DOES WRITING HAVE A FUTURE?

Electronic Mediations
Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster,
and Samuel Weber, Series Editors

33. Does Writing Have a Future? Vilém Flusser

32. Into the Universe of Technical Images Vilém Flusser

31 . Hypertext and the Female Imaginary Jaishree K. Odin

30 . Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art Kate Mondloch

29. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter

28 . Tactical Media Rita Raley

27 . Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the

Political Philip Armstrong

26. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds

Timothy Murray

25 . Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path

Terry Harpold

24 . Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why

We Need Open Access Now Gary Hall

23 . Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet Lisa

Nakamura

(continued on page 180)

Does Writing
Have a Future?
Vilém Flusser
Introduction by Mark Poster
Translated by Nancy Ann Roth

Electronic Mediations
volume 33

University of Minnesota Press

minneapolis . london
Originally published as Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?
Copyright 1987 European Photography, Andreas Müller-
Pohle, P. O. Box 08 02 27, D-10002 Berlin, Germany, www.
equivalence.com. Edition Flusser, Volume V (20025).

Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flusser, Vilém, 1920–1991.

[Schrift. English]
Does writing have a future? / Vilém Flusser ; introduction by
Mark Poster ; translated by Nancy Ann Roth.
p. cm. — (Electronic mediations ; v. 33)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7022-2 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7023-9 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Writing—Philosophy. 2. Written communication. I. Poster,
Mark. II. Title.
P211.F68 2011
302.2'244—dc22
2010030719

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator

and employer.

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 For Abraham Moles,
who discovered and began to research writing
after writing.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
An Introduction to Vilém Flusser’s Into the Universe
of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future?
Mark Poster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Does Writing Have a Future?

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Superscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Inscriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Letters of the Alphabet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Print. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Spoken Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Ways of Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Deciphering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Newspapers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Stationeries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Desks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Scripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
The Digital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Recoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Subscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

Afterword to the Second Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Translator’s Afterword and Acknowledgments . . . . . . . 165
Translator’s Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
This page intentionally left blank
An Introduction to Vilém Flusser’s
Into the Universe of Technical Images
and Does Writing Have a Future?
Mark Poster

Vilém Flusser remains relatively unknown to readers of critical

theory, cultural studies, and media studies, particularly among
readers of English. Given this, the Electronic Mediations series of
the University of Minnesota Press herewith publishes in English
translation two of his most important works, Does Writing Have a
Future? and Into the Universe of Technical Images, both translated
by Nancy Ann Roth. We trust that these publications, in addition
to those already available from this and other presses, will bring
Flusser’s ideas to a wider English audience. Flusser ought not to
require an introduction such as I provide because his work is cru-
cial to a world saturated by a culture highly dependent on media.
The production, reproduction, consumption, dissemination, and
storage of texts, images, and sounds increasingly rely on electronic
devices, almost always nowadays in a digital format. The immense
implication of the dramatic spread of media in everyday life is
beginning to dawn on most of us. Yet much remains to be done in
theorizing information media and studying it empirically.
Many obstacles stand in the way of fresh thinking about media.
Media are surely central to Western societies of the past several
centuries and to the emerging global societies of the contempo-
rary era and the future. There is a thickening, intensification, and

