In the Mirror of the Past

by Ivan Illich

  It is important to remember that, at the time Orwell worked on 1984, the language of role theory which Mead, Linton and Murdock had coined in 1932 was just being picked up by sociology. The vocabulary of cybernetics was still confined to the lab. Orwell as a novelist sensed the mood of the time and invented the parable for a mind-set whose elements were as yet unnamed. He reflected on the effects which the treatment of speech as communication would have on people before the computer was available to model it on. In 1945 Western Union placed an ad in the New York Times seeking to employ ‘communications carriers,’ an euphemistic neologism for messenger boys. The Oxford English Dictionary Supplement gives this instance as the first use of the term with its current meaning.

  Thus, Orwell’s Newspeak is much more than a caricature of propaganda, or a parody of Basic English — which in the thirties had fascinated him for a while. Newspeak, at the end of the novel, is for him the cipher for something which then had no English equivalent. This becomes clear in the scene where O’Brien from the Thought Police says to Smith whom he tortures: ‘We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them […] we convert, we shape them […] we make our enemy one of ourselves before we kill him […] we make his brain perfect before we blow it out […]’ At this point Smith, the novel’s anti-hero, still believes that what O’Brien says must make sense to the listener. The next pages then describe how Smith is disabused of his literate mind. He will have to accept that O’Brien’s world is both senseless and selfless, and that the therapy he undergoes has the purpose of making him join it.

  Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth. He specializes in the abuse of language: propaganda in a caricature of Basic English. He practices extreme distortions that are possible within the literate mind. O’Brien has the task of leading him into an entirely new world, a space which Smith must first ‘understand’ and then accept. O’Brien says to him, ‘Tell me why we cling to power […] speak’! Strapped, Winston answers, ‘you rule over us for our own good […] you believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves […].’ This answer would have pleased Ivan’s Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel, but it makes O’Brien turn the pain up to ‘33 degrees.’ ‘We seek power entirely for its own sake.’ O’Brien insists that the State is power, and he has previously made Smith understand that this power consists in the ability to write the book. Winston is to be a line in that book, written or re-written by the State. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces,’ says O’Brien, ‘and putting them together again in new shapes of our own choosing.’ Torture forces Winston to abandon his belief that Newspeak is a degraded form of English; he ‘understands’ that Newspeak is an exchange of meaningless know-how, without any why and without any I. When O’Brien holds up four fingers and calls them ‘three,’ Winston is to understand the message, not the speaker. At a loss for an English word for the exchange of message units between machines, Orwell calls the intended relationship ‘collective solipsism.’ Without knowing the appropriate word, namely, ‘communication,’ Winston has come to understand the world in which O’Brien‘s state operates. Orwell insists that the mere understanding of this world is not enough, it must be accepted.

  To accept his existence without sense and self, Winston needs the ultimate therapy of ‘Room 101.’ Only after the betrayal there does he take himself for granted as part of ‘a fantasy world in which things happen as they should’ — namely, on a screen. And to accept being just a message unit of senseless power, Winston has first to erase his own self. Neither violence nor pain could break what Orwell calls his ‘decency.’ To become self-less like O’Brien, Winston must first betray his last love, Julia (in room 101). Later, when the two former lovers meet as burned-out shells, they know that in Room 101 they had meant what they said. Self-betrayal in face of the rats was the last thing Winston meant. According to Orwell, only this kind of betrayal could integrate the victim into the executioner’s solipsistic system of meaningless communication.

  I have now recounted the fable. It is a story of the State that has turned into a computer, and that of educators who program people so that they come to lose that ‘distality’ between self and I which had come to flower within literate space. They learn to refer to themselves as ‘my system,’ and ‘to input’ themselves as appropriate lines into a mega-text. In the novel, Orwell speaks tongue-in-cheek. He tells more than a cautionary tale, but he does not portray something he believes could ever come to be. He creates the cipher for the State that survives society; communication between role players that survives the literate mind; ‘people’ who remain after the betrayal of decency. 1984 is for Orwell the cipher of something impossible which his journalistic genius made appear imminent.

  In retrospect, Orwell appears to some of us as an optimist. He believed that the cybernetic mind would spread only as a result of intensive instruction. In fact, many people now unthinkingly accept the computer as the key metaphor for themselves and for their place in the world, without any need for ‘Room 101.’ They quietly and uncomplainingly cross over from the mental domain of lay literacy to that of the computer. And they do so often with as little competence in the use of the machine as thirteenth-century laymen had in the use of pen and parchment. The cybernetic mind engulfs a new kind of layman without assistance from educational agencies. This is the reason why at the outset I called attention to two rarely formulated questions: first, is there any reason to believe that the new intense concern of the educational establishment with universal clerical literacy can, in fact, strengthen and spread the literate mind? And, second, has schooling now become an initiation ritual introducing students to the cybernetic mind by hiding from all its participants the contradiction between the literate ideas education pretends to serve and the computer image it sells?

