La fascinación por lo mórbido
Por Roger Bartra
Desde hace algunos años se ha extendido la exhibición de videos o películas –llamadas snuff– que muestran escenas aparentemente reales de torturas, ejecuciones, violaciones y otros actos perversos. El fenómeno forma parte de un amplio complejo de obsesiones sobre los orígenes y las características del mal, que también incluye la atracción por los monstruos y las anormalidades. ¿Qué es lo maligno? ¿Viene del interior de nosotros o sus fuentes son externas? ¿Qué sentido tiene el malestar y qué relación tiene con la muerte, con el más allá?
Se ha dicho que esta fascinación responde a un impulso por atentar contra la inocencia de los hombres y por admirar, sin ninguna compasión, a la sociedad que nos rodea desde una perspectiva exótica, al exhibir el horror de sus deformaciones. Un ejemplo clásico puede ser el famoso libro de J. G. Ballard sobre la exhibición de atrocidades (The Atrocity Exhibition, publicado en 1969). Este libro, que se ha convertido en un verdadero objeto de culto, expone, entre otras cosas, una operación de mamoplastia en los voluminosos pechos de Mae West, un plan para asesinar a Jacqueline Kennedy o para fornicar con Ronald Reagan, una reflexión sobre el erotismo de los accidentes automovilísticos, etc., etc.
Susan Sontag pretende que hay una tendencia en los países capitalistas, que se expresa en la fotografía y que suprime o reduce la náusea moral y sensorial. Cree que la exhibición de atrocidades y monstruos aumenta la tolerancia ante lo horrible, con lo cual se genera una enajenación que atrofia nuestras reacciones ante los males de la vida real. La llamada globalización, con la ayuda de la Internet, ha aumentado las posibilidades de contemplación de atrocidades y la influencia de cultos sadomasoquistas, necrofílicos, etc. Yo no estoy de acuerdo con la idea de Sontag, como lo he expuesto en mi libro El salvaje artificial. La representación y exposición de atrocidades o deformaciones es parte de una tradición histórica profunda y muy compleja que es necesario analizar. La contemplación de atrocidades mórbidas no opera, simplemente, como una droga, que supuestamente aumentaría la tolerancia ante el mal y los fenómenos dañinos. Puede ocurrir incluso que al rebajar el umbral de tolerancia ante lo atroz, en muchas ocasiones se estimule la crítica ante la malignidad que permea el establishment que nos rodea. Al abatir nuestra tolerancia ante el terror que inspiran la deformidad o los monstruos anormales, con frecuencia se hace un llamado a comprender que detrás de la extrema fealdad puede haber una belleza que pocos son capaces de comprender. Así, detrás de los horrores de la sociedad moderna, podemos encontrar valores positivos. Ello también nos ayuda a reconocer que la aparente normalidad es más monstruosa de lo que solemos admitir, de la misma manera en que las deformaciones ocultan situaciones tiernas y profundamente humanas, como puede verse en la película Freaks.
Podemos observar que la exhibición de atrocidades también nos produce un intenso vértigo frente la frontera, muy cercana a nosotros, que nos separa de lo anormal. El abismo de malignidades y de dolor ocasiona que la sociedad "normal" desarrolle impulsos de cohesión, de afirmación de la identidad y de conservación del status quo. En este sentido, la confrontación de lo atroz y monstruoso suele enfrentarse con la estereotipada inocencia atribuida a niños y mujeres, y a toda clase de criaturas indefensas ante la agresión. De esta manera se multiplica el carácter horrendo de los actos y los seres malignos, lo que produce intensos efectos legitimadores. No sé si estos procesos son parte de las peculiaridades de la especie humana; pero con seguridad se trata de mecanismos de equilibrio propios de las sociedades modernas. Yo he estudiado con cierto detenimiento la relación simbólica entre las fobias contra la atroz alteridad y las filias por la normalidad sensata, en el libro Las redes imaginarias del poder político. En el fondo, la exhibición de atrocidades es un proceso paradójico que protege a la especie contra las verdaderas amenazas de exterminio.
No descarto que entre los creadores o los visitantes de galerías del horror en las páginas de Internet haya gente enferma. Pero el fenómeno en su conjunto me parece que no se puede reducir a unos cuantos síntomas psicológicos o psiquiátricos. Como fenómeno global y complejo, responde a una inquietud profunda por entender y explorar los territorios del mal. Esta inquietud ha aumentado desde que a partir de 1989 desapareció lo que para el Occidente capitalista parecía ser la gran fuente de todos los males: el comunismo. El mal ahora hay que buscarlo en casa, dentro de nuestras sociedades, de nuestra cultura, en el interior de nuestros espíritus y dentro de las redes electrónicas que nos ligan con la globalidad.
Del blog de Roger Bartra LA JAULA ABIERTA.
jueves, 2 de octubre de 2008
martes, 23 de septiembre de 2008
Link para trabajo
El texto de Eco, segín su compañero Santiago Peña, está en español en la siguiente dirección:
http://www.usergioarboleda.edu.co/derecho/informatica1/de%20internet%20a%20gutemberg_esp.doc
http://www.usergioarboleda.edu.co/derecho/informatica1/de%20internet%20a%20gutemberg_esp.doc
martes, 16 de septiembre de 2008
Primera Evaluación de Taller
Los alumnos en grupos, máximo de tres estudiantes, deberán leer el artículo que se adjunta y responder a las siguientes preguntas a la luz de lo leído:
1.- ¿Cuáles son sus usos tradicionales de aprendizaje e investigación? (Aquellos que traen de la formación en el colegio, uso de LIBROS, REVISTAS, ETC.)
2.- ¿Qué papel tiene, en sus procesos de aprendizaje, la nueva tecnología? De al menos un ejemplo de aplicación de una nueva tecnología en algún proceso de conocimiento que ustedes hayan experimentado.
3.- ¿Qué uso hacen de la Internet en sus procesos de aprendizaje?
4.- ¿Qué efecto creen que tendrá la Internet en la educación?
EL TRABAJO DEBERÁ SER ENTREGADO POR ESCRITO, IMPRESO EN TIPO 12, EN AL MENOS DOS PÁGINAS A DOBLE ESPACIO, EN LA PRÓXIMA CLASE: EL 23 DE SEPTIEMBRE PARA EL PARALELO DEL MARTES Y EL 26 DEL MISMO MES PARA EL PARALELO DEL VIERNES. TENDRÁ UN VALOR DE 10 PUNTOS
ARTÍCULO
From Internet to
Gutenberg A lecture presented by Umberto Eco at
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America
According to Plato (in Phaedrus) when Hermes, the alleged inventor of writing, presented his invention to the Pharaoh Thamus, he praised his new technique that was supposed to allow human beings to remember what they would otherwise forget. But the Pharaoh was not so satisfied. "My skillful Theut, he said, memory is a great gift that ought to be kept alive by training it continuously. With your invention people will not be obliged any longer to train memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, but by mere virtue of an external device."
We can understand the preoccupation of the Pharaoh. Writing, as any other new technological device, would have made torpid the human power which it substituted and reinforced - just as cars made us less able to walk. Writing was dangerous because it decreased the powers of mind by offering human beings a petrified soul, a caricature of mind, a mineral memory.
Plato's text is ironical, naturally. Plato was writing his argument against writing. But he was pretending that his discourse was told by Socrates, who did not write (since he did not publish, he perished in the course of his academic fight.)
Nowadays, nobody shares these preoccupations, for two very simple reasons. First of all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on the contrary they are machines that provoke further thoughts. Only after the invention of writing was it possible to write such a masterpiece on spontaneous memory as Proust's La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Secondly, if once upon a time people needed to train their memory in order to remember things, after the invention of writing they had also to train their memory in order to remember books. Books challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.
However, the Pharaoh was instantiating an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological achievement could abolish or destroy something that we consider precious, fruitful, something that represents for us a value in itself, and a deeply spiritual one.
It was as if the Pharaoh pointed first to the written surface and then to an ideal image of human memory, saying: "This will kill that."
More than one thousand years later Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris, shows us a priest, Claude Frollo, pointing his finger first to a book, then to the towers and to the images of his beloved cathedral, and saying "ceci tuera cela", this will kill that. (The book will kill the cathedral, alphabet will kill images).
The story of Notre Dame de Paris takes place in the XVth century, a little later than the invention of printing. Before that, manuscripts were reserved to a restricted elite of literate persons, but the only means to teach the masses about the stories of the Bible, the life of Christ and of the Saints, the moral principles, even the deeds of the national history or the most elementary notions of geography and natural sciences (the nature of unknown peoples and the virtues of herbs or stones), was provided by the images of the cathedral. A medieval cathedral was a sort of permanent and unchangeable TV program that was supposed to tell people everything indispensable for their everyday lives as well as for their eternal salvation. The book would have distracted people from their most important values, encouraging unnecessary information, free interpretation of the Scriptures, insane curiosity.
During the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote his The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he announced that the linear way of thinking instaured by the invention of the press, was on the verge of being substituted by a more global way of perceiving and understanding through the TV images or other kinds of electronic devices. If not Mc Luhan, certainly many of his readers pointed their finger first to a Manhattan Discotheque and then to a printed book by saying "this will kill that."
The media needed a certain time to accept the idea that our civilization was on the verge of becoming an image oriented one - which would have involved a decline of literacy. Nowadays this is a common shibboleth for every weekly magazine. What is curious is that the media started to celebrate the decline of literacy and the overwhelming power of images just at the moment in which, in the world scene, appeared the Computer.
Certainly a computer is an instrument by means of which one can produce and edit images, certainly instructions are provided by means of icons; but it is equally certain that the computer has become, first of all, an alphabetic instrument. On its screen there run words, lines, and in order to use a computer you must be able to write and to read. The new computer generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teen-ager. These same teen-agers, if by chance they want to program their own home computer, must know, or learn, logical procedures and algorithms, and must type words and numbers on a keyboard, at a great speed.
In this sense one can say that the computer made us to return to a Gutenberg Galaxy.
People who spend their night implementing an unending Internet conversation are principally dealing with words. If the TV screen can be considered a sort of ideal window through which one watches the whole world under the form of images, the computer screen is an ideal book on which one reads about the world in form of words and pages.
The classical computer provided a linear sort of written communication. The screen was displaying written lines. It was like a fast-reading book.
But now there are hypertexts. In a book one had to read from left to right (or right to left, or up to down, according to different cultures) in a linear way. One could obviously skip through the pages, one - once arrived at page 300 - could go back to check or re-read something at page 10 - but this implied a labor, I mean, a physical labor. On the contrary a hypertext is a multidimensional network in which every point or node can be potentially connected with any other node.
Thus we have arrived at the final chapter of our this-will-kill-that story. It is more and more stated that in the near future hypertextual Cd-roms will replace books.
With a hypertextual diskette books are supposed to become obsolete. If you even consider that a hypertext is usually also multimedial, the complete hypertextual diskette will in the next future replace not only books but also videocassettes and many other supports.
Now we must ask ourselves if such a perspective is a realistic one or is mere science-fiction - as well as if the distinction we have just outlined between visual and alphabetic communication, books and hypertexts is really that simple. Let me list a series of problems and possible perspectives for our future.
Even after the invention of printing books have never been the only instrument for acquiring information. There were paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. One can say that books were in any case the most important instrument for transmitting scientifical information, including news about historical events. In this sense they were the paramount instrument used in schools.
With the diffusion of the various mass media, from cinema to television, something has changed. Years ago the only way to learn a foreign language (outside of traveling abroad) was to study a language from a book. Now our kids frequently know other languages by listening to records, by watching movies in the original edition, by deciphering the instructions printed on a beverage can. The same happens with geographical information. In my childhood I got the best of my information about exotic countries not from textbooks but by reading adventure novels (Jules Verne, for instance). My kids very early knew more than me on the same subjects from watching TV and movies. One could learn very well the story of the Roman Empire through movies, provided that movies were historically correct. The fault of Hollywood is not to have opposed its movies to the books of Tacitus or of Gibbon, but rather to have imposed a pulp- and romance-like version on both Tacitus and Gibbon.
A good educational tv program (not to speak of a CD-ROM) can explain genetics better than a book.
Today the concept of literacy comprises many media. An enlightened policy of literacy must take into account the possibilities of all of these media. Educational preoccupation must be extended to the whole of media. Responsibilities and tasks must be carefully balanced. If for learning languages, tapes are better than books, take care of cassettes. If a presentation of Chopin, with commentary on compact disks, helps people to understand Chopin, don't worry if people do not buy five volumes of the history of music.
Even if it were true that today visual communication overwhelms written communication, the problem is not to oppose written to visual communication. The problem is how to improve both. In the Middle Ages visual communication was, for the masses, more important than writing. But Chartres Cathedral was not culturally inferior to the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun. Cathedrals were the TV of those times, and the difference from our TV was that the directors of the medieval TV --read: good books-- had a lot of imagination, and worked for the public profit (or, at least, for what they believed to be public profit).
The real problems lay elsewhere. Visual communication has to be balanced with the verbal one, and mainly with the written one for a precise reason. Once, a semiotician, Sol Worth, wrote a paper, "Images cannot say Ain't". I can verbally say "Unicorns do not exist" but if I show the image of a unicorn the unicorn is there. Moreover, is the unicorn I see a unicorn or the unicorn, that is, does it stand for a given unicorn or for the unicorns in general?