ix
x ✴ introduction
increasing complexity to the use of information machines, technolo-
gies that are necessary in the production, reproduction, storage,
and distribution of texts, images, and sounds—the constituent
elements of culture. This phenomenon has been termed a “media
ecology,”1 adding a new layer to the ecologies of animal, vegetable,
and mineral. It behooves anyone engaged in critical discourse to
take serious account of media. I argue that media offer a key to
understanding the process of globalization in relation to a new
configuration of interaction between humans and machines.
Media are not easy to define, and one’s approach to them af-
fects considerably the character and limits of one’s discourse. All
too often, media are generalized and made transcendent, as in the
characteristic gesture of Western theory in which humans are tool-
making animals, enjoying the benefits of their tools “for the relief
of man’s estate,” as Francis Bacon put it a half millennium ago.2
Descartes provided the metaphysics to Bacon’s utopian imaginings:
humans are spirit, subjects for whom material workings, includ-
ing of the human body, comprise little more than inert matter to
be shaped and fashioned for human betterment. This ontology
oscillates between praising the freedom of the human mind and
cringing with anxiety at the possibility of its diminution should
these external objects rise up and threaten it. The name for this
threat is technological determinism, so poignantly portrayed by
Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times.
Another problematic aspect of the Western figure of the tool-
making animal is the confounding of media with technology.
Machines that process texts, images, and sounds, I contend, are
significantly distinct from machines that act on materials like wood
and iron. However important these mechanical machines are,
they are very different and have very different implications from
information machines. Media machines act on the components
of culture, not nature (if that distinction may still be employed),
affecting human beings in a way very different from mechanical
 introduction ✴ xi
machines. One might say that information machines are closer to
humans than mechanical machines and establish relations with
them that are more profound.
It is urgent to rid critical discourse of the older framework of
tool-making creatures and seek openings to the comprehension
of the relation of humans to information machines, openings that
promise alternatives to the binary of freedom and determinism.
Such frameworks would need to acknowledge the logics of both
the human and the machine as well as the logics of their various
and multiple interactions. They would account for the interface
between the two as well as the extension of their interactions across
the planet, often violating political and cultural boundaries and
forming new domains of politics and culture. These are the weighty
issues raised by the simple term media. One theorist who braved
these paths was Vilém Flusser.
Vilém Flusser can be compared to Marshall McLuhan and
Jean Baudrillard. Similar to McLuhan, Flusser takes media seri-
ously, and as does Baudrillard, he discerns the impact of media
on culture. Like both McLuhan and Baudrillard, Flusser theorized
media culture well before many other cultural theorists thought
seriously about it. (There are certainly some notable exceptions:
Walter Benjamin, Harold Innis, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger
come immediately to mind.) Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan,
Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, Ernesto
Laclau, Homi K. Bhabha, and Judith Butler—the list could be ex-
tended considerably of major theorists from the 1970s onward who
either paid no attention at all to the vast changes in media culture
taking place under their noses or who commented on the media
only as a tool that amplified other institutions like capitalism or
representative democracy. Against this group of thinkers, Flusser
stands out, with only a handful of others, as one who presciently
and insightfully deciphered the codes of materiality disseminated
under the apparatuses of the media.
xii ✴ introduction
Perhaps one reason for the relative lack of attention to media by
cultural theorists was the polemical antics of McLuhan, Baudril-
lard, and Flusser. The Canadian, the Frenchman, and the Czech all
reveled in poking fun at those who failed to see the importance of
media. Like McLuhan, Flusser repeatedly hailed the end of print
and the onset of the age of images. He opens his book on writing,
for example, with the following: “Writing, in the sense of placing
letters and other marks one after another, appears to have little or
no future.”3 Just as McLuhan pronounced the end of the “Gutenberg
Galaxy,” so Flusser proclaimed the end of writing. Neither would
appeal much to a theoretical world that was discovering the impor-
tance of language, writing, and so forth. And in a mental habitus of
scorn for popular culture, all three took seriously the importance
of television (McLuhan), style (Baudrillard), and popularizing and
extending symbolic exchanges on the global network (Flusser). One
might say the importance of their work rests not so much with their
insight into the phenomena of electronic media but with the simple
and more basic fact that they paid attention to it at all.
Characteristic criticism of Flusser is found in an essay by
Friedrich Kittler. Kittler objects to the sharp distinction drawn by
McLuhan and Flusser between print and images:

Media theorists, specifically Marshall McLuhan and, succeed-

ing him, Vilem Flusser, draw an absolute distinction between
writing and the image that ultimately rests on concepts of
geometry. They contrast the linearity or one-dimensionality
of printed books with the irreducible two-dimensionality of
images. Simplified in this manner, it is a distinction that may
hold true even when computer technology can model texts
as strings, as it does today. But it suppresses the simple facts
emphasized long ago and, not coincidentally, by a nouveau
romancier, Michel Butor: the books used most often—the
Bible, once upon a time, and today more likely the telephone
book—are certainly not read in a linear manner.4
 introduction ✴ xiii
Kittler’s critique of the binary print–image serves a cautionary
role against overgeneralization but does not grapple with the basic
issue of media specificity and its cultural implications. His critique
is somewhat puzzling given his Foucauldian, historical approach to
media, in which “discourse networks” are defined by epochs and
are accordingly decidedly different from one another.5
One area of Flusser’s media theory that deserves special atten-
tion is the connection he drew between writing and history and
the implications of this analysis for a concept of temporality. In his
discussions of media and history, Flusser—one might say without
exaggeration—denaturalizes temporality with a systematicity not
seen perhaps since Vico.6 Flusser first argues that history is not
possible without writing:

With the invention of writing, history begins, not because

writing keeps a firm hold on processes, but because it trans-
forms scenes into processes: it generates historical con-
sciousness.7

