Art is flirting with the aleatory, and with self-destruction. M. Baudrillard movingly evoked the caverns of Lascaux, or I could say Altamira. This came to an end on a specific date: it being rare that a great movement in history has a calendar date. It came on a late afternoon in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Tinguely, in front of a large crowd, having set up a splendid metal and partially Calderesque but very different structure of meaning, set fire to it and as it collapsed he said quite clearly, “Je ne veux pas durer”: I don’t want to last. And perhaps with that ended that which at Altamira and Lascaux had begun by saying, I want to last. Tinguely doesn’t want to last. It’s ephemeral. It’s collective. It’s anonymous. It’s a happening. It’s a moment. Because the desire to last is, at a central level, that of a very natural and often vulnerable artistic vanity. It is that of a link with a transcendent belief now no longer available. In this light, it is both uncertain and blinding. It is in the light of these changes that we must together try and redefine the word literacy, even though in only the most provisional, tentative way. Anything else would be arrogance.

The saturation of daily lives by electronic means of communication, of information storage and retrieval and learning methods, will inevitably comport increasing familiarity with the near mathematical and logically formal languages and sensibility. Never forget that your computer, wherever it is in the world, is speaking Victorian English; its structure is that of Boolean algebra, which is not the only algebra available. It could have been based on Indian algebraic thought, which is very different. It is speaking a kind of Esperanto with deep roots in the nineteenth-century English confidence in logic. Increasingly, orality, writing, and reading, as we have known them, will take on highly specialized functions, as did reading and writing throughout the ancient and medieval worlds. There is nothing new in this. We harbour the illusion that our literacy was an inevitable, natural, and ubiquitous form. It was not. There may again be what Rabbi Akiba, after the destruction of the temple, called “houses of reading” for people who actually know how to sit in silence and read a serious text without secondary sources of any kind.