This problem is not as immaterial as it can seem, and many many pages have been written by logicians and semioticians on the difference between such expressions as a child, the child, this child, all children, childhood as a general idea. Such distinctions are not so easy to display through images. Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art wondered if a picture representing a woman
is the representation of Women in general, the portrait of a given woman, the example of the general characteristics of a woman, the equivalent of the statement there is a woman looking at me.
One can say that in a poster or on an illustrated book, the caption or other forms of written material can help to understand what the image means. But I want to remind you about a rhetorical device called example, on which Aristotle spent some interesting pages. In order to convince somebody about a given matter, the most convincing is a proof by induction. In induction I provide many cases and then I infer that probably they instantiate a general law. Suppose I want to demonstrate that dogs are friendly and love their masters: I provided many cases in which a dog has proved to be friendly and helpful and I suggest that there must be a general law by which every animal belonging to the species of dogs is friendly.
Suppose now I want to persuade you that dogs are dangerous. I can do this by providing you with an example: "Once, a dog killed its master...." As you easily understand, a single case does not prove anything, but if the example is shocking I can surreptitiously suggest that dogs can even be unfriendly, and once you are convinced that it can be so, I can unduly extrapolate a law from a single case and conclude: "this means that dogs cannot be trusted." With the rhetorical use of the example I shift from a dog to all dogs.
If you have a critical mind you can realize that I have manipulated a verbal expression (a dog was bad) so to transform it into another one (all dogs are bad) which does not mean the same thing. But if the example is a visual rather than a verbal one, the critical reaction is made more difficult. If I show you the poignant image of a given dog biting its master it is very difficult to discriminate between a particular and a general statement. It is easy to take that dog as the representative of its species. Images have, so to speak, a sort of Platonic power: they transform individuals into general ideas.
Thus by a purely visual communication and education it is easier to implement persuasive strategies that reduce our critical power. If I read on a newspaper that a given man said "we want mister X as president" I am aware that I was given the opinion of a given man. But if I watch on the TV screen a man saying enthusiastically "we want mister X as president" it is easier to take the will of that individual as the example of the general will.
Frequently I think that our societies will be split in a short time (or they are already split) into two classes of citizens: those who only watch TV, who will receive pre-fabricated images and therefore prefabricated definitions of the world, without any power to critically choose the kind of information they receive, and those who know how to deal with the computer, who will be able to select and to elaborate information. This will re-establish the cultural division which existed at the time of Claude Frollo, between those who were able to read manuscripts, and therefore to critically deal with religious, scientifical or philosophical matters, and those who were only educated by the images of the cathedral, selected and produced by their masters, the literate few.
A science fiction writer could elaborate a lot on a future world where a majority of proletarians will receive only visual communication planned by an élite of computer-literate people.
There are two sorts of books: these to be read and these to be consulted.
As far as books-to-read are concerned (they can be a novel, or a philosophical treatise, or a sociological analysis, and so on) the normal way of reading them is the one that I would call the detective-like story. You start from page 1, where the author tells you that a crime has been committed, you follow every path of the detection until the end, and finally you discover that the guilty one was the butler. End of the book and end of your reading experience. Remark that the same happens even if you read, let us say, Descartes' Discourse de la methode. The author wanted you to open the book at its first page, to follow the series of questions he proposed, to see how he reaches certain final conclusions. Certainly, a scholar, who already knows that book, can re-read it by jumping from one page to another, trying to isolate a possible link between a statement of the first chapter and one of the last one... A scholar can also decide to isolate, let us say, every occurrence of the word Jerusalem in the immense opus of Thomas Aquinas, thus skipping thousands of pages in order to focus his or her own attention on the only passages dealing with Jerusalem... But these are ways of reading that the layman would consider as unnatural.
Then there are the books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopedias. Sometimes handbooks must be read from the beginning to the end; but when one knows the matter enough, one can consult them, so selecting also certain chapters or passages. When I was in high-school I had to read entirely, in a linear way, my handbook on mathematics; today, if I need a precise definition of logarithm, I only consult it. I keep it on my shelves not to read and re-read it every day, but in order to keep it up once in ten years, to find the item I need to consult it about.
Encyclopedias are conceived in order to be always consulted and never read from the first to the last page. Usually one pick up a given volume of one's encyclopedia to know or to remember when Napoleon died or what is the formula of sulfuric acid. Scholars use encyclopedias in a more sophisticated way. For instance, if I want to know whether it was possible or not that Napoleon met Kant, I have to pick up the volume K and the wolume N of my encyclopedia: I discover that Napolen was born in 1769 and died in 1821, Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804, when Napoleon was already emperor. It is not impossible that the two met. I have probably to consult a biography of Kant, or of Napoleon - but in a short biography of Napoleon, who met so many persons in his life, this possible meeting with Kant can be disregarded, while a in a biography of Kant a meeting with Napoleon should be recorded. In brief, I must leaf through many books in many shelves of my library, I must take notes in order to compare later all the data I collected, and so on. In short, all this will cost to me a painful physical labor.
With a hypertext, instead, I can navigate through the whole encyclopedia. I can connect an event registered at the beginning with a series of similar events disseminated all along the text, I can compare the beginning with the end, I can ask for the list of all the words beginning by A, I can ask for all the cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with the one of Kant, I can compare the dates of their birth and death - in short, I can do my job in few seconds or few minutes.
Hypertexts will certainly render obsolete encyclopedias and handbooks. In few Cd-roms (probably soon in a single one) it is possible to store more information than in the whole Encyclopedia Britannica, with the advantage that it permits crossed references and non-linear retrieval of information. The whole of the compact disks , plus the computer, will occupy one fifth of the space occupied by an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia cannot be transported as the CD-ROM can, the encyclopedia cannot be easily updated. The shelves today occupied, at my home as well as in public libraries, by meters and meters of encyclopedia could be eliminated in the next future, and there will be no reasons to complain for their disappearance.
Can a hypertextual disk replace the books to be read? This question conceals in fact two different problems and could be rephrased as two different questions.
(I) First, a practical one: Can some electronic support replace the books-to-read?
(II) Second an theoretical and an esthetical one: Can a hypertextual and multimedial CD-ROM transform the very nature of a book-to-read, such as a novel or a collection of poems?
Let me first answer the first question.
Books will remain indispensable not only for literature, but for any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it. To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book. Think to the process of learning a new computer program. Usually the program is able to display on the screen all the instructions you need. But usually the users who want to learn the program either print the instructions and read them as if they were in book form, or they buy a printed manual (let me underevaluate the fact that presently all the computer's Helps are clearly written by irresponsible and tautological idiots, while commercial handbooks are written by smart people). It is possible to conceive of a visual program that explains very well how to print and bind a book, but in order to get instructions on how to write (or how to use) a computer program, we need a printed handbook.
After having spent no more than 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and I feel the need of sitting comfortably down in an armchair and reading a newspaper, and maybe a good poem. I think that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.
In my hours of optimism I dream of a computer generation which, compelled to read a computer screen, gets acquainted with reading, but at a certain moment feels unsatisfied and looks for a different, more relaxed and differently-committing form of reading.
During a symposium on the future of books held at the university of San Marino (the proceedings are now published by Brepols), Regis Debray has observed that the fact that Hebrew civilization was a civilization based upon a Book is not independent on the fact that it was a nomadic civilization. I think that this remark is very important. Egyptians could carve their records on stone obelisks, Moses could not. If you want to cross the Red Sea, a scroll is a more practical instrument for recording wisdom. By the way, another nomadic civilization, the Arabic one, was based upon a book, and privileged writing over images.
But books also have an advantage in respect to computers. Even if printed in modern acid paper, which lasts only 70 years or so, they are more durable than magnetic supports. Moreover, they do not suffer of power shortage and black outs, and are more resistant to shocks. Up to now, books still represent the more economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at a very low cost.
Computers communication travels ahead of you, books travel with you and at your speed, but if you shipwreck in a desert island, a book can serve you, while you don't have any chance to plug a computer anywhere. And even though your computer has solar batteries you cannot easily read it while laying on a hammock. Books are still the best companions for a shipwreck, or for the Day After.
For scholarly purposes a book-to-read can be transformed into a hypertextual CD-ROM. A scholar may need to know, let us say, how many times the word good appears in the Paradise Lost.
However there are today new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem can be transformed into a hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no more a practical one: it concern the very nature of the reading process.
Conceived in a hypertextual way even a detective story can be structured in a open way, so that its readers can even select a given reading-path, that is, to build up their own personal story - even to decide that the guilty one can and must be the detective instead of the butler.
Such an idea is not a new one. Before the invention of the computer, poets and narrators have dreamt of a totally open text that the readers could infinitely re-write in different ways. Such was the idea of Le Livre, as extolled by Mallarmé; Joyce thought of his Finnegans Wake as a text that could be read by an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia. In the sixties Max Saporta wrote and published a novel whose pages could be displaced so as to compose different stories. Nanni Balestrini gave one of the early computers a disconnected list of verses that the machine put together in different ways so to compose different poems; Raymond Queneau invented a combinatorial algorithm by virtue of which it was possible to compose, from a finite set of lines, billions of poems. Many contemporary musicians have produced musical movable scores, and by manipulating them one can compose different musical performances.
As you have probably realized, even here one is dealing with two different problems. (I) The first is the idea of a text which is physically movable. Such a text should give the impression of the absolute freedom on the part of the reader; but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom. The only machinery that allows one to produce infinite texts already existed from millennia, and it is the alphabet. With a reduced number of letters one can produce, really, billions of texts, and this is exactly what has been done from Homer to the present days. A stimulus-text which provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move in a finite number of ways pre-established textual chunks.
But I, as a reader, do have this freedom even when I read a traditional detective novel. Nobody forbids me from imagining a different end. Given a novel where two lovers die I, as a reader, can either cry on their fate, or to try to imagine a different end in which they survive and live happy forever. In a way I, as a reader, feel more free with a physically finite text, on which I can muse for years, than with a movable one where only some manipulations are permitted.
(ii) This possibility leads us to the second problem which concerns a text which is physically finite and limited but that can be interpreted in infinite, or at least in many ways. This has been in fact the aim of every poet or narrator. But a text which can support many interpretations is not a text which can support every interpretation.
I think that we are confronted with three different ideas of hypertext. First of all, we should make a careful distinction between systems and texts. A system (for instance a linguistic system) is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language. Every linguistic item can be interpreted in terms of other linguistic or other semiotic items, a word by a definition, an event by an example, a natural kind by an image, and so on and so forth. The system is perhaps finite but unlimited. You go in a spiral-like movement ad infinitum. In this sense certainly all the conceivable books are comprised by and within a good dictionary and a good grammar. If you are able to use the Webster you can write both the Paradise Lost and Ulysses.
Certainly, if conceived in such a way, a hypertext can transform every reader into an author. Give the same hypertextual system to Shakespeare and a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
However a text is not a linguistic or an encyclopedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe. Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is sure that it will never provide you the demonstration of Fermat's theorem, or the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of irresponsible deconstructionists was to believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is blatantly false. A textual hypertext is finite and limited, even though open to innumerable and original inquiries. FIG.6
Hypertext can work very well with systems, they cannot work with texts. Systems are limited but infinite. Texts are limited and finite, even they can allow for a high number of possible interpretations (but they do not justify every possible interpretation).
There is however a third possibility. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazz-like unending story. At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativity. Being the author of the Open Work I cannot but hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference between producing infinite texts and interpreting precise and finite texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans Jam Session.
We are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will co-exist with textual interpretation. I like this. But we must not say that we have substituted a old thing with another one. We have both, thanks God. TV zapping is a kind of activity which has nothing to do with watching a movie. A hypertextual device that allows us to invent new texts has nothing to do with our ability to interpret pre-existing texts.
There is still another confusion between and about two different questions: (a) will computers made books obsolete? and (b) will computers make written and printed material obsolete?
Let us suppose that computers will make books to disappear. This would not mean the disappearance of printed material.
The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents. In order to re-read a text, and to correct it properly, if it is not simply a short letter, one needs to print it, then to re-read it, then to correct it at the computer and to reprint it again. I do not think that one is able to write a text of hundreds of pages and to correct it without printing it at least once.
We have seen that - if by chance one hoped that computers, and specially word processors, would have contributed to save trees - that was a wishful thinking. Computers encourage the production of printed material. We can think of a culture in which there will be no books, and people will go around with tons and tons of unbound sheets of paper. This will be pretty difficult, and will pose a new problem for libraries.
People desire to communicate with each other. In ancient communities they did it orally; in a more complex society they tried to do it by printing. Most of the books which are displayed in a bookstore should be defined as products of Vanity Presses, even if they are published by a university press. But with computer technology we are entering a new Samisdazt Era. People can communicate directly without the mediation of publishing houses. Lot of people do not want to publish, they simply want to communicate each other. Today they do it by E-mail or Internet, will result in being a great advantage for books, books' civilization and books' market. Look at a bookstore. There are too many books. I receive too many books every week. If the computer network will succeed in reducing the quantity of published books, it would be a paramount cultural improvement.
One of the most common objections against the pseudo-literacy of computers is that young people get more and more accustomed to speak through cryptic short formulas: dir, help, diskcopy, error 67, and so on. One of the closing formulas used in the networks is cul8r. Is that still literacy? FIG 7
I am a rare-books collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal Addressee, usually an Emperor or a Pope, and lasted for pages and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text to follow.
If Baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions are one page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book, thank some National or International Endowment for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten in a hurry...
But let me guess that in the near future we will have three lines saying: "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," (to be read as: I thank my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation.") FIGURE 8
That would be as eloquent as a Baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric. I think that in the coming years passionate love messages will be sent in the form of a short instruction in Basic language, under the form "if... then", so to obtain, as an input, messages like "I love you, therefore I cannot live with you," (beautiful verse from Emily Dickinson).
Besides, the best of English mannerist literature was listed --as far as I remember-- in some program language: 2B OR/NOT 2B " FIGURE 9
There is a curious idea according to which the more you say in verbal language, the more you are profound and perceptive. Mallarmé told us that it is sufficient to spell out "une fleur" to evoke a universe of perfumes, shapes, and thoughts. Frequently for poetry, the fewer the words, the more the things. Three lines of Pascal say more than 300 pages of a long and boring treatise on morals and metaphysics. The quest for a new and surviving literacy ought not to be the quest for a pre-informatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere.
Until now I have tried to show that the arrival of new technological devices does not necessarily made previous device obsolete. The car is goes faster than the bicycle, but cars have not rendered bicycles obsolete and no new technological improvement can make a bicycle better than it was before. The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous role is too much simplistic. After the invention of Daguerre painters did not feel obliged to serve any longer as craftsmen obliged to reproduce reality such as we believe to see it. But it does not mean that Daguerre's invention only encouraged abstract painting. There is a whole tradition in modern painting that could not exist without the photographic model, think for instance of hyper-realism. Reality is seen by the painter's eye through the photographic eye.
Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has made literature free from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like post-modern literature, it exists just because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema. For the same reason today I do not need any longer a heavy portrait painted by a modest artist and I can send my sweetheart a glossy and faithful photograph, but such a change in the social functions of painting has not made painting obsolete, except that today painted portraits do not fulfill the same practical function of portraying a person (which can be done better and less expensively by a photograph), but of celebrating important personalities, so that the command, the purchasing and the exhibition of such portraits acquire aristocratic connotations.
This means that in the history if culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else.
I have quoted McLuhan, according to which the Visual Galaxy had substituted the Gutenberg Galaxy. We have seen that few decades later this was no longer true. McLuhan stated that we are living in a new electronic Global Village. We are certainly living in a new electronic community, which is global enough, but this is not a Village - if by village one means a human settlement where people are directly interacting each other.
The real problems of an electronic community are the following: (1) Solitude. The new citizen of this new community is free to invent new texts, to cancel the traditional notion of authorship, to delete the traditional divisions between author and reader, but the risk is that - being in touch with the entire world by means of a galactic network - one feels alone.... (2) Excess of information and inability to choose and to discriminate. I am used to saying that certainly the Sunday NYT is the kind of newspaper where you can find everything fit to print. Its 500 hundred pages tell you everything you need to know about the events of the past week and the ideas for the new one. However, a single week is not enough to read the whole Sunday NYT. Is there a difference between a newspaper which says everything you cannot read, and a newspaper which says nothing, is there a difference between NYT and Pravda?
Notwithstanding this, the NYT reader can still distinguish between the book review, the pages devoted to the tv programs, the Real Estate supplement, and so on. The user of Internet has not the same skill. We are today unable to discriminate, at least at first glance, between a reliable source and a mad one. We need a new form of critical competence, an as yet unknown art of selection and decimation of information, in short, a new wisdom. We need a new kind of educational training.
Let me say that in this perspective books will still have a paramount function. As well as you need a printed handbook in order to surf on Internet, so we will need new printed manuals in order to cope critically with the World Wide Web.
Let me conclude with a praise of the finite and limited world that books provide us. Suppose you are reading Tolstoj's War and Peace: you are desperately wishing that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel who is Anatolij; you desperately wish that that marvellous person who is prince Andrej will not die, and that he and Natasha could live together happy forever. If you had War and Peace in a hypertextual and interactive CD-rom you could rewrite your own story, according to your desires, you could invent innumerable War and Peaces, where Pierre Besuchov succeeds in killing Napoleon or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov.
Alas, with a book you cannot. You are obliged to accept the laws of Fate, and to realise that you cannot change Destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such a kind of inventive activity will be practised in the schools of the future. But the written War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of Freedom, but with the severe law of Necessity. In order to be free persons we also need to learn this lesson about Life and Death, and only books can still provide us with such a wisdom.
http://www.italynet.com/columbia/internet.htm
1.- ¿Cuáles son sus usos tradicionales de aprendizaje e investigación? (Aquellos que traen de la formación en el colegio, uso de LIBROS, REVISTAS, ETC.)
2.- ¿Qué papel tiene, en sus procesos de aprendizaje, la nueva tecnología? De al menos un ejemplo de aplicación de una nueva tecnología en algún proceso de conocimiento que ustedes hayan experimentado.
3.- ¿Qué uso hacen de la Internet en sus procesos de aprendizaje?
4.- ¿Qué efecto creen que tendrá la Internet en la educación?
EL TRABAJO DEBERÁ SER ENTREGADO POR ESCRITO, IMPRESO EN TIPO 12, EN AL MENOS DOS PÁGINAS A DOBLE ESPACIO, EN LA PRÓXIMA CLASE: EL 23 DE SEPTIEMBRE PARA EL PARALELO DEL MARTES Y EL 26 DEL MISMO MES PARA EL PARALELO DEL VIERNES. TENDRÁ UN VALOR DE 10 PUNTOS
ARTÍCULO
From Internet to
Gutenberg A lecture presented by Umberto Eco at
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America
According to Plato (in Phaedrus) when Hermes, the alleged inventor of writing, presented his invention to the Pharaoh Thamus, he praised his new technique that was supposed to allow human beings to remember what they would otherwise forget. But the Pharaoh was not so satisfied. "My skillful Theut, he said, memory is a great gift that ought to be kept alive by training it continuously. With your invention people will not be obliged any longer to train memory. They will remember things not because of an internal effort, but by mere virtue of an external device."
We can understand the preoccupation of the Pharaoh. Writing, as any other new technological device, would have made torpid the human power which it substituted and reinforced - just as cars made us less able to walk. Writing was dangerous because it decreased the powers of mind by offering human beings a petrified soul, a caricature of mind, a mineral memory.
Plato's text is ironical, naturally. Plato was writing his argument against writing. But he was pretending that his discourse was told by Socrates, who did not write (since he did not publish, he perished in the course of his academic fight.)
Nowadays, nobody shares these preoccupations, for two very simple reasons. First of all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on the contrary they are machines that provoke further thoughts. Only after the invention of writing was it possible to write such a masterpiece on spontaneous memory as Proust's La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Secondly, if once upon a time people needed to train their memory in order to remember things, after the invention of writing they had also to train their memory in order to remember books. Books challenge and improve memory; they do not narcotize it.
However, the Pharaoh was instantiating an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological achievement could abolish or destroy something that we consider precious, fruitful, something that represents for us a value in itself, and a deeply spiritual one.
It was as if the Pharaoh pointed first to the written surface and then to an ideal image of human memory, saying: "This will kill that."
More than one thousand years later Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris, shows us a priest, Claude Frollo, pointing his finger first to a book, then to the towers and to the images of his beloved cathedral, and saying "ceci tuera cela", this will kill that. (The book will kill the cathedral, alphabet will kill images).
The story of Notre Dame de Paris takes place in the XVth century, a little later than the invention of printing. Before that, manuscripts were reserved to a restricted elite of literate persons, but the only means to teach the masses about the stories of the Bible, the life of Christ and of the Saints, the moral principles, even the deeds of the national history or the most elementary notions of geography and natural sciences (the nature of unknown peoples and the virtues of herbs or stones), was provided by the images of the cathedral. A medieval cathedral was a sort of permanent and unchangeable TV program that was supposed to tell people everything indispensable for their everyday lives as well as for their eternal salvation. The book would have distracted people from their most important values, encouraging unnecessary information, free interpretation of the Scriptures, insane curiosity.
During the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote his The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he announced that the linear way of thinking instaured by the invention of the press, was on the verge of being substituted by a more global way of perceiving and understanding through the TV images or other kinds of electronic devices. If not Mc Luhan, certainly many of his readers pointed their finger first to a Manhattan Discotheque and then to a printed book by saying "this will kill that."
The media needed a certain time to accept the idea that our civilization was on the verge of becoming an image oriented one - which would have involved a decline of literacy. Nowadays this is a common shibboleth for every weekly magazine. What is curious is that the media started to celebrate the decline of literacy and the overwhelming power of images just at the moment in which, in the world scene, appeared the Computer.
Certainly a computer is an instrument by means of which one can produce and edit images, certainly instructions are provided by means of icons; but it is equally certain that the computer has become, first of all, an alphabetic instrument. On its screen there run words, lines, and in order to use a computer you must be able to write and to read. The new computer generation is trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teen-ager. These same teen-agers, if by chance they want to program their own home computer, must know, or learn, logical procedures and algorithms, and must type words and numbers on a keyboard, at a great speed.
In this sense one can say that the computer made us to return to a Gutenberg Galaxy.
People who spend their night implementing an unending Internet conversation are principally dealing with words. If the TV screen can be considered a sort of ideal window through which one watches the whole world under the form of images, the computer screen is an ideal book on which one reads about the world in form of words and pages.
The classical computer provided a linear sort of written communication. The screen was displaying written lines. It was like a fast-reading book.
But now there are hypertexts. In a book one had to read from left to right (or right to left, or up to down, according to different cultures) in a linear way. One could obviously skip through the pages, one - once arrived at page 300 - could go back to check or re-read something at page 10 - but this implied a labor, I mean, a physical labor. On the contrary a hypertext is a multidimensional network in which every point or node can be potentially connected with any other node.
Thus we have arrived at the final chapter of our this-will-kill-that story. It is more and more stated that in the near future hypertextual Cd-roms will replace books.
With a hypertextual diskette books are supposed to become obsolete. If you even consider that a hypertext is usually also multimedial, the complete hypertextual diskette will in the next future replace not only books but also videocassettes and many other supports.
Now we must ask ourselves if such a perspective is a realistic one or is mere science-fiction - as well as if the distinction we have just outlined between visual and alphabetic communication, books and hypertexts is really that simple. Let me list a series of problems and possible perspectives for our future.
Even after the invention of printing books have never been the only instrument for acquiring information. There were paintings, popular printed images, oral teaching, and so on. One can say that books were in any case the most important instrument for transmitting scientifical information, including news about historical events. In this sense they were the paramount instrument used in schools.
With the diffusion of the various mass media, from cinema to television, something has changed. Years ago the only way to learn a foreign language (outside of traveling abroad) was to study a language from a book. Now our kids frequently know other languages by listening to records, by watching movies in the original edition, by deciphering the instructions printed on a beverage can. The same happens with geographical information. In my childhood I got the best of my information about exotic countries not from textbooks but by reading adventure novels (Jules Verne, for instance). My kids very early knew more than me on the same subjects from watching TV and movies. One could learn very well the story of the Roman Empire through movies, provided that movies were historically correct. The fault of Hollywood is not to have opposed its movies to the books of Tacitus or of Gibbon, but rather to have imposed a pulp- and romance-like version on both Tacitus and Gibbon.
A good educational tv program (not to speak of a CD-ROM) can explain genetics better than a book.
Today the concept of literacy comprises many media. An enlightened policy of literacy must take into account the possibilities of all of these media. Educational preoccupation must be extended to the whole of media. Responsibilities and tasks must be carefully balanced. If for learning languages, tapes are better than books, take care of cassettes. If a presentation of Chopin, with commentary on compact disks, helps people to understand Chopin, don't worry if people do not buy five volumes of the history of music.
Even if it were true that today visual communication overwhelms written communication, the problem is not to oppose written to visual communication. The problem is how to improve both. In the Middle Ages visual communication was, for the masses, more important than writing. But Chartres Cathedral was not culturally inferior to the Imago Mundi of Honorius of Autun. Cathedrals were the TV of those times, and the difference from our TV was that the directors of the medieval TV --read: good books-- had a lot of imagination, and worked for the public profit (or, at least, for what they believed to be public profit).
The real problems lay elsewhere. Visual communication has to be balanced with the verbal one, and mainly with the written one for a precise reason. Once, a semiotician, Sol Worth, wrote a paper, "Images cannot say Ain't". I can verbally say "Unicorns do not exist" but if I show the image of a unicorn the unicorn is there. Moreover, is the unicorn I see a unicorn or the unicorn, that is, does it stand for a given unicorn or for the unicorns in general?
This problem is not as immaterial as it can seem, and many many pages have been written by logicians and semioticians on the difference between such expressions as a child, the child, this child, all children, childhood as a general idea. Such distinctions are not so easy to display through images. Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art wondered if a picture representing a woman
is the representation of Women in general, the portrait of a given woman, the example of the general characteristics of a woman, the equivalent of the statement there is a woman looking at me.