In the relation Flusser draws between writing and history, media

practice already plays a central role in culture, in this case, as the
awareness of time as linear movement. But already for him, “writing”
performs the function of changing “scenes into processes.” Thereby
Flusser contrasts culture based on writing with culture based on
images. In contrast to Derrida, Flusser associates the institution
of writing not so much with a change in the form of memory (as
différance) but with resistance to images: “Greek philosophy and
Jewish prophecy are battle cries against images on behalf of texts.”8
Whereas for Derrida, the ancient Greeks at least focused on the
danger of writing in comparison to speech, Flusser’s binary of writ-
ing and images yields a different conclusion regarding the Greek
valuation of writing.
What becomes most salient for Flusser’s theory of media is the
consequence of writing for temporality. Flusser makes a great deal
xiv ✴ introduction
of the fact that writing is linear—that in this medium, one thing
inexorably comes after another. One cannot easily skip around in
a written text (i.e., until hypertext emerged with the digitization
of writing). Try as they might, theorists such as Roland Barthes
and writers from Laurence Sterne to Raymond Quéneau and the
Oulipo group have at best great difficulty in constructing texts that
allow or encourage the reader to find her own way through the
page.9 Flusser’s insistence on the linearity of writing, despite these
exceptions and demurrals, is convincing. He writes,

Linear codes demand a synchronization of their diachronic-

ity. They demand progressive reception. And the result is
a new experience of time, that is, linear time, a stream of
unstoppable progress, of dramatic unrepeatability, of fram-
ing, in short, history.10

It might be noted that for the most part, historians have tra-
ditionally sided with Flusser on the question of the relation of
history to writing but not usually for the same reasons. Historians
claim that without writing, there is no material, objective basis for
memory about the past; as Flusser says, writing keeps “a firm hold
on the past.” Put differently, Flusser distinguishes his argument
regarding the relation of writing to history from the argument of
historians as follows:

The difference between prehistory and history is not that we

have written documents . . . , but that during history there
are literate men who experience, understand, and evaluate
the world as a “becoming.”11

Societies without writing are thereby societies without history.

