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The present fear in the bookish classes that formal reasoning
is a thing of the past comes not from its imagined eclipse but from our
halting efforts to democratize it. We need to process information faster
and to express it in a more immediately intuitive way. What else can the
wide pattern of “puns” we have discussed reflect but an intense
pressure to compress meaning, multiplex its signal so as to deliver it
faster and more powerfully? We need to use the human brain more efficiently.
We need to find new shapes for traditional arguments and shapes for new
kinds of arguments. We need to develop a notation which allows us to move
from Stuff to What we Think about Stuff more easily than print permits.
To develop it, we will have to embrace a traditional enemy, stylistic
self-consciousness.
The great Hellenist Eric Havelock, in a series of essays
on the Greek alphabet, isolated this enemy. He argued that the Greek alphabet
was simple enough to learn in early youth and totally internalize. It
became transparent; you looked right through it to the conceptual arguments
it could be employed to set forth. The letters had no visual content themselves.
They did not give you pause for a moment, have any calligraphic power,
make you think about them as shapes.
It is a sign of the arrival of modern scientific and socialized
man that calligraphy as an art form has largely expired. This is a welcome
development. . . . A successful or developed writing system is one which
does not think at all. It should be the purely passive instrument of the
spoken word even if, to use a paradox, the word is spoken silently.
Kinetic text does what Havelock deplored. It creates an
alphabet which thinks. It has resurrected a new and complex form
of calligraphy, of notation which is to be noticed for surface form as
well as content beneath. It brings back together the world of stuff and
what we think about stuff.
There has always been, as we’ve seen, an alphabet
which thinks. It was there from the beginning as hieroglyphics, cuneiform,
shape poems, and, more recently, shaped prose. It appears as animated
alphabets. It appears in medieval manuscript illumination, as fiendishly
complex Latin verbal and imagistic poetic puns called technopaegnia,
and in “art prose” of all kinds, prose that is meant to be
noticed as such, Kunstprosa as the Germans call it. It appears
in later forms, as “poésie concrète,” and French
“lettrisme” and as livres d’artiste, books
designed by artists which grant primacy to image rather than letter. And
such books had appeared earlier.
We have long thought this mixed operatic writing an inconsequential
vagary, an unfortunate remnant of primitive notation. What suppressed
the agenda of these “alphabets which think” was the triumph
of black and white print. Everything that did not build toward this triumph—not
fully realized, we might remember, until the invention of the rotary press
in the nineteenth century—had no real part in the story of human
expressivity. Now an “alphabet which can think” has returned
as a genuine alternative to the transparent medium of print. Only now
can we see how accurate Havelock was in describing it as a threat to that
transparent medium.
Print has striven for purely through vision. So
Beatrice Warde’s argument for a crystal goblet. So we have all been
taught that the best style, for anything from writing to clothes and cars,
is the style which is never noticed. A potent showcase but never the show.
Since electronic expression invites us to look both at and through
and in continual oscillation, since it writes in an “alphabet which
thinks,” it requires a more capacious theory of communication than
we operate under at present. To that theory we now turn.
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