point. On the one hundred and
fiftieth birthday of Nebrija's grammar, John Winthrop, Jr., was
on his way to Europe searching for a theologian and educator to
accept the presidency of Harvard. One of the first persons he
approached was the Czech Comenius, leader and last bishop of the
Moravian Church. Winthrop found him in London, where he was
organizing the Royal Society and advising the government on
public schools. In
Magna Didactica, vel Ars Omnibus Omnia
Omnino Docendi, Comenius had succinctly defined the goals of
his profession. Education begins in the womb, and does not end
until death. Whatever is worth knowing is worth teaching by a
special method appropriate to the subject. The preferred world is
the one so organized that it functions as a school for all. Only
if learning is the result of teaching can individuals be raised
to the fullness of their humanity. People who learn without being
taught are more like animals than men. And the school system must
be so organized that all, old and young, rich and poor, noble and
low, men and women, be taught effectively, not just symbolically
and ostentatiously.
These are the thoughts written by the potential president of
Harvard. But he never crossed the Atlantic. By the time Winthrop
met him, he had already accepted the invitation of the Swedish
government to organize a national system of schools for Queen
Christina. Unlike Nebrija, he never had to argue for the need of
his services - they were always in great demand. The domain of
the vernacular, considered untouchable by Isabella, had become
the hunting ground for job-seeking Spanish
letrados, Jesuits,
and Massachusetts divines. A sphere of formal education had been
disembedded. Formally taught mother tongue professionally handled
according to abstract rules had begun to compare with and
encroach upon the vernacular. This gradual replacement and
degradation of the vernacular by its costly counterfeit heralds
the coming of the market-intensive society in which we now live.
The Decline of Vernacular Values
Vernacular comes from an Indo-Germanic root that
implies "rootedness" and "abode."
Vernaculum
as a Latin word was used for whatever was homebred, homespun,
homegrown, homemade, as opposed to what was obtained in formal
exchange. The child of one's slave and of one's wife, the donkey
born of one's own beast, were vernacular beings, as was the
staple that came from the garden or the commons. If Karl Polanyi
had adverted to this fact, he might have used the term in the
meaning accepted by the ancient Romans: sustenance derived from
reciprocity patterns imbedded in every aspect of life, as
distinguished from sustenance that comes from exchange or from
vertical distribution.
Vernacular was used in this general sense from
preclassical times down to the technical formulations found in
the Codex of Theodosius. It was Varro who picked the term to
introduce the same distinction in language. For him,
vernacular
speech is made up of the words and patterns grown on the
speaker's own ground, as opposed to what is grown elsewhere and
then transported. And since Varro's authority was widely
recognized, his definition stuck. He was the librarian of both
Caesar and Augustus and the first Roman to attempt a thorough and
critical study of the Latin language. His
Lingua Latina
was a basic reference book for centuries. Quintillian admired him
as the most learned of all Romans. And Quintillian, the
Spanish-born drill master for the future senators of Rome, is
always proposed to normal students as one of the founders of
their profession. But neither can be compared to Nebrija. Both
Varro and Quintillian were concerned with shaping the speech of
senators and scribes, the speech of the forum; Nebrija with the
language of the common man who could read and listen to readings.
Simply, Nebrija proposed to substitute a mother tongue for the
vernacular.
Vernacular came into English in the one restricted
sense to which Varro had confined its meaning. Just now, I would
like to resuscitate some of its old breath. We need a simple,
straightforward word to designate the activities of people when
they are not motivated by thoughts of exchange, a word that
denotes autonomous, non-market related actions through which
people satisfy everyday needs - the actions that by their very
nature escape bureaucratic control, satisfying needs to which, in
the very process, they give specific shape. Vernacular seems a
good old word for this purpose, and should be acceptable to many
contemporaries. There are technical words that designate the
satisfaction of needs that economists do not or cannot measure -
social production as opposed to economic production, the
generation of use-values as opposed to the production of
commodities, household economics as opposed to market economics.
But these terms are specialized, tainted with some ideological
prejudice, and each, in a different way, badly limps. Each
contrasting pair of terms, in its own way, also fosters the
confusion that assigns vernacular undertakings to unpaid,
standardized, formalized activities. It is this kind of confusion
I wish to clarify.