One can say that in a poster or on an illustrated book, the caption or other forms of written material can help to understand what the image means. But I want to remind you about a rhetorical device called example, on which Aristotle spent some interesting pages. In order to convince somebody about a given matter, the most convincing is a proof by induction. In induction I provide many cases and then I infer that probably they instantiate a general law. Suppose I want to demonstrate that dogs are friendly and love their masters: I provided many cases in which a dog has proved to be friendly and helpful and I suggest that there must be a general law by which every animal belonging to the species of dogs is friendly.
Suppose now I want to persuade you that dogs are dangerous. I can do this by providing you with an example: "Once, a dog killed its master...." As you easily understand, a single case does not prove anything, but if the example is shocking I can surreptitiously suggest that dogs can even be unfriendly, and once you are convinced that it can be so, I can unduly extrapolate a law from a single case and conclude: "this means that dogs cannot be trusted." With the rhetorical use of the example I shift from a dog to all dogs.
If you have a critical mind you can realize that I have manipulated a verbal expression (a dog was bad) so to transform it into another one (all dogs are bad) which does not mean the same thing. But if the example is a visual rather than a verbal one, the critical reaction is made more difficult. If I show you the poignant image of a given dog biting its master it is very difficult to discriminate between a particular and a general statement. It is easy to take that dog as the representative of its species. Images have, so to speak, a sort of Platonic power: they transform individuals into general ideas.
Thus by a purely visual communication and education it is easier to implement persuasive strategies that reduce our critical power. If I read on a newspaper that a given man said "we want mister X as president" I am aware that I was given the opinion of a given man. But if I watch on the TV screen a man saying enthusiastically "we want mister X as president" it is easier to take the will of that individual as the example of the general will.
Frequently I think that our societies will be split in a short time (or they are already split) into two classes of citizens: those who only watch TV, who will receive pre-fabricated images and therefore prefabricated definitions of the world, without any power to critically choose the kind of information they receive, and those who know how to deal with the computer, who will be able to select and to elaborate information. This will re-establish the cultural division which existed at the time of Claude Frollo, between those who were able to read manuscripts, and therefore to critically deal with religious, scientifical or philosophical matters, and those who were only educated by the images of the cathedral, selected and produced by their masters, the literate few.
A science fiction writer could elaborate a lot on a future world where a majority of proletarians will receive only visual communication planned by an élite of computer-literate people.
There are two sorts of books: these to be read and these to be consulted.
As far as books-to-read are concerned (they can be a novel, or a philosophical treatise, or a sociological analysis, and so on) the normal way of reading them is the one that I would call the detective-like story. You start from page 1, where the author tells you that a crime has been committed, you follow every path of the detection until the end, and finally you discover that the guilty one was the butler. End of the book and end of your reading experience. Remark that the same happens even if you read, let us say, Descartes' Discourse de la methode. The author wanted you to open the book at its first page, to follow the series of questions he proposed, to see how he reaches certain final conclusions. Certainly, a scholar, who already knows that book, can re-read it by jumping from one page to another, trying to isolate a possible link between a statement of the first chapter and one of the last one... A scholar can also decide to isolate, let us say, every occurrence of the word Jerusalem in the immense opus of Thomas Aquinas, thus skipping thousands of pages in order to focus his or her own attention on the only passages dealing with Jerusalem... But these are ways of reading that the layman would consider as unnatural.
Then there are the books to be consulted, like handbooks and encyclopedias. Sometimes handbooks must be read from the beginning to the end; but when one knows the matter enough, one can consult them, so selecting also certain chapters or passages. When I was in high-school I had to read entirely, in a linear way, my handbook on mathematics; today, if I need a precise definition of logarithm, I only consult it. I keep it on my shelves not to read and re-read it every day, but in order to keep it up once in ten years, to find the item I need to consult it about.
Encyclopedias are conceived in order to be always consulted and never read from the first to the last page. Usually one pick up a given volume of one's encyclopedia to know or to remember when Napoleon died or what is the formula of sulfuric acid. Scholars use encyclopedias in a more sophisticated way. For instance, if I want to know whether it was possible or not that Napoleon met Kant, I have to pick up the volume K and the wolume N of my encyclopedia: I discover that Napolen was born in 1769 and died in 1821, Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804, when Napoleon was already emperor. It is not impossible that the two met. I have probably to consult a biography of Kant, or of Napoleon - but in a short biography of Napoleon, who met so many persons in his life, this possible meeting with Kant can be disregarded, while a in a biography of Kant a meeting with Napoleon should be recorded. In brief, I must leaf through many books in many shelves of my library, I must take notes in order to compare later all the data I collected, and so on. In short, all this will cost to me a painful physical labor.
With a hypertext, instead, I can navigate through the whole encyclopedia. I can connect an event registered at the beginning with a series of similar events disseminated all along the text, I can compare the beginning with the end, I can ask for the list of all the words beginning by A, I can ask for all the cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with the one of Kant, I can compare the dates of their birth and death - in short, I can do my job in few seconds or few minutes.
Hypertexts will certainly render obsolete encyclopedias and handbooks. In few Cd-roms (probably soon in a single one) it is possible to store more information than in the whole Encyclopedia Britannica, with the advantage that it permits crossed references and non-linear retrieval of information. The whole of the compact disks , plus the computer, will occupy one fifth of the space occupied by an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia cannot be transported as the CD-ROM can, the encyclopedia cannot be easily updated. The shelves today occupied, at my home as well as in public libraries, by meters and meters of encyclopedia could be eliminated in the next future, and there will be no reasons to complain for their disappearance.
Can a hypertextual disk replace the books to be read? This question conceals in fact two different problems and could be rephrased as two different questions.
(I) First, a practical one: Can some electronic support replace the books-to-read?
(II) Second an theoretical and an esthetical one: Can a hypertextual and multimedial CD-ROM transform the very nature of a book-to-read, such as a novel or a collection of poems?
Let me first answer the first question.
Books will remain indispensable not only for literature, but for any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and to reflect about it. To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book. Think to the process of learning a new computer program. Usually the program is able to display on the screen all the instructions you need. But usually the users who want to learn the program either print the instructions and read them as if they were in book form, or they buy a printed manual (let me underevaluate the fact that presently all the computer's Helps are clearly written by irresponsible and tautological idiots, while commercial handbooks are written by smart people). It is possible to conceive of a visual program that explains very well how to print and bind a book, but in order to get instructions on how to write (or how to use) a computer program, we need a printed handbook.
After having spent no more than 12 hours at a computer console, my eyes are like two tennis balls, and I feel the need of sitting comfortably down in an armchair and reading a newspaper, and maybe a good poem. I think that computers are diffusing a new form of literacy but are incapable of satisfying all the intellectual needs they are stimulating.
In my hours of optimism I dream of a computer generation which, compelled to read a computer screen, gets acquainted with reading, but at a certain moment feels unsatisfied and looks for a different, more relaxed and differently-committing form of reading.
During a symposium on the future of books held at the university of San Marino (the proceedings are now published by Brepols), Regis Debray has observed that the fact that Hebrew civilization was a civilization based upon a Book is not independent on the fact that it was a nomadic civilization. I think that this remark is very important. Egyptians could carve their records on stone obelisks, Moses could not. If you want to cross the Red Sea, a scroll is a more practical instrument for recording wisdom. By the way, another nomadic civilization, the Arabic one, was based upon a book, and privileged writing over images.
But books also have an advantage in respect to computers. Even if printed in modern acid paper, which lasts only 70 years or so, they are more durable than magnetic supports. Moreover, they do not suffer of power shortage and black outs, and are more resistant to shocks. Up to now, books still represent the more economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at a very low cost.
Computers communication travels ahead of you, books travel with you and at your speed, but if you shipwreck in a desert island, a book can serve you, while you don't have any chance to plug a computer anywhere. And even though your computer has solar batteries you cannot easily read it while laying on a hammock. Books are still the best companions for a shipwreck, or for the Day After.
For scholarly purposes a book-to-read can be transformed into a hypertextual CD-ROM. A scholar may need to know, let us say, how many times the word good appears in the Paradise Lost.
However there are today new hypertextual poetics according to which even a book-to-read, even a poem can be transformed into a hypertext. At this point we are shifting to question two, since the problem is no more a practical one: it concern the very nature of the reading process.
Conceived in a hypertextual way even a detective story can be structured in a open way, so that its readers can even select a given reading-path, that is, to build up their own personal story - even to decide that the guilty one can and must be the detective instead of the butler.
Such an idea is not a new one. Before the invention of the computer, poets and narrators have dreamt of a totally open text that the readers could infinitely re-write in different ways. Such was the idea of Le Livre, as extolled by Mallarmé; Joyce thought of his Finnegans Wake as a text that could be read by an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia. In the sixties Max Saporta wrote and published a novel whose pages could be displaced so as to compose different stories. Nanni Balestrini gave one of the early computers a disconnected list of verses that the machine put together in different ways so to compose different poems; Raymond Queneau invented a combinatorial algorithm by virtue of which it was possible to compose, from a finite set of lines, billions of poems. Many contemporary musicians have produced musical movable scores, and by manipulating them one can compose different musical performances.
As you have probably realized, even here one is dealing with two different problems. (I) The first is the idea of a text which is physically movable. Such a text should give the impression of the absolute freedom on the part of the reader; but this is only an impression, an illusion of freedom. The only machinery that allows one to produce infinite texts already existed from millennia, and it is the alphabet. With a reduced number of letters one can produce, really, billions of texts, and this is exactly what has been done from Homer to the present days. A stimulus-text which provides us not with letters, or words, but with pre-established sequences of words, or of pages, does not set us free to invent anything we want. We are only free to move in a finite number of ways pre-established textual chunks.
But I, as a reader, do have this freedom even when I read a traditional detective novel. Nobody forbids me from imagining a different end. Given a novel where two lovers die I, as a reader, can either cry on their fate, or to try to imagine a different end in which they survive and live happy forever. In a way I, as a reader, feel more free with a physically finite text, on which I can muse for years, than with a movable one where only some manipulations are permitted.
(ii) This possibility leads us to the second problem which concerns a text which is physically finite and limited but that can be interpreted in infinite, or at least in many ways. This has been in fact the aim of every poet or narrator. But a text which can support many interpretations is not a text which can support every interpretation.
I think that we are confronted with three different ideas of hypertext. First of all, we should make a careful distinction between systems and texts. A system (for instance a linguistic system) is the whole of the possibilities displayed by a given natural language. Every linguistic item can be interpreted in terms of other linguistic or other semiotic items, a word by a definition, an event by an example, a natural kind by an image, and so on and so forth. The system is perhaps finite but unlimited. You go in a spiral-like movement ad infinitum. In this sense certainly all the conceivable books are comprised by and within a good dictionary and a good grammar. If you are able to use the Webster you can write both the Paradise Lost and Ulysses.
Certainly, if conceived in such a way, a hypertext can transform every reader into an author. Give the same hypertextual system to Shakespeare and a schoolboy, and they have the same odds of producing Romeo and Juliet.
However a text is not a linguistic or an encyclopedic system. A given text reduces the infinite or indefinite possibilities of a system to make up a closed universe. Finnegans Wake is certainly open to many interpretations, but it is sure that it will never provide you the demonstration of Fermat's theorem, or the complete bibliography of Woody Allen. This seems trivial, but the radical mistake of irresponsible deconstructionists was to believe that you can do everything you want with a text. This is blatantly false. A textual hypertext is finite and limited, even though open to innumerable and original inquiries. FIG.6
Hypertext can work very well with systems, they cannot work with texts. Systems are limited but infinite. Texts are limited and finite, even they can allow for a high number of possible interpretations (but they do not justify every possible interpretation).
There is however a third possibility. We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazz-like unending story. At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativity. Being the author of the Open Work I cannot but hail such a possibility. However there is a difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and the existence of produced texts. We shall have a new culture in which there will be a difference between producing infinite texts and interpreting precise and finite texts. That is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethoven's Fifth and a new instance of a New Orleans Jam Session.
We are marching towards a more liberated society in which free creativity will co-exist with textual interpretation. I like this. But we must not say that we have substituted a old thing with another one. We have both, thanks God. TV zapping is a kind of activity which has nothing to do with watching a movie. A hypertextual device that allows us to invent new texts has nothing to do with our ability to interpret pre-existing texts.
There is still another confusion between and about two different questions: (a) will computers made books obsolete? and (b) will computers make written and printed material obsolete?
Let us suppose that computers will make books to disappear. This would not mean the disappearance of printed material.
The computer creates new modes of production and diffusion of printed documents. In order to re-read a text, and to correct it properly, if it is not simply a short letter, one needs to print it, then to re-read it, then to correct it at the computer and to reprint it again. I do not think that one is able to write a text of hundreds of pages and to correct it without printing it at least once.
We have seen that - if by chance one hoped that computers, and specially word processors, would have contributed to save trees - that was a wishful thinking. Computers encourage the production of printed material. We can think of a culture in which there will be no books, and people will go around with tons and tons of unbound sheets of paper. This will be pretty difficult, and will pose a new problem for libraries.
People desire to communicate with each other. In ancient communities they did it orally; in a more complex society they tried to do it by printing. Most of the books which are displayed in a bookstore should be defined as products of Vanity Presses, even if they are published by a university press. But with computer technology we are entering a new Samisdazt Era. People can communicate directly without the mediation of publishing houses. Lot of people do not want to publish, they simply want to communicate each other. Today they do it by E-mail or Internet, will result in being a great advantage for books, books' civilization and books' market. Look at a bookstore. There are too many books. I receive too many books every week. If the computer network will succeed in reducing the quantity of published books, it would be a paramount cultural improvement.