Historians’ penchant for the fullness of the written text, and the
face value of truth contained therein, is, of course, not Flusser’s
claim. Not perhaps until the second half of the twentieth century,
 introduction ✴ xv
with studies of the Holocaust12 and other traumatic experiences
more generally, have historians reconsidered the unique value of
writing for their discipline, opening up the possibility that histori-
cal research might find evidentiary truth in oral reports and by
conducting interviews. Also, influenced by anthropological and
archeological methods, some historians consider material arti-
facts, objects without writing, at least as a supplementary source
for their archives.
But Flusser’s argument for the relation of writing to temporality
has not been a major focus of historians. Flusser stresses the unidi-
rectional flow of writing as well as its “unrepeatability” as prominent
aspects of this medium, aspects that militate, if not determine, a
cultural inscription of time as progressive. For Flusser, practices of
writing and reading induce a linear sense of time and give promi-
nence to diachronicity in general as compared with synchronicity.
For Flusser, modern society’s break with the general human sense
of time as cyclical, an obvious extrapolation from nature’s rhythms,
owes a deep debt to the increasing salience of writing over the past
several centuries. The full extension of time as a linear progres-
sion emerged not with the simple discovery of writing but with a
number of social and cultural changes commensurate with modern
society: the printing press that made writing widely reproducible,
the spread of compulsory education in modern democracies, the
rise of urban commercial cultures with their heavy reliance on
written documents, the emergence of the modern state with its
bureaucratic form, and so forth.
There is another facet to Flusser’s theory of writing and tem-
porality that deserves mention. For Flusser, writing as a medium
encourages a specific form of temporality. The medium and the
character of time are particular. This suggests that each medium
might have an associated, special form of temporality. Flusser’s me-
dia theory thereby accounts for the specificity of each information
technology. His view contrasts sharply with Derrida’s view in the
sense that the latter understands the temporal logic of writing as
xvi ✴ introduction
paradigmatic for all media—indeed, for all technology. As a result,
deconstruction has difficulty distinguishing between media cul-
tures such as between writing cultures and image cultures. Bernard
Stiegler finds fault with Derrida on precisely these grounds,13 with
the consequence that the relation of media technology to time is
very different in the views of Derrida and Flusser.
If history, for Flusser, is a linear mode of consciousness related
to writing, today it must be considered in crisis. The reason for
the crisis is simply that writing is being supplanted by images—a
new medium is being added to the old and taking priority over it
in the culture. Flusser understands this change in media in several
ways. From a historical point of view (and there is some degree
of irony in Flusser’s reliance on history for periodizing media
changes), image culture begins with the photograph.14 As techni-
cally produced images, photographs encourage a nonlinear form
of composition and reading. They “are dams placed in the way
of the stream of history, jamming historical happenings.”15 The
temporality of reading photographs is an all-at-onceness, not a
linear progression. Written texts are decoded in a linear fashion,
in a sequence of steps that are narrative in nature, moving from
start to finish. According to Flusser, the process of interpreting
images is different: “In pictures we may get the message first, and
then try to decompose it. . . . This difference is one of temporality,
and involved the present, the past and the future.”16 The “historical
time” of the written text induces a directional sense in the reader,
a feeling of going somewhere, whereas images are read with no
sense of movement, with a feeling of going nowhere.
In their composition, as well, Flusser regards photographs as
different from writing because they rely on a “calculating, formal”
type of thinking.17 Yet for him, photographs are not a throwback
to prehistoric times. There is no identity between photographs
and cave paintings, for instance. The latter are mimetic, whereas
photographs “are computed possibilities (models, projections onto
the environment).”18
 introduction ✴ xvii
Flusser is perhaps least convincing in his insistence on the
difference between prehistoric images and photographs. Even if
photographs have the formal property of “models,” one might say
the same about cave paintings. And even if cave paintings are in
the first instance mimetic, one might easily argue that photographs,
at least until the advent of digital technology, have had a mimetic
quality as well. Certainly in the culture at large of the nineteenth
century, photographs were in good part regarded as indexical. To
make Flusser’s argument more convincing, one might analyze the
difference between the technology of prehistoric images and pho-
tography. The difference in the composition process between the
two forms of image production is certainly stark. A close reading
of Into the Universe of Technical Images might help to clarify the
distinction for the reader.
In his analysis of the different temporalities of writing and im-
ages, Flusser develops a theory of the visual. Writing and images
are as different as lines and surfaces. The former, as we have seen,
produces historical society, the latter “telematic society.” Flusser
describes this new world as follows: “The telematic society would
be the first to recognize the production of information as society’s
actual function, and so to systematically foster this production:
the first self-conscious and therefore free society.”19 In a somewhat
utopian vein, Flusser foresees revolutionary changes when digital
images replace first text and then analog images (television, pho-
tography, cinema). He imagines, as well, the end of the reign of
the author, very much like Foucault and Barthes. He writes, “For
genuinely disciplined, theorized creativity will only be possible
after the myth of the author of information is abandoned.”20 For
Flusser, computer-generated images require a level of creativity
unknown in the past, when copying nature was the goal of image
production.
The cultural study of media is hampered by a philosophical
tradition based on the episteme of the transcendental, uncondi-
tional, and contextless “I think.” From Kant (time as a synthetic
xviii ✴ introduction
a priori of reason) to Husserl (time as a feature of consciousness
as it appears to thought) and even to Bergson (time as duration),
the nature of time is deduced from logic. A change comes with
Derrida and the association of time with the technology of writ-
ing, but here again, writing becomes a form (différance) inherent
to all media and thereby divorced from technological specificity
and social practice. Stiegler, in his three-volume work Technics and
Time, attempts to break from this tradition by inserting technol-
ogy more firmly within the conceptual formation of time. In his
essay “Derrida and Technology” as well as in his televised debate
with Derrida, published as a transcripted book titled Echographies,
Stiegler complains that when Derrida theorizes writing as “arche-
writing,” he places technology in a register of temporality that loses
the specificity of different media: “All [media for Derrida],” he writes,
“are figures . . . of origin that arche-writing constitutes.”21 Time is
thus possible for Stiegler (as for Flusser) through the technical
inscription of cultural objects. Wrestling with the question of the
transcendental nature of media temporality, Stiegler concludes on
a middle ground of what he calls “a-transcendentality.”22
In Mark Hansen’s review of volume 1 of Technics and Time,
he points out that Stiegler’s discovery of the discreteness of the
digital image leads him to posit media as constituting subjects in
different forms of the awareness of time.23 Photography, film, and
networked computing thus construct distinctly different forms of
temporality in the subject. Yet Stiegler, rigorous and systematic in
his thinking, still maintains a kind of original disposition of media
as material forms of memory, as prostheses. The question that
remains open in his work, and that provides a fruitful intersection
with Flusser’s media theory, is the degree of determination one
would give to this primary or initial prosthetic figure. I argue that
one must theorize time and media in such a way that the relation is
not entirely dependent on the human as ground but instead opens
a more complex possibility for multiple assemblages of the human
and the machine, not as prostheses for the human but as mixtures
 introduction ✴ xix
of human–machine in which the outcome or specific forms of the
relation are not prefigured in the initial conceptualization of the
relation. Contingency of the relation must be kept open. In that
way, the different cultural forms of media and time would each
have their own validity, and the critical question of how to institute
the newer relation in networked computing would remain an open
political question.
Given the importance of the question of media, and of Flusser’s
work in this area, it is disappointing that the major cultural theorists
of the 1970s and 1980s tend to overlook media theory and almost
completely ignore the thought of Flusser. Let us take a brief glance
at some examples of this lack and this problem.
Michel Foucault provides an interesting example of the problem
that also persists in Derrida’s work, as we have seen. Foucault’s work
of the 1970s is densely sprinkled with metaphors of media. Disci-
pline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, centrally
rely on such figures as “technology of power” and “networks,” in
which individuals are understood as “nodes.” His understanding
of the individual or subject as constituted by and living within
networks in everyday life is highly suggestive for an understanding
of the role of media. Similarly, his depiction of the confessional
as a peculiar space of speech in early modern France moves very
close to an analysis of one form of language in relation to subject
positions. Even more, his enigmatic depiction of a world beyond
the author function suggests the types of exchanges that prevailed
on the Internet before the phenomenon of global communication
actually existed:

All discourses . . . would then develop in the anonymity of a

murmur. We would no longer hear the questions that have
been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he
and not someone else? With what authenticity or original-
ity? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his
discourse? Instead there would be other questions, like these:
xx ✴ introduction
What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has
it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate
it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room
for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject
functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear
hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What
difference does it make who is speaking?24

Here Foucault seems to anticipate the world of chat rooms, e-

mail, blogs, and Web pages, where authorship is always in question.
He seems to depict, and even desire, a space of communication
where identity may be in doubt and subordinated to the flow of
text, to the impulses of creativity. And yet the word media is absent
from the vocabulary of the critic of authorship. In the end, however,
aside from passing comments on the importance of writing in
the care of self, Foucault does not theorize media as a significant
domain of what he calls “subjectivation.”
Then there is Jacques Lacan, whose work has stimulated the
important writings of Slavoj Žižek but whose own work on media
provides perhaps the most egregious examples of the problem I am
addressing. In his widely read (and viewed) television interview
purportedly about television and published in transcript form as
Television, Lacan demonstrates quite clearly that he has, I am sorry
to report, not a whiff of understanding about media. Complain-
ing that the rebellious Parisian students of May 1968 were acting
without a shred of guilt or shame, Lacan argues in Seminar XVII
that the young people have symbolically slain their parents because
they have failed to recognize the authority of the gaze of the Other.
Thus they cannot come under the Law, or become subjects of desire
through the good graces of the master signifier, and so on. The
important point in this stunning application of psychoanalysis to
media is that Lacan attributes this moral transgression to television.
Why? Because with television, there is a voice but no individual.25
The obvious question is, how is television different from radio,
 introduction ✴ xxi
film, or the Internet, which also emit voices without the speaker’s
presence? Indeed, books, newspapers—all forms of print—might
be included in the list, although in these cases, “voice” is not ac-
companied by sound. Why, then, limit the complaint to television?
Clearly media studies will not be well informed by psychoanalysis
if Lacan is any guide.26
Gilles Deleuze provides another variation of the absence of
media in twentieth-century theory. The seminal, even magiste-
rial works he composed with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus, explore critically the social and cultural space
of modernity without mention of media. Their absence threatens to
undermine what is otherwise a compelling rethinking of Western
reality. The same may be said of Deleuze’s two volumes on film.27
The one exception within Deleuze’s considerable and weighty corpus
is the short essay “Postscript on Control Societies” (1990),28 whose
title suggests its marginal position in his thought. In the English-
speaking discursive community, thinkers have so yearned for a
discussion of media that this slight piece has gained attention and
praise far exceeding its modest standing. Because of its celebrity,
if for no other reason, it is worthy of attention.
In this brief piece, Deleuze emphasizes the absence of confining
spatial arrangements in the exercise of domination afforded by the
use of computer technology. “What has changed,” in the formulation
of Deleuze’s argument by Hardt and Negri, “is that, along with the
collapse of the institutions, the disciplinary dispositifs have become
less limited and bounded spatially in the social field. Carceral disci-
pline, school discipline, factory discipline, and so forth interweave
in a hybrid production of subjectivity.”29 Beyond the negative trait
of the absence of “major organizing sites of confinement,”30 control
societies are, in this text, maddeningly undefined. Deleuze discusses
the control society again in “Having an Idea in Cinema”31 but is
again both brief and vague, only adding to his previous discussion
that because “information is precisely the system of control,”32
“counterinformation” becomes a form of resistance,33 all of which
xxii ✴ introduction
suggests to me that Deleuze’s understanding of networked digital
information machines remains rudimentary. It is hard to imagine
what counterinformation might be, for example. Does he mean
that critical content is resistance? Or does the form of the critical
content constitute resistance?
It might seem logical to conclude from the opposition between
societies of discipline and societies of control that Deleuze places
himself against Foucault, or at least that he is going beyond Foucault
by discerning forms of domination unthought by the historian of
the Panopticon. Yet such is not at all the case. Instead, Deleuze
proclaims his agreement with Foucault, citing William Burroughs
again as the fulcrum of the matter. Deleuze writes, “Foucault agrees
with Burroughs who claims that our future will be controlled rather
than disciplined.”34 But Deleuze gives no evidence that Foucault
anticipated a transformation to societies of control, relegating dis-