  With these suggestions I hope to have clarified the subject and argued the urgency of the research for which I plead. This research is based on historical phenomenology of assumptions about speech. Only the technique of the alphabet allows us to record speech and to conceive of this record — in the alphabet — as ‘language’ that we use in speaking. A certain view of the past and of bringing up the young is determined by this assumption. The research I call for could set out to identify the assumptions which are characteristic and proper to ‘education’ only within this mental space.

  The research would further explore the degree to which literates and illiterates alike share the special mind-set which arises in a society that uses alphabetic record. It would recognize that the literate mind constitutes a historical oddity of seventh century B.C. origin. It would further explore this space which is uniform in its characteristics, but diverse in all the distortions and transformations these permit. Finally, this research will recognize the heteronomy of the literate space in regard to three other domains: the worlds of orality, those shaped by non-alphabetic notations and, finally, that of the cybernetic mind.

  You can see that my world is that of literacy. I am at home only on the island of the alphabet. I share this island with many who can neither read nor write, but whose mind-set is fundamentally literate like mine. And they are threatened, as I am, by the betrayal of those clerics who dissolve the words of the book into just a communication code.

  Mnemosyne: The Mold of Memory

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  ‘The Object of Objects: An Elegy for the Anchored Text’. Concluding Statement at an International Conference on ‘The Socio-Semiotics of Objects: The Role of Artifacts in Social Symbolic Processes’ University of Toronto, 24th June, 1990

  Modes of pastness

  We all have the power to recall what has been. Each one shares with his own generation the ability to recreate the past. Life in the shadow of pastness is what makes us human. However, in several ways people differ because of the different pasts they have.

  Each of us can remember his own past. But the older I get the more I treasure the discrepancies between what is uniquely mine in the past and that which others can share with me. The past
that appears in this interstice is that past which can surprise me. For even when we have grown up together and later on recall the same moment that we lived together, my substance that is recalled is frequently not yours. And, further, the chords which the past strikes when it comes to me might jar those that respond in your heart. Only years later I suddenly grasped that when those bells tolled for the wedding, for you they meant death. This is one reason why I like to reminisce with others: the shoddy evening that made me cringe when I thought of it has put on a festive dress since you told me about it.

  When the past is invoked it always comes in a different dress. And each time it passes it leaves something new behind, it deposits a freshly-spun layer on the cocoon which I take for my memories. Whenever I take a glass of Burgundy, that memorable afternoon with my brother returns, but with a new coloring.

  This diversity of the ‘same’ past is so fascinating and adventurous that it could almost blind us to yet another, even more fundamental difference between past and past. The past returns in quite distinct modes of pastness, according to the historical epoch into which it is called. ‘Les neiges d’antan’ refer to a past which is incomparable to that of ‘the old clock on the staircase.’

  Several of these modes of pastness I have to know by experience. When I enter a church — be it Greek or Latin — I know that I am in a temple erected above an empty tomb. The absence of the saint during the Liturgy is of a different kind than the absence of Charlemagne when I discuss his treasures with a colleague in an office. Thanks to my upbringing, I have a spontaneous albeit faint sense of the difference between liturgical and academic remembrance. And I have lived long enough in a Mexican village to sense how the newly-dead come back on 2nd November, walking along the lines of flower petals that show them the way from the grave to their erstwhile home. In spite of the goose pimples, I know that they do not come to be with me.

  Other modes of pastness lie completely beyond the range of my feelings. I know about them only by hearsay. My body is dumb to the chords they seem to strike in others. Conceptually, I can refer to the experience that befits the re-presentation of African ancestors or the mythical return of Mexican gods. But the world into which I was born and in which I was raised has blotted out the reality of the ambience in which these events can take place. And the more I reflect upon historical reports about remembrance, the better I come to see that there is a chasm which separates the past now and then.

  Culture as mnemosyne

  The present is the mold of the past. What Boas called a culture I, following the advice of Aby Warburg, could just as well call mnemosyne. What else is culture but the frame within which the shadows come back and are enfleshed? Thus understood, the customs and symbols, the rituals and artifacts of a culture can be imagined as one body that resonates when the past emerges. Like the wave patterns that form in a body of water when it is touched by a breeze, culture-as-mnemosyne is affected as a whole by the winds from its own beyond. But just as the waves across a body of water begin to mumble and spray when they hit a cliff or the shore, so there are within each culture coastlines against which memory breaks.

  Different ages have used different devices to conjure up what has been: Greeks used the lyre, Aztecs the flute, Bushmen the drum, to make the whole body of mnemosyne resonate to the rhythms of the past. Beads and knots, paintings and marked paths through mountains and deserts, have all been pressed into service for initiation into the past. Franks used notched sticks to recount the exact number of magical words needed for the oath. The Bards had their own techniques, useless to the literate. The Yorubas used masks in dances, Christians assemblies above an empty grave.