One of the most common objections against the pseudo-literacy of computers is that young people get more and more accustomed to speak through cryptic short formulas: dir, help, diskcopy, error 67, and so on. One of the closing formulas used in the networks is cul8r. Is that still literacy? FIG 7
I am a rare-books collector, and I feel delighted when I read the seventeenth-century titles that took one page and sometimes more. They look like the titles of Lina Wertmuller's movies. The introductions were several pages long. They started with elaborate courtesy formulas praising the ideal Addressee, usually an Emperor or a Pope, and lasted for pages and pages explaining in a very baroque style the purposes and the virtues of the text to follow.
If Baroque writers read our contemporary scholarly books they would be horrified. Introductions are one page long, briefly outline the subject matter of the book, thank some National or International Endowment for a generous grant, shortly explain that the book has been made possible by the love and understanding of a wife or husband and of some children, and credit a secretary for having patiently typed the manuscript. We understand perfectly the whole of human and academic ordeals revealed by those few lines, the hundreds of nights spent underlining photocopies, the innumerable frozen hamburgers eaten in a hurry...
But let me guess that in the near future we will have three lines saying: "W/c, Smith, Rockefeller," (to be read as: I thank my wife and my children; this book was patiently revised by Professor Smith, and was made possible by the Rockefeller Foundation.") FIGURE 8
That would be as eloquent as a Baroque introduction. It is a problem of rhetoric and of acquaintance with a given rhetoric. I think that in the coming years passionate love messages will be sent in the form of a short instruction in Basic language, under the form "if... then", so to obtain, as an input, messages like "I love you, therefore I cannot live with you," (beautiful verse from Emily Dickinson).
Besides, the best of English mannerist literature was listed --as far as I remember-- in some program language: 2B OR/NOT 2B " FIGURE 9
There is a curious idea according to which the more you say in verbal language, the more you are profound and perceptive. Mallarmé told us that it is sufficient to spell out "une fleur" to evoke a universe of perfumes, shapes, and thoughts. Frequently for poetry, the fewer the words, the more the things. Three lines of Pascal say more than 300 pages of a long and boring treatise on morals and metaphysics. The quest for a new and surviving literacy ought not to be the quest for a pre-informatic quantity. The enemies of literacy are hiding elsewhere.
Until now I have tried to show that the arrival of new technological devices does not necessarily made previous device obsolete. The car is goes faster than the bicycle, but cars have not rendered bicycles obsolete and no new technological improvement can make a bicycle better than it was before. The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous role is too much simplistic. After the invention of Daguerre painters did not feel obliged to serve any longer as craftsmen obliged to reproduce reality such as we believe to see it. But it does not mean that Daguerre's invention only encouraged abstract painting. There is a whole tradition in modern painting that could not exist without the photographic model, think for instance of hyper-realism. Reality is seen by the painter's eye through the photographic eye.
Certainly the advent of cinema or of comic strips has made literature free from certain narrative tasks it traditionally had to perform. But if there is something like post-modern literature, it exists just because it has been largely influenced by comic strips or cinema. For the same reason today I do not need any longer a heavy portrait painted by a modest artist and I can send my sweetheart a glossy and faithful photograph, but such a change in the social functions of painting has not made painting obsolete, except that today painted portraits do not fulfill the same practical function of portraying a person (which can be done better and less expensively by a photograph), but of celebrating important personalities, so that the command, the purchasing and the exhibition of such portraits acquire aristocratic connotations.
This means that in the history if culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else.
I have quoted McLuhan, according to which the Visual Galaxy had substituted the Gutenberg Galaxy. We have seen that few decades later this was no longer true. McLuhan stated that we are living in a new electronic Global Village. We are certainly living in a new electronic community, which is global enough, but this is not a Village - if by village one means a human settlement where people are directly interacting each other.
The real problems of an electronic community are the following: (1) Solitude. The new citizen of this new community is free to invent new texts, to cancel the traditional notion of authorship, to delete the traditional divisions between author and reader, but the risk is that - being in touch with the entire world by means of a galactic network - one feels alone.... (2) Excess of information and inability to choose and to discriminate. I am used to saying that certainly the Sunday NYT is the kind of newspaper where you can find everything fit to print. Its 500 hundred pages tell you everything you need to know about the events of the past week and the ideas for the new one. However, a single week is not enough to read the whole Sunday NYT. Is there a difference between a newspaper which says everything you cannot read, and a newspaper which says nothing, is there a difference between NYT and Pravda?
Notwithstanding this, the NYT reader can still distinguish between the book review, the pages devoted to the tv programs, the Real Estate supplement, and so on. The user of Internet has not the same skill. We are today unable to discriminate, at least at first glance, between a reliable source and a mad one. We need a new form of critical competence, an as yet unknown art of selection and decimation of information, in short, a new wisdom. We need a new kind of educational training.
Let me say that in this perspective books will still have a paramount function. As well as you need a printed handbook in order to surf on Internet, so we will need new printed manuals in order to cope critically with the World Wide Web.
Let me conclude with a praise of the finite and limited world that books provide us. Suppose you are reading Tolstoj's War and Peace: you are desperately wishing that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel who is Anatolij; you desperately wish that that marvellous person who is prince Andrej will not die, and that he and Natasha could live together happy forever. If you had War and Peace in a hypertextual and interactive CD-rom you could rewrite your own story, according to your desires, you could invent innumerable War and Peaces, where Pierre Besuchov succeeds in killing Napoleon or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov.
Alas, with a book you cannot. You are obliged to accept the laws of Fate, and to realise that you cannot change Destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such a kind of inventive activity will be practised in the schools of the future. But the written War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of Freedom, but with the severe law of Necessity. In order to be free persons we also need to learn this lesson about Life and Death, and only books can still provide us with such a wisdom.
http://www.italynet.com/columbia/internet.htm
martes, 12 de agosto de 2008
PÁGINA RECOMENDADA A LOS ALUMNOS DE PRIMER AÑO
La página http://www.letraslibres.com/ es una estupenda fuente de artículos de ciencias sociales, de comunicación y de literatura.
lunes, 11 de agosto de 2008
PRIMERA LECTURA
¿QUE ES LA LIBERTAD POLÍTICA?
ISAIAH BERLIN
Al igual que la mayoría de las palabras que han desempeñado un papel importante en la historia de la humanidad, los términos “libertad humana” y “liberación” conllevan múltiples significados. Sin embargo, parece haber uno que es nuclear, central, mínimo, común a las diversas acepciones de la palabra, y que significa “ausencia de restricciones”. Más específicamente, ausencia de coacción por parte de congéneres específicos o sin especificar. Hay sentidos en los que la palabra “libertad” no se utiliza de esa forma, en los que resulta natural hablar del libre movimiento de las extremidades humanas, o del libre juego de la imaginación, o de liberarse del dolor, o de liberarse de los obstáculos de la vida terrenal. Pero cuando hablamos de libertad política esos sentidos parecen casi metafóricos y, a menudo, el intento de hacerlos entrar en juego sólo ensombrece el asunto.
Las pugnas de individuos, grupos o comunidades por obtener libertad por lo general se conciben como intentos de individuos particulares por destruir o neutralizar el poder que, poseído o utilizado por algún otro individuo o grupo de personas, los limita para llevar a cabo sus propios deseos. Y el partido de la libertad, al contrario de quienes desean mantener algún tipo particular de autoridad –la de un monarca, la Iglesia, la aristocracia hereditaria, una compañía comercial, una asamblea soberana, un dictador, a veces disfrazados de agencias impersonales (“el Estado”, “la ley”, “la nación”), pero de hecho siempre conformadas por individuos, vivos o muertos– está compuesto por personas que se oponen a una forma de restricción existente o en ciernes. Ellos mismos pueden estar a favor de alguna otra forma específica de autoridad –digamos la de un cuerpo democrático, o una federación de unidades constituida de diversas formas–, pero no se los describe como amigos de la libertad en virtud de su apoyo a la forma de autoridad que favorecen. Aunque se han atribuido muchos significados a las palabras “libertad”, “libertario”, “liberal”, siempre tendrán una mayor o menor connotación de resistencia a lo que interfiere por parte de alguien –una persona o personas, y no cosas o circunstancias– en condiciones más o menos específicas. Éste parece ser el sentido básico de la palabra “libertad” usada como término político, y el sentido en el que la esgrimen todos sus grandes paladines, en el pensamiento y en la acción, en nombre tanto de naciones como de individuos, desde Moisés y Leónidas hasta nuestros días.
En épocas modernas, la fórmula clásica del ideal de libertad es fruto del pensamiento del siglo XVIII, y culmina en las celebradas formulaciones que de ella se hacen en la Declaración de Independencia de Estados Unidos, y de los Derechos del Hombre y del Ciudadano de la Primera República Francesa. Estos documentos hablan de derechos y, al hacerlo, se refieren a la invasión de ciertas áreas de la existencia –digamos aquellas que el hombre necesita a fin de asegurar la vida y oportunidades idóneas de felicidad; o para ser capaz de poseer una propiedad, o para pensar y hablar como lo desee, o para obtener empleo, o para participar en la vida política y social de su comunidad– y pretenden que la invasión de tales parcelas vitales se considere prohibida por la ley. En este sentido, la ley es un instrumento para prevenir usurpaciones específicas, o para castigarlas, si ocurren.
Por tanto, la libertad política es un concepto negativo: exigirla es exigir que dentro de cierta esfera a un hombre no se le prohíba hacer lo que desee, es decir, que no se le prohíba hacerlo, independientemente de que sea capaz de llevarlo a cabo o no. A un lisiado no se le prohíbe caminar erguido, aunque de hecho no pueda hacerlo. A un hombre sano tampoco se le prohíbe volar a la luna aunque, de hecho, no esté en posición de hacerlo. Sin embargo, no decimos que un hombre no es libre de volar a la luna, ni decimos que un lisiado no es libre de caminar erguido. Se han hecho esfuerzos para hablar de esta manera: se ha igualado libertad con poder. Por ejemplo, el sentido en que se dice que la ciencia hace libres a los hombres es precisamente en el sentido de que incrementa sus capacidades técnicas para sobreponerse a los obstáculos que opone la naturaleza, y también, hasta cierto punto, para desarrollar su imaginación hasta que conciba opciones que sean más realizables que las de su ignorancia o incapacidad mental previas, o lo que su así llamado estrecho horizonte mental, le habían permitido practicar hasta entonces.
Pero aunque estos usos de la palabra “libertad” son razonablemente familiares y claros, parecen, y con razón, algo metafóricos: el hecho de que yo no sea capaz de pensar en las distintas maneras de disfrutar que se le ocurren a una persona más imaginativa que yo, no hace que yo no sea libre, en el sentido en que se diría de una persona que me encierra en una habitación para evitar que yo obtenga una satisfacción que anhelo. Si soy incapaz de deshacerme de algún encaprichamiento obstinado o de una idée fixe, que me hace olvidar el mundo entero en la búsqueda frenética de un objetivo que me obsesiona, se me puede describir, sin duda, como “esclavo” de mis pasiones. Pero no soy un esclavo en el sentido literal de la palabra, y nadie me considerará un esclavo en el sentido en que el Tío Tom era esclavo de Simon Legree.
Ciertamente ambos casos tienen algo en común: hay algo que no estoy haciendo, y que podría hacer o haber hecho, pero el sentido básico o literal de la palabra “liberación” y de la palabra “libertad” parece asociarse a que la intervención deliberada de un ser humano es el obstáculo que me impide hacer esto o aquello, de perseguir mis deseos reales o “potenciales”.
Existen todo tipo de factores naturales –físicos y psicológicos– que evitan que un hombre haga lo que desea hacer, o que desee como alguien más desea o podría desear. Pero, por regla, no se considera que estos obstáculos sean objeto directo de la acción política, ni asunto de principios políticos, pues la política tiene que ver con medidas intencionales llevadas a cabo por seres humanos conscientes, preocupados por el grado de interferencia que se les permite ejercer a los unos sobre la vida de otros. Y cuando se dice que surgen obstáculos sociológicos –por ejemplo, la influencia de la educación o del ambiente social sobre el desarrollo de un hombre, que se afirma que lo frustran o mutilan de alguna manera–, no estamos del todo seguros si la frustración resultante es o no una privación de la libertad en el sentido que viene al caso.
No tenemos la certeza porque no estamos tan convencidos de los hechos de causalidad sociológica como lo estamos de los psicológicos o fisiológicos, por no mencionar la causalidad física. Y, por lo tanto, no sabemos bien a bien si considerar esa frustración como debida a causas naturales –no a actos humanos, sino lo que en la ley se llama “fuerza mayor”, por la que no puede culparse a nadie– y, por lo tanto, no se trata en absoluto de un caso de esclavitud u opresión en el sentido político, o debido a un comportamiento de los seres humanos que se puede prever, y por lo tanto, un caso de clara privación de la libertad por parte de alguien a manos de alguien más, en el sentido en que se espera que sus defensores luchen por ella, y de vez en cuando la garanticen.