We need a simple adjective to name those
acts of competence, lust, or concern that we want to defend from
measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys and Socialist
Commissars. The term must be broad enough to fit the
preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth, and
recreation, without implying either a privatized activity akin to
the housework of modern women, a hobby or an irrational and
primitive procedure. Such an adjective is not at hand. But
vernacular might serve. By speaking about vernacular language and
the possibility of its recuperation, I am trying to bring into
awareness and discussion the existence of a vernacular mode of
being, doing, and making that in a desirable future society might
again expand in all aspects of life.
Mother tongue, since the term was first used, has never
meant the vernacular, but rather its contrary. The term was first
used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they
used, instead of Latin, when speaking from the pulpit. No
Indo-Germanic culture before had used the term. The word was
introduced into Sanskrit in the eighteenth century as a
translation from the English. The term has no roots in the other
major language families now spoken on which I could check. The
only classical people who viewed their homeland as a kind of
mother were the Cretans. Bachofen suggests that memories of an
old matriarchal order still lingered in their culture. But even
in Crete, there was no equivalent to "mother" tongue.
To trace the association which led to the term
mother tongue,
I shall first have to look at what happened at the court of
Charlemagne, and then what happened later in the Abbey of Gorz.
The First Universal Need for Professional Service
The idea that humans are born in such fashion that they need
institutional service from professional agents in order to reach
that humanity for which by birth all people are destined can be
traced down to Carolingian times. It was then that, for the first
time in history, it was discovered that there are certain basic
needs, needs that are universal to mankind and that cry out for
satisfaction in a standard fashion that cannot be met in a
vernacular way. The discovery is perhaps best associated with the
Church reform that took place in the eighth century. The Scottish
monk Alcuin, the former chancellor of York University who became
the court philosopher of Charles the Great, played a prominent
role in this reform. Up to that time the Church had considered
its ministers primarily as priests, that is, as men selected and
invested with special powers to meet communitary, liturgical,
public needs. They were engaged in preaching at ritual occasions
and had to preside at functions. They acted as public officials,
analogous to those others through whom the state provided for the
administration of justice, or, in Roman times, for public work.
To think of these kinds of magistrates as if they were
"service professionals" would be an anachronistic
projection of our contemporary categories.
But then, from the eighth century on, the classical priest
rooted in Roman and Helenistic models began to be transmogrified
into the precursor of the service professional: the teacher,
social worker, or educator. Church ministers began to cater to
the personal needs of parishioners, and to equip themselves with
a sacramental and pastoral theology that defined and established
these needs for their regular service. The institutionally
defined care of the individual, the family, the village
community, acquires unprecedented prominence. The term "holy
mother the church" ceases almost totally to mean the actual
assembly of the faithful whose love, under the impulse of the
Holy Spirit, engenders new life in the very act of meeting. The
term
mother henceforth refers to an invisible, mystical
reality from which alone those services absolutely necessary for
salvation can be obtained. Henceforth, access to the good graces
of this mother on whom universally necessary salvation depends is
entirely controlled by a hierarchy of ordained males. This
gender-specific mythology of male hierarchies mediating access to
the institutional source of life is without precedent. From the
ninth to the eleventh century, the idea took shape that there are
some needs common to all human beings that can be satisfied only
through service from professional agents. Thus the definition of
needs in terms of professionally defined commodities in the
service sector precedes by a millennium the industrial production
of universally needed basic goods.
Thirty-five years ago, Lewis Mumford tried to make this point.
When I first read his statement that the monastic reform of the
ninth century created some of the basic assumptions on which the
industrial system is founded, I could not be convinced by
something I considered more of an intuition than a proof. In the
meantime, though, I have found a host of converging arguments -
most of which Mumford does not seem to suspect - for rooting the
ideologies of the industrial age in the earlier Carolingian
Renaissance. The idea that there is no salvation without
personal
services provided by professionals in the name of an
institutional Mother Church is one of these formerly unnoticed
developments without which, again, our own age would be
unthinkable. True, it took five hundred years of medieval
theology to elaborate on this concept. Only by the end of the
Middle Ages would the
pastoral self-image of the Church be
fully rounded. And only in the Council of Trent (1545) would this
self-image of the Church as a mother milked by clerical
hierarchies become formally defined. Then, in the
Constitution
of the Second Vatican Council (1964), the Catholic Church, which
had served in the past as the prime model for the evolution of
secular service organizations, aligns itself explicitly in the
image of its secular imitations.
