Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture

11. Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems

Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems Closure, Openness, and the Word 11 Studies in this book have treated the history of the word often, though not entirely, in tenus of sequestration, interposition, diaeresis or division, alienation, and closed fields or systems. The history of the word since its encounter and interaction with technology when the first writing systems were devised some six thousand years ago has been largely a matter of such separations and systems. By comparison with oral speech, writing is itself a closed system: a written text exists on its own, physically separate from any speaker or hearer, as no real spoken word can exist. Print creates a world even more spectacularly contained: every a in a font of type is exactly like every other; every copy of an edition matches every other. Closure is not the only result of writing and print, for writing and print also open and liberate. They give access not only to information otherwise inaccessible but also make possible new thought processes. Moreover, they also give rise to and interact with their own dialectical opposites. Today, it appears, we live in a culture or in cultures very much drawn to openness and in particular to open-system models for conceptual representations. This openness can be connected with our new kind of orality, the secondary orality of our electronic age, which both resembles and contrasts with primary or preliterate orality. This new kind of orality, secondary orality, has its own openness, but is itself dependent upon writing and print. As has been seen in Chapter 306 Present and Future 3, writing and print inevitably make possible the world which transforms them. If they still retain their diaeretic, closed-field thrust, they do so differently from before, within a dialectically opposed, more open, noetic economy which is nevertheless dependent on them and their closures. A system in actuality is always only relatively closed: a group of interrelated elements which interact with one another in a pattern which is relatively stable and relatively free or resistant to outside interference. Paul A. Weiss puts it this way: "Pragmatically defined, a system is a rather circumscribed complex of relatively bounded phenomena, which, within those bounds, retains a relatively stationary pattern or structure in space or sequential configuration in time in spite of a high degree of variability in the details of distribution and interrelations among its constituent units of lower order."l The "rather" and the "relatively" are essential, as Professor Weiss here and elsewhere makes clear, and as others have made equally clear. A completely closed system, physical or biological or psychological or noetic, is impossible. We have become increasingly sensitive to this fact today, both with regard to language and with regard to existence as a whole. We live in an age which quite widely favors open-system thinking, at least in principle, with some of the same fervor with which earlier chirographic and typographic cultures championed closed-system thinking. At least, this is true in the Free World, for the state of consciousness in the Communist countries and in many others still inhibits any wide use of many open-system models which the Free World finds nonthreatening. 1. See Paul A. Weiss, "The Living System: Determinism Stratified," in The Alpbach Symposium 1968: Beyond Reductionism-New Perspectives in Life Sciences, ed. Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies (New York: Macmillan , 1967), pp. 3-55; the definition here quoted is on pp. 11-12. For a sweeping overview of the whole matter of systems, see Anthony Wilden, System and Structure : Essays in Communication and Exchange (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972 ); for social implications, see Dante Germino and Klaus Van Beyme, eds., The Open Society in Theory and Practice (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), in which seventeen political theorists from nine countries treat the question of openness. Voice and Opening Closed Systems 307 The reasons for change to an open-system mentality are comp1e ~ and in assessing the cultural developments associated with the change it is often difficult to distinguish cause from effect. Interconnections are bewildering. Here an attempt will be made to give a brief account of some of the interconnections by examining the present inclination or drive to open-system models throughout society, especially in the West but also to some extent across the world, in terms of the technological history of the word. It should be emphasized that what is said here is only a part of all that could be said to describe and...