  Script as a bridge

  Some societies adopted script as a privileged route into the past. But script is not just a path over which shades can come; it is a bridge for messages that have been left, a bridge that spans a chasm into the beyond. Or, it is like a vessel that ferries memories that have been recorded by the dead. But script is not the main material of cultural memories, even in most of those societies where it plays a prominent role. On this point also, contemporary, post-typewriter society is arguably a major exception. Many conceive and perceive their memories, waking or sleeping, as floating, unattached ‘texts.’

  The scripts of the past can be studied with different intents. For the archaeologist the script itself is an object that survives from the past. For the historian, the script is a vehicle which allows him to recover the events or perceptions that the document was meant to record. For the student of pastness itself, the script has a more specific function. For him, the script is a privileged object which allows him to explore two things: the mode of recall used in a given epoch, and also the image held by that epoch about the nature of memory and therefore of the past.

  On the present occasion I want to pursue one very special aspect of script, and ask what it can tell me about an epoch’s perception of pastness. I want to limit myself to the patterning of the surface by the use of letters, and to the effect that this patterning has on the epoch’s conception of ‘memory.’ In other words, I want to examine the power of the pattern of impagination to signify the mode of recall rather than the subject that is recalled through the content of the written.

  My subject is impagination as the mold of memory. In any mold I can distinguish two things: I can ask if the coin will be molded round or oval-shaped, small or large, flat or convex, and I can ask whom it will represent, King Pippin or Charlemagne. Here I want to focus on the page in the first sense.

  I have no doubt that in different epochs the patterning of the writing surface has molded the concept of what memory is all about. I cannot prove this here; I can only make it plausible by examining a very special instance, namely, the writing surface which took the form of a book-page. I believe that during the twelfth century the page changed its molding function, that a number of technical changes, all affecting the arrangement of letters at this particular moment, made out of the manuscript page a tool that transformed the notion of memory. Though subtle, these changes had a powerful social effect. And they occurred three hundred years before moveable type came into use. They supported a new set of axioms for the obvious, without which Gutenberg and Luther, Leibnitz and Descartes, The New York Review of Books and Penguin Books could never have become what they are.

  The end of the old past in the twelfth century

  I will organize my discourse around the writings of a twelfth-century author, Hugh of Saint-Victor. He was an Augustinian Canon Regular born in Flanders around 1100 and brought up in Thuringia. He came to Paris at the time when Abelard began his lectures on method, and the Gothic arches of St Denis were abuilding, when Peter the Venerable brought the Koran from Toledo to translate it, and the first troubadours were composing vernacular songs. He died as head of the School of Saint-Victor. Hugh left a vast opus, and three of his books are particularly suited to show up the historic seam that runs through his relationship with the page. I will comment on the perception of memory in these three books.

  The first is the Didascalicon, subtitled, de arte legendi. It is the first book to make the ‘art of reading’ into the subject of a treatise. The explicit contents of the book have often been examined. I have read it, listening to what Hugh implies in answer to two of my questions: what did he do when he ‘read’? And what did he imagine he was doing? What was the precise activity of his hands, mouth, tongue, eyes and ears when he read? And what was the meaning that he gave to lines, words, parchment, ink and whatever else was there, in front of him, on the page? I read the Didascalicon to find out about Hugh’s reading rather than about the substance of his teaching on the seven arts. I did so to become sensitive to the ethology of learning in his time.

  As I read Hugh, I felt invited to start out on a pilgrimage through the pages. I ambulate with him through the espalier of lines on which words are strung up like grapes which I can pick, and from which I am urged to suck the tasty sweetness of wisdom. Reading is presented to me a
s a kinetic activity, as a tasting, as a declamation that will become meaningful only if I open my ears. Of course, the eyes have their role. But it is not the role I attribute to my eyes when I read today. Hugh imagines his eyes as having a double function: they are a source of illumination, since their light makes words on the page sparkle, and they are windows that let in the light of wisdom which shines through the pages.

  The second book by Hugh that I want to examine is very short. Today we might call it a hand-out for class. It is titled De tribus maximis circumstantiis and is a manual for pre-teen novices who need elementary instruction on the art of learning by rote. Surprisingly, its text lay unacknowledged for many centuries, and the first printed edition appeared in 1932. Though this pamphlet is tiny, it is of great originality.

  Since Greco-Roman antiquity one of the first things a student had to learn was the art of memory. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, memorization remained one of the basic skills a student of the humanities had to cultivate. Only during the last several decades has it gone out of style. In antiquity, the student usually followed the method Cicero describes. He was trained to construct a mental ‘palace,’ a fantasized dwelling with many rooms. He had to label those passages he wanted to remember with an emblem, for instance a red apple, and place several such marked phrases in one of these imagined rooms if he wanted to have them present at the same point of a debate. Within the confines of this palace, the pupil acquired the skill to dash with agility from one room to another; he learned to be prompt in finding the sentences he had prepared for use in examinations at school or under cross-examination in court.