Professional Control Over the Nature of Needed Service
The important point here is the notion that the clergy can
define its services as needs of human nature, and make this
service-commodity the kind of necessity that cannot be forgone
without jeopardy to eternal life. It is in this ability of a
nonhereditary elite that we ought to locate the foundation
without which the contemporary service or welfare state would not
be conceivable. Surprisingly little research has been done on the
religious concepts that fundamentally distinguish the industrial
age from all other epochs. The official decline of the vernacular
conception of Christian life in favor of one organized around
pastoral care is complex and drawn-out process constituting the
background for a set of consistent shifts in the language and
institutional development of the West.
The Origins of "Mother Tongue"
When Europe first began to take shape as an idea and as a
political reality, between Merovingian times and the High Middle
Ages, what people spoke was unproblematic. It was called
"romance" or "theodisc" - peoplish. Only
somewhat later,
lingua vulgaris became the common
denominator distinguishing popular speech from the Latin of
administration and doctrine. Since Roman times, a person's first
language was the
patrius sermo, the language of the male
head of the household. Each such
sermo or speech was
perceived as a separate language. Neither in ancient Greece nor
in the Middle Ages did people make the modern distinction between
mutually understandable dialects and different languages. The
same holds true today, for example, at the grass roots in India.
What we know today as monolingual communities were and, in fact,
are exceptions. From the Balkans to Indochina's western
frontiers, it is still rare to find a village in which one cannot
get along in more than two or three tongues. While it is assumed
that each person has his
patrius sermo, it is equally
taken for granted that most persons speak several
"vulgar" tongues, each in a vernacular, untaught way.
Thus the vernacular, in opposition to specialized, learned
language - Latin for the Church, Frankish for the Court - was as
obvious in its variety as the taste of local wines and food, as
the shapes of house and hoe, down to the eleventh century. It is
at this moment, quite suddenly, that the term
mother tongue
appears. It shows up in the sermons of some monks from the Abbey
of Gorz. The process by which this phenomenon turns vernacular
speech into a moral issue can only be touched upon here.
Gorz was a mother abbey in Lorrain, not far from Verdun.
Benedictine monks had founded the monastery in the eighth
century, around bones believed to belong to Saint Gorgonius.
During the ninth century, a time of widespread decay in
ecclesiastical discipline, Gorz, too, suffered a notorious
decline. But only three generations after such scandalous
dissolution Gorz became the center of monastic reform in the
Germanic areas of the Empire. Its reinvigoration of Cistercian
life paralleled the work of the reform abbey of Cluny. Within a
century, 160 daughter abbeys throughout the northeastern parts of
central Europe were established from Gorz.
It seems quite probable that Gorz was then at the center of
the diffusion of a new technology that was crucial for the later
imperial expansion of the European powers. The transformation of
the horse into the tractor of choice. Four Asiastic inventions -
the horseshoe, the fixed saddle and stirrup, the bit, and the
cummett (the collar resting on the shoulder) - permitted
important and extensive changes. One horse could replace six
oxen. While supplying the same traction, and more speed, a horse
could be fed on the acreage needed for one yoke of oxen. Because
of its speed, the horse permitted a more extensive cultivation of
the wet, northern soils, in spite of the short summers. Also,
greater rotation of crops was possible. But even more
importantly, the peasant could now tend fields twice as far away
from his dwelling. A new pattern of life became possible.
Formerly, people had lived in clusters of homesteads; now they
could form villages large enough to support a parish and, later,
a school. Through dozens of abbeys, monastic learning and
discipline, together with the reorganization of settlement
patterns, spread throughout this part of Europe.
Gorz lies close to the line that divides Frankish from Romance
types of vernacular, and some monks from Cluny began to cross
this line. In these circumstances, the monks of Gorz made
language, vernacular language, into an issue to defend their
territorial claims. The monks began to preach in Frankish, and
spoke specifically about the value of the Frankish tongue. They
began to use the pulpit as a forum to stress the importance of
language itself, perhaps even to teach it. From the little we
know, they used at least two approaches. First, Frankish was the
language spoken by the women, even in those areas where the men
were already beginning to use a Romance vernacular. Second, it
was the language now used by Mother Church.
How charged with sacred meanings motherhood was in the
religiosity of the twelfth century one can grasp through
contemplating the contemporary statues of the Virgin Mary, or
from reading the liturgical Sequences, the poetry of the time.