Casos semejantes –como cuando dudamos en culpar a un individuo o a un grupo de personas por actuar de manera despótica, porque pudieron evitar comportarse así; o, por el contrario, no culparlos, ni calificar de déspota su comportamiento, porque están “socialmente condicionados” y por lo tanto no pudieron “evitarlo”–, nos hacen sentir una especie de cualidad limítrofe. Y esto en sí mismo indica que la palabra “libertad” tiene un sentido distinto en ambos casos, de los cuales el caso limítrofe forma una instancia de puente: tiene algo en común con ambos, y resulta desconcertante y problemático porque no pertenece con suficiente claridad a ninguno de los dos.
En su sentido político y no metafórico, libertad significa la ausencia de interferencia por parte de otros, y la libertad civil define el área de la cual la interferencia de otros ha sido excluida por la ley o por un código de comportamiento, ya sea “natural” o “positivo”, dependiendo de cómo se conciba la ley o el código en cuestión. Esto puede ilustrarse de manera más amplia tomando los usos de la palabra “liberación” que se consideran correctos, pero un poco ambiguos en cuanto a su fuerza: por ejemplo, la celebrada frase “libertad económica”. Lo que querían decir quienes la acuñaron es que la concesión de libertades políticas o civiles –es decir, el hecho de levantar todas las restricciones a cierto tipo de actividad en cuanto concierne a la interferencia legal– servía de poco a quienes no contaban con los recursos económicos suficientes para hacer uso de tal libertad. Quizá no exista ninguna prohibición acerca de la cantidad de comida que puede comprar un hombre, pero si no tiene recursos materiales, esa “liberación” le resulta inútil, y decirle que es libre de comprar cuanta comida quiera es burlarse de su indigencia.
A veces se dice que semejante libertad “carece de sentido”, si la persona a quien le pertenece es demasiado pobre o demasiado débil para ejercerla. Y, sin embargo, quienes abogan por la libertad política sienten que existe cierto grado de injusticia en este argumento: el hecho de que la ley no prohíba comprar una cantidad ilimitada de comida, por ejemplo, es, según afirman algunos de ellos, una libertad genuina cuya suspensión constituiría un serio revés para el progreso humano. El hecho de que los pobres no puedan beneficiarse de esta “liberación” es análogo al hecho de que un sordomudo no pueda sacar gran ventaja del derecho a la libertad de expresión o del derecho a la libertad de reunión. Un derecho es un derecho, y la libertad es la libertad, independientemente de quienes puedan o no estar en la posición de hacer uso de ambos. Y, sin embargo, se percibe que quienes hablan de libertad económica señalan un defecto genuino en una organización social que hace que los bienes materiales estén disponibles, en teoría, para aquellos que, en la práctica, no pueden adquirirlos. Señalan que esas personas son tan libres para beneficiarse de las libertades económicas como el propio Tántalo quien, rodeado de un mar infinito, es libre de beber toda el agua salada que quiera, porque no existe ningún estatuto que se lo prohíba.
Pero quizás este dilema, como muchos otros argumentos donde ambos bandos sienten que dicen algo verdadero pero mutuamente incompatible, recibe su característica de paradoja de la inevitable –y no siempre deseable– vaguedad y ambigüedad de las palabras. La mera incapacidad de hacer uso de algo que los demás no evitan que uno use –digamos un defecto biológico o mental por parte del supuesto usuario, o la incapacidad de alcanzarlo debido a alguna razón física o geográfica– ciertamente no se considera, como tal y en sí misma, una forma de falta de libertad o de “esclavitud”. Y si las reclamaciones sobre la ausencia de libertad económica fueran simples lamentos, en el sentido de que algunas personas dentro de la sociedad son, de hecho, insuficientemente ricas para obtener todo lo que necesitan –a pesar del hecho de que se puede obtener legalmente–, eso no diferiría, en principio, de las reclamaciones sobre otras incapacidades. Describirlo como ausencia de libertad sería tan absurdo como decir que tener sólo dos ojos eo ipso constituye una ausencia de libertad para tener tres ojos o un millón de ojos, lo cual –después de todo– la ley no lo prohíbe.
La admisibilidad real de la carga que el término “libertad económica” debe conllevar se deriva del hecho de que implica –sin afirmarlo siempre de manera explícita– que la incapacidad económica de los pobres no se debe meramente a factores naturales, ni a factores psicológicos o sociales “inevitables”, sino a la actividad –si no deliberada por lo menos evitable, una vez que se la atiende– por parte de individuos, clases o instituciones específicas. El pensamiento que subyace en ello es que los ricos son dueños de una porción demasiado grande de las posesiones totales de la sociedad. Ésta es la razón de que los pobres tengan tan poco y, por lo tanto, de que no puedan hacer uso de leyes que de hecho benefician sólo a los ricos.
La implicación es que los ricos pueden actuar de manera voluntaria, o pueden ser forzados a actuar, de modo tal que dejen de despojar a los pobres de los recursos que necesitan y que querrían poseer si supieran que los necesitan, y que, según los paladines de la libertad económica, obtendrían en una sociedad que fuera más justa, es decir, en una sociedad administrada de manera distinta por quienes la organizan, aunque no en una sociedad que necesariamente fuera distinta física o psicológicamente, o diferente en cualquier otro aspecto natural de la sociedad actual, que es menos justa. Lo que le da fuerza a la palabra “libertad” en la frase “libertad económica” no es que establezca una exigencia para una capacidad faltante en materia de acción, sino que indica que alguien ha despojado a alguien más de algo que le pertenece por derecho. Si se la interpreta de manera totalmente explícita, en este contexto la expresión “le pertenece” significa por lo menos que la persona o personas así despojadas pueden describirse como personas que han sufrido alguna interferencia, que han sido despojadas, se han visto menoscabadas, en el sentido en que un hombre fuerte interfiere con uno débil, o en que un ladrón despoja a su víctima.
De esta forma, “libertad” denota por lo general la ausencia de una coerción positiva, o la presencia de una restricción negativa, por parte de un grupo de seres humanos hacia otro. Los alegatos o reclamaciones de libertad a menudo se refieren a la clase particular de coerción o de restricción que, en las circunstancias específicas en cuestión, se dan para evitar que los hombres sean o actúen u obtengan algo que en ese momento desean con fervor, y cuya carencia –para bien o para mal– atribuyen al comportamiento prevenible de otros.
Ciertamente éste es el sentido clásico de palabras como “libertad” y “liberación”, en las que se denotaron los principios o “causas” en cuyo nombre –desde los albores de la civilización occidental–, los Estados, las comunidades y las Iglesias han luchado por conservar ciertas formas de organización contra la interferencia que proviene del exterior, no importa cuánto hayan creído en interferir en las vidas de los individuos dentro de tales conjuntos organizados; y, a su vez, los individuos han luchado contra la interferencia por parte de otros individuos o cuerpos, dentro o fuera de su propia comunidad, en un intento por retener, volver a ganar o ampliar el área en la que podían cumplir sus propios deseos, sin una oposición efectiva por parte de otros individuos.
La liberación es, en primera instancia, libertad contra algo; la libertad es libertad de algo. Al analizarlo, resulta que la libertad para hacer esto o aquello significa libertad respecto de las restricciones, libertad contra individuos que buscan interferir –el despejar un área contra la presión exterior–, implicando, pero no afirmando, el elemento positivo correspondiente: la existencia de deseos, ideales, políticas por parte de los seres humanos, todo lo cual no puede llevarse a cabo a menos que se cumplan las condiciones negativas necesarias para que se realicen, a menos que, de hecho, los seres humanos sean “libres” en su funcionamiento. […]
La libertad es un ideal sólo mientras está amenazado. Al igual que la guerra y la ciencia económica, su propósito esencial debería ser abolir las condiciones que lo hacen necesario. En una sociedad ideal, ésta no sería conciente de su necesidad de libertad. Porque la libertad es una mera garantía contra la interferencia, y la necesidad de tener garantías sólo se siente donde existe la conciencia de esos peligros, para evitar aquello que los promueve. La lucha por la libertad es la lucha por crear una situación en que su nombre mismo se olvide. Pero éste es un estado ideal de las cosas, y muy pocos de los pensadores cuerdos, empíricos –de los cuales descienden en gran medida los liberales que los sucedieron– quisieron suponer que era algo que se pudiera obtener por completo en la práctica, en el sentido en el que los verdaderos anarquistas –Godwin y Fourier; Stirner y Bakunin, y quizá, a veces, Condorcet– lo consideraron una posibilidad completamente práctica, factible, que sólo necesitaba ajustar algunos de los fundamentos sociales para llevarse a cabo. Por esa razón se los relega justamente a la categoría de visionarios, maniáticos y excéntricos, a menudo talentosos y fascinantes, a veces profundamente influyentes, pero siempre demostrablemente trastornados. […]
Ya sea que estén concebidos en los términos casi mitológicos de los auténticos creyentes en los derechos naturales –como Paine y Condorcet, y algunos otros, en todo caso, que se encuentran entre los padres fundadores tanto de la República Francesa como de la estadounidense, o en formas más positivistas o empíricas, como lo hicieron Hume o Bentham o Mill, o dentro de la curiosa zona intermedia entre ambos, en la que algunos de los abogados y escritores constitucionales de la democracia parecían haber pensado–, para los liberales la noción de libertad sigue siendo no una meta positiva, como lo son el placer o el conocimiento, o la beatitud que buscan los sabios de Oriente o los santos de Occidente. Tampoco es una meta positiva como los deberes de Kant o los estados aprobados de mente y cuerpo de Hume. Sólo es el medio que debe emplearse para evitar que se frustren estas metas positivas: los hábitos políticos, con leyes para apuntalarlos contra fallas en casos individuales, que hacen posible el cumplimiento del propósito favorecido.
Ser libre es no estar obstruido, es ser capaz de hacer lo que uno quiera hacer. Ser absolutamente libre es encontrarse en un estado donde nada puede oponerse a los deseos de uno: ser omnipotente. Ser absolutamente libre, en el sentido social normal, o en el sentido político de la palabra, tanto en la vida privada como en la pública, es no estar obstruido en los propios deseos por otro ser humano. Ser relativamente libre, en el sentido en que lo afirma Mill, es no estar obstruido dentro de ciertos límites precisamente establecidos, o más o menos concebidos con vaguedad. La libertad no es una palabra que denote un fin humano, sino un término para designar la ausencia de obstáculos –en particular, obstáculos que resultan de la acción humana para la realización de cualesquiera fines que los hombres puedan perseguir–. Y la lucha por la libertad, al igual que la lucha por la justicia, es una pugna, no por un fin positivo, sino por condiciones en que puedan llevarse a cabo esos fines positivos: es despejar un espacio que, sin los fines que vale la pena perseguir en sí mismos, permanecería vacío. ~
Extraído de Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: The Rise and Influence of Modern Thought, de Isaiah Berlin, editado por Henry Hardy, con una introducción de Joshua L. Cherniss (Londres, 2006, Chatto and Windus, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006). © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2006. Traducción de Laura Emilia Pacheco
INSTRUCCIONES DE TRABAJO
Este trabajo busca presentar a los alumnos el tema de la lectura de textos, fundamental para su formación universitaria.
1.- Los y las estudiantes, en los grupos que se organizarán la primera clase del semestre, deberán reunirse con el profesor (los del martes, el martes 26 en la mañana entre 8:00 y 10:00; los del viernes, el viernes 29 desde las 16:00) para que se resuelvan las dudas que el texto haya generado.
2.- Cada grupo deberá llevar, al menos, una interrogante que necesite ser resuelta por el profesor.
3.- Luego, en la siguiente clase, en la semana del 1 al 5 de septiembre, en clase normal se trabajará sobre el texto de Berlin.
ISAIAH BERLIN
Al igual que la mayoría de las palabras que han desempeñado un papel importante en la historia de la humanidad, los términos “libertad humana” y “liberación” conllevan múltiples significados. Sin embargo, parece haber uno que es nuclear, central, mínimo, común a las diversas acepciones de la palabra, y que significa “ausencia de restricciones”. Más específicamente, ausencia de coacción por parte de congéneres específicos o sin especificar. Hay sentidos en los que la palabra “libertad” no se utiliza de esa forma, en los que resulta natural hablar del libre movimiento de las extremidades humanas, o del libre juego de la imaginación, o de liberarse del dolor, o de liberarse de los obstáculos de la vida terrenal. Pero cuando hablamos de libertad política esos sentidos parecen casi metafóricos y, a menudo, el intento de hacerlos entrar en juego sólo ensombrece el asunto.
Las pugnas de individuos, grupos o comunidades por obtener libertad por lo general se conciben como intentos de individuos particulares por destruir o neutralizar el poder que, poseído o utilizado por algún otro individuo o grupo de personas, los limita para llevar a cabo sus propios deseos. Y el partido de la libertad, al contrario de quienes desean mantener algún tipo particular de autoridad –la de un monarca, la Iglesia, la aristocracia hereditaria, una compañía comercial, una asamblea soberana, un dictador, a veces disfrazados de agencias impersonales (“el Estado”, “la ley”, “la nación”), pero de hecho siempre conformadas por individuos, vivos o muertos– está compuesto por personas que se oponen a una forma de restricción existente o en ciernes. Ellos mismos pueden estar a favor de alguna otra forma específica de autoridad –digamos la de un cuerpo democrático, o una federación de unidades constituida de diversas formas–, pero no se los describe como amigos de la libertad en virtud de su apoyo a la forma de autoridad que favorecen. Aunque se han atribuido muchos significados a las palabras “libertad”, “libertario”, “liberal”, siempre tendrán una mayor o menor connotación de resistencia a lo que interfiere por parte de alguien –una persona o personas, y no cosas o circunstancias– en condiciones más o menos específicas. Éste parece ser el sentido básico de la palabra “libertad” usada como término político, y el sentido en el que la esgrimen todos sus grandes paladines, en el pensamiento y en la acción, en nombre tanto de naciones como de individuos, desde Moisés y Leónidas hasta nuestros días.
