Lingua ex Machina: Computer-Mediated Communication and the Tower of Babel

We’ve finally reversed the damage done by the Tower of Babel, and God, no doubt, is wondering what we’re going to do for an encore. ¹

The “Tower of Babel” (Genesis 11:1–9) provides an account of the plurality of languages as having issued from an original and apparently universal tongue. The first line of the fable reads: “And all the earth was one lip and there was one language to all.” This mythic loss of an original universality and the subsequent attempts to reestablish it by overcoming the confusio linguarum already constitute a kind of universal idiom: “The story of the confusion of tongues, and of the attempt to redeem its loss through the rediscovery or invention of a language common to all humanity, can be found in every culture.” ² The computer and the technologies of computer-mediated communication manifest the most recent version of this supposedly universal endeavor. According to numerous popular and technical discourses, the computer promises to supply a technological solution to the linguistic cacophony that has been the legacy of Babel. In this manner, computer technology participates in an old and apparently universal obsession, one that situates universality as both its origin and its purpose.

In this paper I will undertake an examination of the Babelian information that currently circulates through cyberculture and determines the general significance of networked computer systems. I will trace the origin and purpose of the desire for universal understandability, locate the computer within this tradition, and ask about the underlying assumptions and consequences of this procedure. My inquiry is directed toward not only computer technology per se, but also the various discourses that have reflected on and informed the meaning of this technology. In short, I attempt to understand the rather cacophonous babble concerning Babel as it has been deployed within the networks of computer-mediated communication. Whether this babble derives from and is reducible to a single and univocal meaning cannot be answered in advance—for this question constitutes the very issue that will be at stake in the “Tower of Babel.”

Introduction

In the popular mythology the computer is a mathematics machine; it is designed to do numerical calculations. Yet it is really a language machine; its fundamental power lies in its ability to manipulate linguistic tokens—symbols to which meaning has been assigned. ³

Although its taxonomy is derived from a mathematical concept, the computer is not primarily a computational apparatus. Its substance and genealogy have been determined to be otherwise. Michael Heim, the self-proclaimed metaphysician of cyberspace technology, traces the genesis of the computer to the universal-language movement: “Underneath the computer’s calculating power lies an inner core sprung from a seed planted two centuries ago. . . . That initial germ for the birth of computers started with the rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century who were passionate in their efforts to design a world language.” ⁴ Seventeenth-century Europe saw the development of several projects related to the creation of a universal idiom. In a 1657 publication, for example, Cave Beck proposed a Universal Character, by which all the nations of the world may understand one another’s conceptions, reading out of one common writing their own mother tongues. A similar pasigraphic endeavor was undertaken by Athanasius Kircher in the Polygraphia nova et universalis ex combinatoria arte detecta, which proposed a system of writing in which “all languages are reduced to one.” Five years earlier, Francis Lodwick published The Groundwork or Foundation Laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing, which proposed not only a universal idiom to which everyone would have equal access, but also a perfected language that was “capable of mirroring the true nature of objects.” ⁵ Similar systems were introduced in the Via lucis (1668) of Comenius, George Dalgarno’s Ars signorum (1661), and John Wilkins’s Essay toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668).

The seventeenth-century philosopher to whom the computer makes particular reference, however, is Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. According to Michael...