The term mother tongue, from its very first use, instrumentalizes
everyday language in the service of an institutional cause. The
word was translated from Frankish into Latin. Then, as a rare
Latin term, it incubated for several centuries. In the decades
before Luther, quite suddenly and dramatically, mother tongue
acquired a strong meaning. It came to mean the language created
by Luther in order to translate the Hebrew Bible, the language
taught by schoolmasters to read that book, and then the language
that justified the existence of nation states.
The Age of Commodity-Defined Needs
Today, "mother tongue" means several things: the
first language learned by the child, and the language which the
authorities of the state have decided ought to be one's first
language. Thus, mother tongue can mean the first language picked
up at random, generally a very different speech than the one
taught by paid educators and by parents who act as if they were
such educators.
We see, then, that people are considered as creatures who need
to be taught to speak properly in order "to
communicate" in the modern world - as they need to be
wheeled about in motorized carriages in order to move in modern
landscapes - their feet no longer fit. Dependence on taught
mother tongue can be taken as the paradigm of all other
dependencies typical of humans in an age of commodity-defined
needs. And the ideology of this dependence was formulated by
Nebrija. The ideology which claims that human mobility depends
not on feet and open frontiers, but on the availability of
"transportation" is only slightly more than a hundred
years old. Language teaching created employment long ago; macadam
and the suspended coach made the conveyance of people a big
business only from about the middle of the l8th century.
The Cost of Taught Mother Tongue
As language teaching has become a job, it has begun to cost
a lot of money. Words are now one of the two largest
categories of marketed values that make up the gross national
product (GNP). Money decides what shall be said, who shall say
it, when and what kind of people shall be targeted for the
messages. The higher the cost of each uttered word, the more
determined the echo demanded. In schools people learn to speak as
they should. Money is spent to make the poor speak more like the
wealthy, the sick more like the healthy, and the minority more
like the majority. We pay to improve, correct, enrich, update the
language of children and of their teachers. We spend more on the
professional jargons that are taught in college, and more yet in
high schools to give teenagers a smattering of these jargons; but
just enough to make them feel dependent on the psychologist,
druggist, or librarian who is fluent in some special kind of
English. We go even further: we first allow standard language to
degrade ethnic, black, or hillbilly language, and then spend
money to teach their counterfeits as academic subjects.
Administrators and entertainers, admen and newsmen, ethnic
politicians and "radical" professionals, form powerful
interest groups, each fighting for a larger slice of the language
pie.
I do not really know how much is spent in the United States to
make words. But soon someone will provide us with the necessary
statistical tables. Ten years ago, energy accounting was almost
unthinkable. Now it has become an established practice. Today you
can easily look up how many "energy units" have gone
into growing, harvesting, packaging, transporting, and
merchandising one edible calory of bread. The difference between
the bread produced and eaten in a village in Greece and that
found in an American supermarket is enormous - about forty times
more energy units are contained in each edible calory of the
latter. Bicycle traffic in cities permits one to move four times
as fast as on foot for one-fourth of the energy expended - while
cars, for the same progress, need 150
times as many
calories per passenger mile. Information of this kind was
available ten years ago, but no one thought about it. Today, it
is recorded and will soon lead to a change in people's outlook on
the need for fuels. It would now be interesting to know what
language accounting looks like, since the linguistic analysis of
contemporary language is certainly not complete, unless for each
group of speakers we know the amount of money spent on shaping
the speech of the average person. Just as social energy accounts
are only approximate and at best allow us to identify the orders
of magnitude within which the relative values are found, so
language accounting would provide us with data on the relative
prevalence of standardized, taught language in a population -
sufficient, however, for the argument I want to make.
Class-Specific Destruction of Vernacular Speech
But mere per capita expenditure employed to mold the language
of a group of speakers does not tell us enough. No doubt we would
learn that each paid word addressed to the rich costs, per
capita, much more than words addressed to the poor. Watts are
actually more democratic than words. But taught language comes in
a vast range of qualities. The poor, for instance, are much more
blared at than the rich, who can buy tutoring and, what is more
precious, hedge on their own high class vernacular by purchasing
silence. The educator, politician and entertainer now come with a
loudspeaker to Oaxaca, to Travancore, to the Chinese commune, and
the poor immediately forfeit the claim to that indispensable
luxury, the silence out of which vernacular language arises.