cipline to the garbage can of history. It would appear that Deleuze
was unwilling to position himself as the thinker who went beyond
Foucault even as, in the same paragraph, Deleuze compellingly
characterizes the break between the two orders of domination.
In the following passage, Deleuze insists that Foucault adopts the
notion of societies of control: “The disciplines which Foucault
describes are the history of what we gradually cease to be, and our
present-day reality takes on the form of dispositions of overt and
continuous control in a way which is very different from recent
closed disciplines.”35
Deleuze’s stadial theory, moving from discipline to control, is
also far too linear in character. Elements of control existed in Europe
in the early modern period as the state hired spies to keep track
of suspected miscreants. Equally, forms of discipline proliferate in
the twenty-first century as the United States, for example, erects
more and more prisons under the so-called get tough policies of
recent and current administrations. The shift from discipline to
control is also Eurocentric, overlooking the very different disposi-
tion of these state strategies in the southern hemisphere. François
 introduction ✴ xxiii
Vergès points out, for example, that “in postcolonial Reunion,
these two strategies have concurrently occurred. New types of
sanction, education, and care have constructed a web of control
around the Creoles, and along with the creation of a vast social
network of control, there has been a multiplication of prisons, a
criminalization and psychologization of politics.”36 Deleuze’s model
of control as the next stage after discipline thus contains problems
at numerous levels.
In an essay from 1998, Michael Hardt attempts to explicate the
concept of societies of control beyond what Deleuze has given us.
He asserts that as the chief new form of power, “the metaphorical
space of the societies of control is perhaps best characterized by the
shifting desert sands, where positions are continually swept away;
or better, the smooth surfaces of cyberspace, with its infinitely pro-
grammable flows of codes and information.”37 Smooth surfaces are
opposed to striated planes, categories one recalls from A Thousand
Plateaus38 that designate homogeneous and heterogeneous spaces,
respectively.39 But Hardt overlooks the side of cyberspace that resists
the power formation of the control society, all kinds of spaces in
which copyright law, fixed identities, censorship, and so forth, are
continuously evaded and challenged. Cyberspace is hardly Hardt’s
smooth surface of transparency and control but is rather a highly
differentiated field of resistance, conflict, and uncertainty.
For Hardt, control societies are “smooth” because civil society
has collapsed, rendering the social lacking in mediations.40 Hardt
analyzes the dialectic of civil society from Hegel to Foucault, con-
cluding that “what has come to an end, or more accurately declined
in importance in post–civil society, then, are precisely these func-
tions of mediation or education and the institutions that gave them
form.”41 Foucault’s disciplinary institutions have lost their ability
to position and give identity to individuals. Replacing the spaces
of confinement, according to Hardt, are the media. But again, one
must object: the media are also mediating, albeit in a different form
from older establishments like education and the family. What is
xxiv ✴ introduction
lacking in Hardt’s understanding of the move from discipline to
control is precisely an analysis of media as technologies of power.
Surely media are different from prisons, education, and so forth,
but one must understand the specificity of media as structuring
systems as well as pay attention to the differences of one medium
from another. Television, print, and the Internet are each a dis-
ciplinary institution—in this sense, they are different from each
other but also similar to prisons in that they construct subjects,
define identities, position individuals, and configure cultural ob-
jects. True enough, media do not require spatial arrangements in
the manner of workshops and prisons, but humans remain fixed
in space and time: at the computer, in front of the television set,
walking or bicycling through city streets, or riding on a subway
with headphones and an mp3 player or cell phone. I refer to this
configuration of the construction of the subject as a superpanopti-
con to indicate its difference from modern institutions.42 The term
control society bears the disadvantage of losing an ability to capture
the new technologies of power: the media.
At a more general level, what stands in the way of an approach
to media theory for Deleuze is his understanding of film as art.
From Difference and Repetition to the cinema books of the 1980s,
Deleuze frames cinema only as art. When he recognizes the altered
sphere of everyday life as steeped in audio and visual technologies,
he finds in art a liberatory escape from the quotidian: “The more
our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped and subject to an
accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the art must
be injected into it.”43 One cannot come near the problem of media
with a view of the everyday as degraded, debased, and baleful.
Perhaps a turn to Flusser will change the disregard for media
that has so characterized cultural theory of the 1970s, 1980s, and
1990s. Flusser, however flamboyant and polemical his writing can
be, thought deeply about the emergence of electronic media and
their implications not only for Western culture but also truly for
global culture.
 introduction ✴ xxv