En épocas modernas, la fórmula clásica del ideal de libertad es fruto del pensamiento del siglo XVIII, y culmina en las celebradas formulaciones que de ella se hacen en la Declaración de Independencia de Estados Unidos, y de los Derechos del Hombre y del Ciudadano de la Primera República Francesa. Estos documentos hablan de derechos y, al hacerlo, se refieren a la invasión de ciertas áreas de la existencia –digamos aquellas que el hombre necesita a fin de asegurar la vida y oportunidades idóneas de felicidad; o para ser capaz de poseer una propiedad, o para pensar y hablar como lo desee, o para obtener empleo, o para participar en la vida política y social de su comunidad– y pretenden que la invasión de tales parcelas vitales se considere prohibida por la ley. En este sentido, la ley es un instrumento para prevenir usurpaciones específicas, o para castigarlas, si ocurren.
Por tanto, la libertad política es un concepto negativo: exigirla es exigir que dentro de cierta esfera a un hombre no se le prohíba hacer lo que desee, es decir, que no se le prohíba hacerlo, independientemente de que sea capaz de llevarlo a cabo o no. A un lisiado no se le prohíbe caminar erguido, aunque de hecho no pueda hacerlo. A un hombre sano tampoco se le prohíbe volar a la luna aunque, de hecho, no esté en posición de hacerlo. Sin embargo, no decimos que un hombre no es libre de volar a la luna, ni decimos que un lisiado no es libre de caminar erguido. Se han hecho esfuerzos para hablar de esta manera: se ha igualado libertad con poder. Por ejemplo, el sentido en que se dice que la ciencia hace libres a los hombres es precisamente en el sentido de que incrementa sus capacidades técnicas para sobreponerse a los obstáculos que opone la naturaleza, y también, hasta cierto punto, para desarrollar su imaginación hasta que conciba opciones que sean más realizables que las de su ignorancia o incapacidad mental previas, o lo que su así llamado estrecho horizonte mental, le habían permitido practicar hasta entonces.
Pero aunque estos usos de la palabra “libertad” son razonablemente familiares y claros, parecen, y con razón, algo metafóricos: el hecho de que yo no sea capaz de pensar en las distintas maneras de disfrutar que se le ocurren a una persona más imaginativa que yo, no hace que yo no sea libre, en el sentido en que se diría de una persona que me encierra en una habitación para evitar que yo obtenga una satisfacción que anhelo. Si soy incapaz de deshacerme de algún encaprichamiento obstinado o de una idée fixe, que me hace olvidar el mundo entero en la búsqueda frenética de un objetivo que me obsesiona, se me puede describir, sin duda, como “esclavo” de mis pasiones. Pero no soy un esclavo en el sentido literal de la palabra, y nadie me considerará un esclavo en el sentido en que el Tío Tom era esclavo de Simon Legree.
Ciertamente ambos casos tienen algo en común: hay algo que no estoy haciendo, y que podría hacer o haber hecho, pero el sentido básico o literal de la palabra “liberación” y de la palabra “libertad” parece asociarse a que la intervención deliberada de un ser humano es el obstáculo que me impide hacer esto o aquello, de perseguir mis deseos reales o “potenciales”.
Existen todo tipo de factores naturales –físicos y psicológicos– que evitan que un hombre haga lo que desea hacer, o que desee como alguien más desea o podría desear. Pero, por regla, no se considera que estos obstáculos sean objeto directo de la acción política, ni asunto de principios políticos, pues la política tiene que ver con medidas intencionales llevadas a cabo por seres humanos conscientes, preocupados por el grado de interferencia que se les permite ejercer a los unos sobre la vida de otros. Y cuando se dice que surgen obstáculos sociológicos –por ejemplo, la influencia de la educación o del ambiente social sobre el desarrollo de un hombre, que se afirma que lo frustran o mutilan de alguna manera–, no estamos del todo seguros si la frustración resultante es o no una privación de la libertad en el sentido que viene al caso.
No tenemos la certeza porque no estamos tan convencidos de los hechos de causalidad sociológica como lo estamos de los psicológicos o fisiológicos, por no mencionar la causalidad física. Y, por lo tanto, no sabemos bien a bien si considerar esa frustración como debida a causas naturales –no a actos humanos, sino lo que en la ley se llama “fuerza mayor”, por la que no puede culparse a nadie– y, por lo tanto, no se trata en absoluto de un caso de esclavitud u opresión en el sentido político, o debido a un comportamiento de los seres humanos que se puede prever, y por lo tanto, un caso de clara privación de la libertad por parte de alguien a manos de alguien más, en el sentido en que se espera que sus defensores luchen por ella, y de vez en cuando la garanticen.
Casos semejantes –como cuando dudamos en culpar a un individuo o a un grupo de personas por actuar de manera despótica, porque pudieron evitar comportarse así; o, por el contrario, no culparlos, ni calificar de déspota su comportamiento, porque están “socialmente condicionados” y por lo tanto no pudieron “evitarlo”–, nos hacen sentir una especie de cualidad limítrofe. Y esto en sí mismo indica que la palabra “libertad” tiene un sentido distinto en ambos casos, de los cuales el caso limítrofe forma una instancia de puente: tiene algo en común con ambos, y resulta desconcertante y problemático porque no pertenece con suficiente claridad a ninguno de los dos.
En su sentido político y no metafórico, libertad significa la ausencia de interferencia por parte de otros, y la libertad civil define el área de la cual la interferencia de otros ha sido excluida por la ley o por un código de comportamiento, ya sea “natural” o “positivo”, dependiendo de cómo se conciba la ley o el código en cuestión. Esto puede ilustrarse de manera más amplia tomando los usos de la palabra “liberación” que se consideran correctos, pero un poco ambiguos en cuanto a su fuerza: por ejemplo, la celebrada frase “libertad económica”. Lo que querían decir quienes la acuñaron es que la concesión de libertades políticas o civiles –es decir, el hecho de levantar todas las restricciones a cierto tipo de actividad en cuanto concierne a la interferencia legal– servía de poco a quienes no contaban con los recursos económicos suficientes para hacer uso de tal libertad. Quizá no exista ninguna prohibición acerca de la cantidad de comida que puede comprar un hombre, pero si no tiene recursos materiales, esa “liberación” le resulta inútil, y decirle que es libre de comprar cuanta comida quiera es burlarse de su indigencia.
A veces se dice que semejante libertad “carece de sentido”, si la persona a quien le pertenece es demasiado pobre o demasiado débil para ejercerla. Y, sin embargo, quienes abogan por la libertad política sienten que existe cierto grado de injusticia en este argumento: el hecho de que la ley no prohíba comprar una cantidad ilimitada de comida, por ejemplo, es, según afirman algunos de ellos, una libertad genuina cuya suspensión constituiría un serio revés para el progreso humano. El hecho de que los pobres no puedan beneficiarse de esta “liberación” es análogo al hecho de que un sordomudo no pueda sacar gran ventaja del derecho a la libertad de expresión o del derecho a la libertad de reunión. Un derecho es un derecho, y la libertad es la libertad, independientemente de quienes puedan o no estar en la posición de hacer uso de ambos. Y, sin embargo, se percibe que quienes hablan de libertad económica señalan un defecto genuino en una organización social que hace que los bienes materiales estén disponibles, en teoría, para aquellos que, en la práctica, no pueden adquirirlos. Señalan que esas personas son tan libres para beneficiarse de las libertades económicas como el propio Tántalo quien, rodeado de un mar infinito, es libre de beber toda el agua salada que quiera, porque no existe ningún estatuto que se lo prohíba.
Pero quizás este dilema, como muchos otros argumentos donde ambos bandos sienten que dicen algo verdadero pero mutuamente incompatible, recibe su característica de paradoja de la inevitable –y no siempre deseable– vaguedad y ambigüedad de las palabras. La mera incapacidad de hacer uso de algo que los demás no evitan que uno use –digamos un defecto biológico o mental por parte del supuesto usuario, o la incapacidad de alcanzarlo debido a alguna razón física o geográfica– ciertamente no se considera, como tal y en sí misma, una forma de falta de libertad o de “esclavitud”. Y si las reclamaciones sobre la ausencia de libertad económica fueran simples lamentos, en el sentido de que algunas personas dentro de la sociedad son, de hecho, insuficientemente ricas para obtener todo lo que necesitan –a pesar del hecho de que se puede obtener legalmente–, eso no diferiría, en principio, de las reclamaciones sobre otras incapacidades. Describirlo como ausencia de libertad sería tan absurdo como decir que tener sólo dos ojos eo ipso constituye una ausencia de libertad para tener tres ojos o un millón de ojos, lo cual –después de todo– la ley no lo prohíbe.
La admisibilidad real de la carga que el término “libertad económica” debe conllevar se deriva del hecho de que implica –sin afirmarlo siempre de manera explícita– que la incapacidad económica de los pobres no se debe meramente a factores naturales, ni a factores psicológicos o sociales “inevitables”, sino a la actividad –si no deliberada por lo menos evitable, una vez que se la atiende– por parte de individuos, clases o instituciones específicas. El pensamiento que subyace en ello es que los ricos son dueños de una porción demasiado grande de las posesiones totales de la sociedad. Ésta es la razón de que los pobres tengan tan poco y, por lo tanto, de que no puedan hacer uso de leyes que de hecho benefician sólo a los ricos.
La implicación es que los ricos pueden actuar de manera voluntaria, o pueden ser forzados a actuar, de modo tal que dejen de despojar a los pobres de los recursos que necesitan y que querrían poseer si supieran que los necesitan, y que, según los paladines de la libertad económica, obtendrían en una sociedad que fuera más justa, es decir, en una sociedad administrada de manera distinta por quienes la organizan, aunque no en una sociedad que necesariamente fuera distinta física o psicológicamente, o diferente en cualquier otro aspecto natural de la sociedad actual, que es menos justa. Lo que le da fuerza a la palabra “libertad” en la frase “libertad económica” no es que establezca una exigencia para una capacidad faltante en materia de acción, sino que indica que alguien ha despojado a alguien más de algo que le pertenece por derecho. Si se la interpreta de manera totalmente explícita, en este contexto la expresión “le pertenece” significa por lo menos que la persona o personas así despojadas pueden describirse como personas que han sufrido alguna interferencia, que han sido despojadas, se han visto menoscabadas, en el sentido en que un hombre fuerte interfiere con uno débil, o en que un ladrón despoja a su víctima.
De esta forma, “libertad” denota por lo general la ausencia de una coerción positiva, o la presencia de una restricción negativa, por parte de un grupo de seres humanos hacia otro. Los alegatos o reclamaciones de libertad a menudo se refieren a la clase particular de coerción o de restricción que, en las circunstancias específicas en cuestión, se dan para evitar que los hombres sean o actúen u obtengan algo que en ese momento desean con fervor, y cuya carencia –para bien o para mal– atribuyen al comportamiento prevenible de otros.
Ciertamente éste es el sentido clásico de palabras como “libertad” y “liberación”, en las que se denotaron los principios o “causas” en cuyo nombre –desde los albores de la civilización occidental–, los Estados, las comunidades y las Iglesias han luchado por conservar ciertas formas de organización contra la interferencia que proviene del exterior, no importa cuánto hayan creído en interferir en las vidas de los individuos dentro de tales conjuntos organizados; y, a su vez, los individuos han luchado contra la interferencia por parte de otros individuos o cuerpos, dentro o fuera de su propia comunidad, en un intento por retener, volver a ganar o ampliar el área en la que podían cumplir sus propios deseos, sin una oposición efectiva por parte de otros individuos.