The "Production" of Mother Tongue
Yet even without putting a price tag on silence, even without
the more detailed language economics on which I would like to
draw, I can still estimate that the dollars spent to power any
nation's motors pale before those that are now expended on
prostituting speech in the mouth of paid speakers. In rich
nations, language has become incredibly spongy, absorbing huge
investments. High expenditures to cultivate the language of the
mandarin, the author, the actor, or the charmer have always been
a mark of high civilization. But these were efforts to teach
elites special codes. Even the cost of making some people learn
secret languages in traditional societies is incomparably lower
than the capitalization of language in industrial societies.
In poor countries today, people still speak to each other
without the experience of capitalized language, although such
countries always contain a tiny elite who manage very well to
allocate a larger proportion of the national income for their
prestige language. Let me ask: What is different in the everyday
speech of groups whose language has received - or shall I say
absorbed? resisted? survived? suffered? enjoyed? - huge
investments, and the speech of people whose language has remained
outside the market? Comparing these two worlds of language, I
want to focus my curiosity on just one issue that arises in this
context. Does the structure and function of the language itself
change with the rate of investment? Are these alterations such
that all languages that absorb funds show changes in the same
direction? In this introductory exploration of the subject, I
cannot demonstrate that this is the case. But I do believe my
arguments make both propositions highly probable, and show that
structurally oriented language economics are worth exploring.
Taught everyday language is without precedent in
pre-industrial cultures. The current dependence on paid teachers
and models of ordinary speech is just as much a unique
characteristic of industrial economies as dependence on fossil
fuels. The need for taught mother tongue was discovered four
centuries earlier,
but only in our generation have both
language and energy been effectively treated as world wide needs
to be satisfied for all people by planned, programmed production
and distribution. Because, unlike the vernacular of
capitalized language we can reasonably say that it results from
production.
Vernacular Learning as Subsistence Activity
Traditional cultures subsisted on sunshine, which was captured
mostly though agriculture. The hoe, the ditch, the yoke, were
basic means to harness the sun. Large sails or waterwheels were
known, but rare. These cultures that lived mostly on the sun
subsisted basically on vernacular values. In such societies,
tools were essentially the prolongation of arms, fingers, and
legs. There was no need for the production of power in
centralized plants and its distant distribution to clients.
Equally, in these essentially sun-powered cultures, there was no
need for language production. Language was drawn by each one from
the cultural environment, learned from the encounter with people
whom the learner could smell and touch, love or hate.
The
vernacular spread just as most things and services were shared,
namely, by multiple forms of mutual reciprocity, rather than
clientage to the appointed teacher or professional. Just as
fuel was not delivered, so the vernacular was never taught.
Taught tongues did exist, but they were rare, as rare as sails
and sills. In most cultures, we know that speech resulted from
conversation embedded in everyday life, from listening to fights
and lullabies, gossip, stories, and dreams. Even today, the
majority of people in poor countries learn all their language
skills without any paid tutorship, without any attempt whatsoever
to teach them how to speak. And they learn to speak in a way that
nowhere compares with the self-conscious, self-important,
colorless mumbling that, after a long stay in villages in South
America and Southeast Asia, always shocks me when I visit an
American college. I feel sorrow for those students whom education
has made tone deaf; they have lost the faculty for hearing the
difference
between the dessicated
utterance of standard television English and the living speech of
the unschooled. What else can I expect, though, from people who
are not brought up at a mother's breast, but on formula? - on
tinned milk, if they are from poor families, and on a brew
prepared under the nose of Ralph Nader if they are born among the
enlightened? For people trained to choose between packaged
formulas, mother's breast appears as just one more option. And in
the same way, for people who were intentionally
taught to
listen and to speak, untutored vernacular seems just like
another, albeit less developed, model among many.
Taught Mother Tongue as a Commodity
But this is simply false. Language exempt from rational
tutorship is a different kind of social phenomenon from language
that is purposefully taught. Where untutored language is the
predominant marker of a shared world, a sense of power within the
group exists, and this sense cannot be duplicated by language
that is delivered. One way this difference shows is the sense of
power over language itself, over its acquisition. Even today, the
poor in non-industrial countries all over the world are polyglot.
My friend, the goldsmith in Timbuktu, speaks Songhay at home,
listens to Bambara on the radio, devotedly and with some
understanding says his prayers five times a day in Arabic, gets
along in two trade languages on the Souk, converses in passable
French that he picked up in the army - and none of these
languages was formally taught him. He did not set out to learn
these tongues; each is one style in which he remembers a peculiar
set of experiences that fits into the frame of that language.