Notes

1 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and

Technoculture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
2 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London: Cassell,
1893), book 1, chap. 5, para. 11.
3 Vilém Flusser, Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), 1.
4 Friedrick Kittler, “Perspective and the Book,” Grey Room 5 (2001):
39.
5 Friedrick Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1990).
6 Giambattista Vico, The New Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1984).
7 Flusser, Writings, 39.
8 Ibid.
9 Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2002).
10 Ibid., 39.
11 Flusser, Writings, 63.
12 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
13 Jacques Derrida and Bernhard Stiegler, Echographies de la té-
lévision: entretiens filmés (Paris: Institut national de l’autovisuel,
1996).
14 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Gottingen,
Germany: European Photography, 1984).
15 Flusser, Writings, 127.
16 Ibid., 23.
17 Ibid., 128.
18 Ibid., 129.
19 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 92.
xxvi ✴ introduction
20 Ibid., 101.
21 Jacques Derrida and Bernhard Stiegler, Echographies of Television
(London: Polity, 2002), 239.
22 B. Stiegler, “Our Ailing Institutions,” Culture Machine XX (1993).
23 Mark Hansen, “‘Realtime Synthesis’ and the Différance of the
Body: Technocultural Studies in the Wake of Deconstruction,”
Culture Machine XX (2004).
24 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader,
ed. P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 119–20.
25 Jacques Lacan, Television (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 27.
26 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1961), 39, also manifests a deep unconcern for
media. In his famous example of the telephone, he quips that it
provides no more satisfaction than sticking one’s leg out from
under the covers on a cold winter night just to be able to return
it to comfort and warmth afterward. For a very different view of
the value of Lacan’s insights on television, see Rosalind Morris,
“The War Drive: Image Files Corrupted,” Social Text 25, no. 2
(2007): 103–42.
27 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
28 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotia-
tions: 1972–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
177–82.
29 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 330.
30 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 177.
31 Gilles Deleuze, “Having an Idea in Cinema,” in Deleuze and
Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed.
Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Heller (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), 14–19.
32 Ibid., 17.
33 Ibid., 18.
 introduction ✴ xxvii
34 Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?” in Michel Foucault Phi-
losopher, ed. François Ewald (New York: Routledge, 1992), 164.
35 Ibid.
36 François Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family
Romance and Métissage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1999), 219.
37 Michael Hardt, “Withering of Civil Society,” Social Text 45 (Winter
1995): 32.
38 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capital-
ism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987).
39 Ibid.
40 Hardt, “Withering of Civil Society.”
41 Ibid., 36.
42 Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and
Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
43 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 293.
This page intentionally left blank
DOES WRITING HAVE A FUTURE?
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Writing, in the sense of placing letters and other marks one after
another, appears to have little or no future. Information is now more
effectively transmitted by codes other than those of written signs.
What was once written can now be conveyed more effectively on
tapes, records, films, videotapes, videodisks, or computer disks, and
a great deal that could not be written until now can be noted down
in these new codes. Information coded by these means is easier
to produce, to transmit, to receive, and to store than written texts.
Future correspondence, science, politics, poetry, and philosophy
will be pursued more effectively through the use of these codes
than through the alphabet or Arabic numerals. It really looks as
though written codes will be set aside, like Egyptian hieroglyphs or
Indian knots. Only historians and other specialists will be obliged
to learn reading and writing in the future.
Many people deny this, mainly out of laziness. They have already
learned to write, and they are too old to learn the new codes. We
surround this, our laziness, with an aura of grandeur and nobility.
If we were to lose writing, we say, we would lose everything we owe
to such people as Homer, Aristotle, and Goethe, to say nothing of
the Holy Bible. Only how do we really know that these great writ-
ers, including the Author of the Bible, would not have preferred
to speak into a microphone or to film?
But laziness doesn’t explain everything. There are people, and
I count myself among them, who believe that they could not live
without writing. And this is not because they want to imitate Homer,
for they know that no one can write as he did anymore, even a second