La liberación es, en primera instancia, libertad contra algo; la libertad es libertad de algo. Al analizarlo, resulta que la libertad para hacer esto o aquello significa libertad respecto de las restricciones, libertad contra individuos que buscan interferir –el despejar un área contra la presión exterior–, implicando, pero no afirmando, el elemento positivo correspondiente: la existencia de deseos, ideales, políticas por parte de los seres humanos, todo lo cual no puede llevarse a cabo a menos que se cumplan las condiciones negativas necesarias para que se realicen, a menos que, de hecho, los seres humanos sean “libres” en su funcionamiento. […]
La libertad es un ideal sólo mientras está amenazado. Al igual que la guerra y la ciencia económica, su propósito esencial debería ser abolir las condiciones que lo hacen necesario. En una sociedad ideal, ésta no sería conciente de su necesidad de libertad. Porque la libertad es una mera garantía contra la interferencia, y la necesidad de tener garantías sólo se siente donde existe la conciencia de esos peligros, para evitar aquello que los promueve. La lucha por la libertad es la lucha por crear una situación en que su nombre mismo se olvide. Pero éste es un estado ideal de las cosas, y muy pocos de los pensadores cuerdos, empíricos –de los cuales descienden en gran medida los liberales que los sucedieron– quisieron suponer que era algo que se pudiera obtener por completo en la práctica, en el sentido en el que los verdaderos anarquistas –Godwin y Fourier; Stirner y Bakunin, y quizá, a veces, Condorcet– lo consideraron una posibilidad completamente práctica, factible, que sólo necesitaba ajustar algunos de los fundamentos sociales para llevarse a cabo. Por esa razón se los relega justamente a la categoría de visionarios, maniáticos y excéntricos, a menudo talentosos y fascinantes, a veces profundamente influyentes, pero siempre demostrablemente trastornados. […]
Ya sea que estén concebidos en los términos casi mitológicos de los auténticos creyentes en los derechos naturales –como Paine y Condorcet, y algunos otros, en todo caso, que se encuentran entre los padres fundadores tanto de la República Francesa como de la estadounidense, o en formas más positivistas o empíricas, como lo hicieron Hume o Bentham o Mill, o dentro de la curiosa zona intermedia entre ambos, en la que algunos de los abogados y escritores constitucionales de la democracia parecían haber pensado–, para los liberales la noción de libertad sigue siendo no una meta positiva, como lo son el placer o el conocimiento, o la beatitud que buscan los sabios de Oriente o los santos de Occidente. Tampoco es una meta positiva como los deberes de Kant o los estados aprobados de mente y cuerpo de Hume. Sólo es el medio que debe emplearse para evitar que se frustren estas metas positivas: los hábitos políticos, con leyes para apuntalarlos contra fallas en casos individuales, que hacen posible el cumplimiento del propósito favorecido.
Ser libre es no estar obstruido, es ser capaz de hacer lo que uno quiera hacer. Ser absolutamente libre es encontrarse en un estado donde nada puede oponerse a los deseos de uno: ser omnipotente. Ser absolutamente libre, en el sentido social normal, o en el sentido político de la palabra, tanto en la vida privada como en la pública, es no estar obstruido en los propios deseos por otro ser humano. Ser relativamente libre, en el sentido en que lo afirma Mill, es no estar obstruido dentro de ciertos límites precisamente establecidos, o más o menos concebidos con vaguedad. La libertad no es una palabra que denote un fin humano, sino un término para designar la ausencia de obstáculos –en particular, obstáculos que resultan de la acción humana para la realización de cualesquiera fines que los hombres puedan perseguir–. Y la lucha por la libertad, al igual que la lucha por la justicia, es una pugna, no por un fin positivo, sino por condiciones en que puedan llevarse a cabo esos fines positivos: es despejar un espacio que, sin los fines que vale la pena perseguir en sí mismos, permanecería vacío. ~
Extraído de Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: The Rise and Influence of Modern Thought, de Isaiah Berlin, editado por Henry Hardy, con una introducción de Joshua L. Cherniss (Londres, 2006, Chatto and Windus, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006). © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2006. Traducción de Laura Emilia Pacheco
INSTRUCCIONES DE TRABAJO
Este trabajo busca presentar a los alumnos el tema de la lectura de textos, fundamental para su formación universitaria.
1.- Los y las estudiantes, en los grupos que se organizarán la primera clase del semestre, deberán reunirse con el profesor (los del martes, el martes 26 en la mañana entre 8:00 y 10:00; los del viernes, el viernes 29 desde las 16:00) para que se resuelvan las dudas que el texto haya generado.
2.- Cada grupo deberá llevar, al menos, una interrogante que necesite ser resuelta por el profesor.
3.- Luego, en la siguiente clase, en la semana del 1 al 5 de septiembre, en clase normal se trabajará sobre el texto de Berlin.
viernes, 30 de mayo de 2008
TALLER DE DOCUMENTACIÓN
TRABAJO DE TALLER:
En grupos de máximo 5 personas contesten las siguientes preguntas:
1.- ¿Cuál es la relación entre orden, pensamiento y mundo en el texto de Borges?
2.- ¿Cuál sería en ese mundo de La Biblioteca un ejemplo de Sistema Mitico de Representaciones?
3.- ¿Cuál sería, en ese mundo, un ejemplo de un Sistema Científico de Representaciones?
4.- ¿Cuál es la relación de esa Biblioteca del cuento y el lenguaje?
DURANTE LAS CLASES EL PROFESOR ATENDERÁ TUTORÍAS DE ACUERDO A LAS NECESIDADES DE LOS ALUMNOS.
En grupos de máximo 5 personas contesten las siguientes preguntas:
1.- ¿Cuál es la relación entre orden, pensamiento y mundo en el texto de Borges?
2.- ¿Cuál sería en ese mundo de La Biblioteca un ejemplo de Sistema Mitico de Representaciones?
3.- ¿Cuál sería, en ese mundo, un ejemplo de un Sistema Científico de Representaciones?
4.- ¿Cuál es la relación de esa Biblioteca del cuento y el lenguaje?
DURANTE LAS CLASES EL PROFESOR ATENDERÁ TUTORÍAS DE ACUERDO A LAS NECESIDADES DE LOS ALUMNOS.
lunes, 12 de mayo de 2008
TALLER FINAL 2008 SEMIÓTICA
PUBLICIDAD, COMUNICACIÓN Y SEMIOTICA
Partiremos de la siguiente DEFINICIÓN DE PUBLICIDAD
“Sistema de comunicación por difusión que hace uso de todos los canales de mass media y que aplica un conjunto de técnicas de la psicología y la sociología con miras a un objetivo utilitario (generalmente la venta), contribuyendo con ello a la aceleración del circuito producción-consumo. (LEON ABRAMOWITCZ)
De esta definición, podemos extraer un conjunto de términos que vinculan a la publicidad con distintos ámbitos de la realidad y que son útiles para relacionar esta disciplina con su entorno socio – científico (Y EN ESTE ÚLTIMO ÁMBITO ESTARÁ LA SEMIÓTICA).
Veamos los componentes de la definición de ABRAMOWITCZ:
1.- DIFUSIÓN.CANALES.MASS MEDIA.-
Todo esto tiene que ver con la teoría funcionalista de la comunicación que viéramos como materia en Fundamentos de la Comunicación, esa perspectiva en la que el MENSAJE era un ESTÍMULO emitido por el EMISOR y que pretendía generar en el receptor, una RESPUESTA CONDUCTUAL.
2.- PSICOLOGÍA.-
Ciencia que estudia la conducta humana individual y sus fuentes internas en relación con el entorno.
3.- SOCIOLOGÍA.-
Ciencia que estudia los sistemas de organización de la sociedad.
4.- PRODUCCIÓN.-
La integración de las materias primas, los instrumentos, las formas de producción en el proceso de producir bienes económicos.
5.- CONSUMO.-
La apropiación de los objetos.
LA SEMIÓTICA TIENE QUE VER CON LOS DOS PRIMEROS Y EL ÚLTIMO (1, 2 y 5). CON LOS PRIMEROS PORQUE GENERA MENSAJES, QUE CIRCULAN POR LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN Y QUE INCIDEN EN LA SICOLOGÍA DE LOS MIEMBROS DE UNA SOCIEDAD. SI HABLAMOS DE CRECIÓN DE MENSAJES, ESTAREMOS EN EL CAMPO DE LA SEMIÓTICA.
Además, en el punto 5 se vincula la publicidad a la semiótica cuando vemos que LA PUBLICIDAD tiene por finalidad hacer que los sujetos CONSUMAN unos bienes, unos objetos o servicios. La PUBLICIDAD HACE CONSUMIR, ES DECIR NECESITAR LOS OBJETOS.
El papel de la publicidad consiste en (*) partir de los deseos o aspiraciones del individuo para provocar en él la necesidad, que satisfará mediante la compra, considerada como un acto agradable (gratificante) tranquilizante o liberador de ciertas inhibiciones. (**)La publicidad no es el lenguaje de la verdad, sino de lo verosímil... (LEON ABRAMOWITCZ)
Como vimos cuando tratamos el tema de los OBJETOS como signos, éstos se convierten en significantes que la publicidad carga de significados en su tarea de facilitar el curso del mercado, la compraventa de productos, esa finalidad última de convertir a un comprador de un producto o marca en un cliente de ese producto o marca.
A partir de los anterior, los alumnos –en grupos de máximo cinco integrantes- deberán realizar el siguiente ejercicio: Analizar un grupo de cinco páginas publicitarias de revistas (todas del mismo tema: licores, ropa deportiva, etc.) para determinar DE QUÉ MANERA SE HA CREADO EL OBJETO PUBLICITADO COMO SIGNO.
El taller se cumplirá con las siguientes tareas:
Lunes 19 de mayo Reunión de grupo con el profesor para presentar el material publicitario elegido.
Lunes 26 de mayo Reunión del grupo con el profesor para presentar la propuesta analítica que se plantea el grupo.
Lunes 2 de junio Reunión del grupo con el profesor para presentar un primer análisis. En la reunión se verá la exactitud del procedimiento empleado.
Lunes 9 de Junio Entrega del trabajo final.
EVALUACIÓN:
Los alumnos serán calificados sobre 10 por su asistencia y aportes a las reuniones, y el trabajo final será calificado sobre 20, como nota final.
En el horario de clases, los días miércoles atenderé en mi oficina cualquier tipo de consultas sobre la marcha de los trabajos.
Partiremos de la siguiente DEFINICIÓN DE PUBLICIDAD
“Sistema de comunicación por difusión que hace uso de todos los canales de mass media y que aplica un conjunto de técnicas de la psicología y la sociología con miras a un objetivo utilitario (generalmente la venta), contribuyendo con ello a la aceleración del circuito producción-consumo. (LEON ABRAMOWITCZ)
De esta definición, podemos extraer un conjunto de términos que vinculan a la publicidad con distintos ámbitos de la realidad y que son útiles para relacionar esta disciplina con su entorno socio – científico (Y EN ESTE ÚLTIMO ÁMBITO ESTARÁ LA SEMIÓTICA).
Veamos los componentes de la definición de ABRAMOWITCZ:
1.- DIFUSIÓN.CANALES.MASS MEDIA.-
Todo esto tiene que ver con la teoría funcionalista de la comunicación que viéramos como materia en Fundamentos de la Comunicación, esa perspectiva en la que el MENSAJE era un ESTÍMULO emitido por el EMISOR y que pretendía generar en el receptor, una RESPUESTA CONDUCTUAL.
2.- PSICOLOGÍA.-
Ciencia que estudia la conducta humana individual y sus fuentes internas en relación con el entorno.
3.- SOCIOLOGÍA.-
Ciencia que estudia los sistemas de organización de la sociedad.
4.- PRODUCCIÓN.-
La integración de las materias primas, los instrumentos, las formas de producción en el proceso de producir bienes económicos.
5.- CONSUMO.-
La apropiación de los objetos.
LA SEMIÓTICA TIENE QUE VER CON LOS DOS PRIMEROS Y EL ÚLTIMO (1, 2 y 5). CON LOS PRIMEROS PORQUE GENERA MENSAJES, QUE CIRCULAN POR LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN Y QUE INCIDEN EN LA SICOLOGÍA DE LOS MIEMBROS DE UNA SOCIEDAD. SI HABLAMOS DE CRECIÓN DE MENSAJES, ESTAREMOS EN EL CAMPO DE LA SEMIÓTICA.
Además, en el punto 5 se vincula la publicidad a la semiótica cuando vemos que LA PUBLICIDAD tiene por finalidad hacer que los sujetos CONSUMAN unos bienes, unos objetos o servicios. La PUBLICIDAD HACE CONSUMIR, ES DECIR NECESITAR LOS OBJETOS.
El papel de la publicidad consiste en (*) partir de los deseos o aspiraciones del individuo para provocar en él la necesidad, que satisfará mediante la compra, considerada como un acto agradable (gratificante) tranquilizante o liberador de ciertas inhibiciones. (**)La publicidad no es el lenguaje de la verdad, sino de lo verosímil... (LEON ABRAMOWITCZ)
Como vimos cuando tratamos el tema de los OBJETOS como signos, éstos se convierten en significantes que la publicidad carga de significados en su tarea de facilitar el curso del mercado, la compraventa de productos, esa finalidad última de convertir a un comprador de un producto o marca en un cliente de ese producto o marca.
A partir de los anterior, los alumnos –en grupos de máximo cinco integrantes- deberán realizar el siguiente ejercicio: Analizar un grupo de cinco páginas publicitarias de revistas (todas del mismo tema: licores, ropa deportiva, etc.) para determinar DE QUÉ MANERA SE HA CREADO EL OBJETO PUBLICITADO COMO SIGNO.
El taller se cumplirá con las siguientes tareas:
Lunes 19 de mayo Reunión de grupo con el profesor para presentar el material publicitario elegido.
Lunes 26 de mayo Reunión del grupo con el profesor para presentar la propuesta analítica que se plantea el grupo.
Lunes 2 de junio Reunión del grupo con el profesor para presentar un primer análisis. En la reunión se verá la exactitud del procedimiento empleado.
Lunes 9 de Junio Entrega del trabajo final.
EVALUACIÓN:
Los alumnos serán calificados sobre 10 por su asistencia y aportes a las reuniones, y el trabajo final será calificado sobre 20, como nota final.
En el horario de clases, los días miércoles atenderé en mi oficina cualquier tipo de consultas sobre la marcha de los trabajos.
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