Communities in which monolingual people prevail are rare except
in three kinds of settings: tribal communities that have not
really experienced the late neolithic, communities that for a
long time lived through exceptional forms of discrimination, and
among the citizens of nation-states that, for several
generations, have enjoyed the benefits of compulsory schooling.
To take it for granted that most people are monolingual is
typical of the members of the middle class. Admiration for the
vernacular polyglot unfailingly exposes the social climber.
Vernacular Culture Enhanced by Taught Language
Throughout history, untutored language was prevalent, but
hardly ever the only kind of language known. Just as in
traditional cultures some energy was captured through windmills
and canals, and those who had large boats or those who cornered
the right spot on the brook could use their tool for a net
transfer of power to their own advantage, so some people have
always used a taught language to corner some privilege. But such
additional codes remained either rare and special, or served very
narrow purposes. The ordinary language, until Nebrija, was
prevalently vernacular. And this vernacular, be it the ordinary
colloquial, a trade idiom, the language of prayer, the craft
jargon, the language of basic accounts, the language of venery or
of age (for example, baby talk) was learned on the side, as part
of meaningful everyday life. Of course, Latin or Sanskrit were
formally taught to the priest, court languages such as Frankish
or Persian or Turkish were taught to the future scribe. Neophytes
were formally initiated into the language of astronomy, alchemy,
or late masonry. And, clearly, the knowledge of such formally
taught languages raised a man above others, somewhat like the
saddle lifts the free man above the serf in the infantry, or the
bridge lifts the captain above the crew. But even when access to
some elite language was unlocked by a formal initiation, it did
not necessarily mean that language was being taught. Quite
frequently, the process of formal initiation did not transfer to
the initiate a new language skill, but simply exempted him
henceforth from a tabu that forbade others to use certain words,
or to speak out on certain occasions. Male initiation in the
language of the hunt or of sex is probably the most widespread
example of such a ritually selective language detabuization.
But, in traditional societies, no matter how much or how
little language was taught, the taught language rarely rubbed off
on vernacular speech. Neither the existence of some language
teaching at all times nor the spread of some language through
professional preachers or comedians weakens my main point:
Outside of those societies that we now call Modern European, no
attempt was made to impose on entire populations an everyday
language that would be subject to the control of paid teachers or
announcers. Everyday language, until recently, was nowhere the
product of design; it was nowhere paid for and delivered like a
commodity. And while every historian who deals with the origins
of nation-states pays attention to the imposition of a national
tongue, economists generally overlook the fact that this taught
mother tongue is the earliest of specifically modern commodities,
the model of all "basic needs" to come.
Counterfeit Vernacular and Other Destructions
Before I can go on to contrast taught colloquial speech and
vernacular speech, costly language and that which comes at no
cost, I must clarify one more distinction. Between taught mother
tongue and the vernacular I draw the line of demarcation
somewhere else than linguists when they distinguish the high
language of an elite from the dialect spoken in lower classes,
somewhere other than the frontier that separates regional and
superregional languages, somewhere else than restricted and
corrected code, and somewhere else than at the line between the
language of the literate and the illiterate. No matter how
restricted within geographic boundaries, no matter how
distinctive for a social level, no matter how specialized for one
sex role or one Caste, language can be either vernacular (in the
sense in which I here use the term) or of the taught variety.
Elite language, trade language, second language, local idiom, are
nothing new. But each of these can be formally taught and the
taught counterfeit of the vernacular comes as a commodity and is
something entirely new.
The contrast between these two complementary forms is most
marked and important in taught everyday language, that is, taught
colloquial, taught standardized everyday speech. But here again
we must avoid confusion. Not all standard language is either
grammar-ridden or taught. In all of history, one mutually
understandable dialect has tended toward predominance in a given
region. This kind of principal dialect was often accepted as the
standard form. It was indeed written more frequently than other
dialects, but not, for that reason, was it taught. Rather,
diffusion occurred through a much more complex and subtle
process. Midland English, for example, slowly emerged as that
second, common style in which people born into any English
dialect could also speak their own tongue. Quite suddenly, the
language of Mogul hordes (Urdu) came into being in northern
India. Within two generations, it became the standard in
Hindustan, the trade language in a vast area, and the medium for
exquisite poetry written in the Arabic and Sanskrit alphabets.
