It is known that
the oldest preserved cave drawings are marks (indexical signs)
of an oral context rather than representations of hunting scenes
(even though they are often interpreted as such). They testify
more to those who drew them than to what the drawing is about.
The decadent literacy of mystified messages does the same. It
speaks about their writers more than about their subject, be
this history, sociology, or anthropology. And the increased oral
and visual communication, supported by technology, defines the
post-literate condition of the human cognitive dimension. The
transition from speech to writing corresponds to the shift from
the pragmatic-affective level of human praxis to the
pragmatic-rational level of linear relations among people and
their environment. It takes place in the context of the
evolution from the syncretic to the analytic. The transition from
literacy to literacies corresponds to the pragmatics of
non-linear relations, and results from the evolution from
analytic to synthetic. These affirmations, at least as far as the
civilization of literacy is concerned, apply to the universe of
European cultures and their later extensions. The cultures of
the Far East are characterized by language's tendency to present,
not to explain. The analytical structure of logical thought
(which will be discussed in another chapter) is actually formed
in the sentence structure of speech, which is fundamentally
different in the two cultures mentioned.
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