Not only was this language not taught for several generations,
but poets who wanted to perfect their competence explicitly
avoided the study of Hindu-Urdu; they explored the Persian,
Arabic, and Sanskrit sources that had originally contributed to
its being. In Indonesia, in half a generation of resistance to
Japanese and Dutch, the militant fraternal and combative slogans,
posters, and secret radios of the freedom struggle spread Malay
competence into every village, and did so much more effectively
than the later efforts of the ministry of Language Control that
was established after independence.
Technical Innovation and the Vernacular
It is true that the dominant position of elite or standard
language was always bolstered by the technique of writing.
Printing enormously enhanced the colonizing power of elite
language. But to say that because printing was invented elite
language is destined to supplant vernacular variety results from
a debilitated imagination - like saying that after the atom bomb
only super powers shall be sovereign. The historical monopoly of
educational bureaucracies over the printing press is no argument
that printing techniques cannot be used to give new vitality to
written expression and new literary opportunity to thousands of
vernacular forms. The fact that the printing press could augment
the extent and power of ungovernable vernacular readings was the
source of Nebrija's greatest concern and of his argument
against
the vernacular. The fact that printing was used since the early
l6
th century (but not during the first forty years of
its existence) primarily for the imposition of standard
colloquials does not mean that printed language must always be a
taught form. The commercial status of taught mother tongue, call
it national language, literary standard, or television language,
rests largely on unexamined axioms, some of which I have already
mentioned:
- that printing implies standardized composition;
- that books written in the standard language could not be
easily read by people who have not been schooled in that tongue;
- that reading is by its very nature a silent activity that
usually should be conducted in private;
- that enforcing a universal ability to read a few sentences
and then copy them in writing increases the access of a
population to the content of libraries:
these and other such illusions are used to enhance the
standing of teachers, the sale of rotary presses, the grading of
people according to their language code and, up to now, an
increase in the GNP.
The Radical Monopoly of Taught Mother Tongue
Vernacular spreads by practical use; it is learned from people
who mean what they say and who say what they mean to the person
they address in the context of everyday life. This is not so in
taught language. With taught language, the one from whom I learn
is not a person whom I care for or dislike, but a professional
speaker. The model for taught colloquial is somebody who does not
say what he means, but who recites what others have contrived. In
this sense, a street vendor announcing his wares in ritual
language is not a professional speaker, while the king's herald
or the clown on television are the prototypes.
Taught
colloquial is the language of the announcer who follows the
script that an editor was told by a publicist that a board of
directors had decided should be said. Taught colloquial is
the dead, impersonal rhetoric of people paid to declaim with
phony conviction texts composed by others, who themselves are
usually paid only for
designing the text. People who speak
taught language imitate the announcer of news, the comedian of
gag writers, the instructor following the teacher's manual to
explain the textbook, the songster of engineered rhymes, or the
ghost-written president. This is language that implicitly lies
when I use it to say something to your face; it is meant for the
spectator who watches the scene. It is the language of farce, not
of theater, the language of the hack, not of the true performer.
The language of media always seeks the appropriate audience
profile that the sponsor tries to hit and to hit hard. While the
vernacular is engendered in me by the intercourse between
complete persons locked in conversation with each other, taught
language is syntonic with loud speakers whose assigned job is
gab.
The vernacular and taught mother tongue are like the two
extremes on the spectrum of the colloquial. Language would be
totally inhuman if it were totally taught. That is what Humboldt
meant when he said that real language is speech that can only be
fostered, never taught like mathematics. Speech is much more than
communication, and only machines can communicate without
reference to vernacular roots. Their chatter with one another in
New York now takes up about three-quarters of the lines that the
telephone company operates under a franchise that guarantees
access by people. This is an obvious perversion of a legal
privilege that results from political aggrandizement and the
degradation of vernacular domains to second-class commodities.
But even more embarrassing and depressing than this abuse of a
forum of free speech by robots is the incidence of robot-like
stock phrases that blight the remaining lines on which people
presumably "speak" to each other. A growing percentage
of speech has become mere formula in content and style. In this
way, the colloquial moves on the spectrum of language
increasingly from vernacular to capital-intensive
"communication," as if it were nothing more than the
human variety of the exchange that also goes on between bees,
whales, and computers. True, some vernacular elements or aspects
always survive - but that is true even for most computer
programs. I do not claim that the vernacular dies; only that it
withers. The American, French, or German colloquials have become
composites made up of two kinds of language: commoditylike taught
uniquack and a limping, ragged, jerky vernacular struggling to
survive. Taught mother tongue has established a radical monopoly
over speech, just as transportation has over mobility or, more
generally, commodity over vernacular values.
Tabus
A resistance, sometimes as strong as a sacred tabu, prevents
people shaped by life in industrial society from recognizing the
difference with which we are dealing - the difference between
capitalized language and the vernacular, which comes at no
economically measurable cost. It is the same kind of inhibition
that makes it difficult for those who are brought up within the
industrial system to sense the fundamental distinction between
nurture from the breast and feeding by bottle, between literature
and textbook, between a mile moved on my own and a passenger mile
- areas where I have discussed this issue over the past years.
Most people would probably be willing to admit that there is a
huge difference in taste, meaning, and satisfaction between a
home-cooked meal and a TV dinner. But the examination and
understanding of this difference can be easily blocked,
especially among those committed to equal rights, equity and
service to the poor. They know how many mothers have no milk in
their breasts, how many children in the South Bronx suffer
protein deficiencies, how many Mexicans - surrounded by fruit
trees - are crippled by vitamin deficits. As soon as I raise the
distinction between vernacular values and values susceptible of
economic measurement and, therefore, of being administered, some
self-appointed tutor of the so-called proletariat will tell me
that I am avoiding the critical issue by giving importance to
noneconomic niceties. Should we not seek first the just
distribution of commodities that correlate to basic needs? Poetry
and fishing shall then be added without more thought or effort.
So goes the reading of Marx and the Gospel of St. Matthew as
interpreted by the theology of liberation.
A laudable intention here attempts an argument that should
have been recognized as illogical in the nineteenth century, and
that countless experiences have shown false in the twentieth.
So
far, every single attempt to substitute a universal commodity for
a vernacular value has led, not to equality, but to a
hierarchical modernization of poverty. In the new
dispensation, the poor are no longer those who survive by their
vernacular activities because they have only marginal or no
access to the market. No, the modernized poor are those whose
vernacular domain, in speech and in action, is most restricted -
those who get least satisfaction out of the few vernacular
activities in which they can still engage.
The Mushrooming Shadow Economy
The second-level tabu which I have set out to violate is not
constituted by the distinction between the vernacular and taught
mother tongue, nor by the destruction of the vernacular through
the radical monopoly of taught mother tongue over speech, nor
even by the class-biased intensity of this vernacular paralysis.
Although these three matters are far from being clearly
understood today, they have been widely discussed in the recent
past.
The point at issue which is sedulously overlooked is quite
other: Mother tongue is taught increasingly, not by paid agents,
but by unpaid parents. These latter deprive their own children of
the last opportunity to listen to adults who have something to
say to each other. This was brought home to me clearly, some time
ago, while back in New York City in an area that a few decades
earlier I had known quite well, the South Bronx. I went there at
the request of a young college teacher, married to a colleague.
This man wanted my signature on a petition for compensatory
pre-kindergarten language training for the inhabitants of a
partially burnt-out, high-rise slum. Twice already, quite
decidedly and yet with deep embarrassment, I had refused. To
overcome my resistance against this expansion of educational
services, he took me on visits to brown, white, black, mostly
single-parent so-called households. I saw dozens of children
dashing through uninhabitable cement corridors, exposed all day
to blaring television and radio in English, Spanish and even
Yiddish. They seemed equally lost in language and landscape. As
my friend pressed for my signature, I tried to argue for the
protection of these children against further castration and
inclusion in the educational sphere. We talked at cross-purposes,
unable to meet. And then, in the evening, at dinner in my
friend's home, I suddenly understood why. This man, whom I viewed
with awe because he had chosen to live in this hell,
had
ceased to be a parent and had become a total teacher. In
front of their own children this couple stood
in loco
magistri. Their children had to grow up without parents,
because these two adults, in every word they addressed to their
two sons and one daughter, were "educating" them - they
were at dinner constantly conscious that they were modeling the
speech of their children, and asked me to do the same.
For the professional parent who engenders children as a
professional lover, who volunteers his semi-professional
counselling skills for neighborhood organizations, the
distinction between his unpaid contribution to the managed
society and what could be, in contrast, the recovery of
vernacular domains, remains meaningless. He is fit prey for a new
type of growth-oriented ideology - the planning and organization
of an expanding shadow economy, the last frontier of arrogance
which
homo economicus faces.
Ludger Lütkehaus: «Die Heimholung»