3
4 ✴ does writing have a future?
Homer; rather they believe that writing is a necessity because their
being is expressed in, and only in, the gesture of writing.
Of course, they could be wrong. But even assuming that they
are right and that the production of video clips does not suit their
being, their forma mentis, it would not prove that their form of being
has become obsolete, that such people have become dinosaurs. It’s
true that not everything obsolete is necessarily expendable. What is
called progress is not necessarily the same thing as improvement.
Dinosaurs were very nice animals in their way, after all. And yet
the insistence on writing is becoming questionable today.
The question is, What is distinctive about writing? What sets
it apart from comparable gestures of the past and future—from
painting, from pressing on computer keys? Is there anything spe-
cific at all that is shared by all kinds of gestures of writing—from
the chiseling of Latin letters in marble to the brushing of Chinese
ideograms on silk, the scratching of equations on boards, or the
pounding on the keys of typewriters? What sort of life did people
have before they began to write? And how would their lives look
if they abandoned writing? All these and many more questions
would obviously concern not only writing itself but also the read-
ing of what is written.
These are simple questions only at first glance. A comprehensive
book would be required just to grasp them all. But the crux of the
matter is that such a book would be a book. Instead of what? That
is the question.
Superscript
My intention in this book is to write about writing. It is, if you
think about it, a project turned in on itself. It makes writing both
the object (that one is facing) and the instrument one uses to deal
with the object. Such an undertaking cannot be compared with
thinking something over, in which ideas are directed against ideas.
But this comparison shows how reflection is different from an at-
tempt to write about writing. The particle over in the construct to
think something over can be interpreted in two ways: on one hand,
as the effort to let supplementary ideas follow after those that have
already been thought to put them in order, and on the other hand, as
the effort to let ideas run counter to those already thought to track
them down. Neither strategy makes any sense when writing about
writing. It can’t be about putting the writing one is writing about
in order because it is already in order. Written signs are arranged
in lines, and each one already has a designated place in this one-
dimensional order. And it can’t be about tracking down writing, for
written signs consist of nothing but tracks (Greek: topoi). Writing
about writing is itself to be seen as thinking of a sort, that is, as an
attempt to arrange those ideas that have already been thought about
writing in an order, to track down these thoughts that have been
thought and to write them down. That is the intention here.
Thinking and writing about writing should really be called super-
script.1 Regrettably, that word is already in use and means something
else. But it doesn’t matter: with permission, the word superscript
will be used with the new meaning suggested. Aren’t there people
who would call such violence against language “creative”?

5
6 ✴ does writing have a future?
All writing is “right”: it is a gesture of setting up and ordering
written signs. And written signs are, directly or indirectly, signs
for ideas. So writing is a gesture that aligns and arranges ideas.
Anyone who writes must first have thought. And written signs are
the quotation marks of right thinking. On first encounter, a hidden
motive appears behind writing: one writes to set one’s ideas on the
right path. That is really the first impression one has in looking
at written texts: exactly this order, this alignment. All writing is
orderly, and that leads directly to the contemporary crisis in writ-
ing. For there is something mechanical about the ordering, the
rows, and machines do this better than people do. One can leave
writing, this ordering of signs, to machines. I do not mean the sort
of machines we already know, for they still require a human being
who, by pressing keys arranged on a keyboard, orders textual signs
into lines according to rules. I mean grammar machines, artificial
intelligences that take care of this order on their own. Such machines
fundamentally perform not only a grammatical but also a thinking
function, and as we consider the future of writing and of thinking
as such, this might well give us pause for thought.
Writing is about setting ideas in lines, for unwritten ideas, left
to their own devices, run in circles. This circling of ideas, where
any idea can turn back to the previous one, is called mythical
thinking in certain contexts. Written signs are quotation marks
signaling the onset of linear, directional thinking within mythical
thinking. This directional thinking is called logical thinking for
reasons still to be discussed. Written signs are quotation marks
for logical thinking. This becomes clear if one looks more closely
at quotation marks, that is, inverted commas. For example, ‘word’
is a word, but ‘sentence’ is not a sentence. Such a thing can only
be written, for anyone who were to try to say it would be thinking
in circles. In a broader, very important sense, all written signs are
quotation marks.
But lines of writing not only direct ideas into rows, they direct
those ideas toward a recipient. They run past their end point toward
 Superscript ✴ 7
a reader. Writing is motivated by an impulse not only to direct
ideas but also to direct them toward another. Only when a piece
of writing reaches another, a reader, does it achieve this underlying
intention. Writing is not only a reflective, inwardly directed gesture
but is also an expressive, outwardly directed (political) gesture.
One who writes presses into his own interior and at the same
time outward toward someone else. These contradictory pressures
lend writing the tension that has made it capable of carrying and
transmitting Western culture and of endowing this culture with
such an explosive form.
In this first observation of writing, it is the rows, the linear flow
of written signs, that make the strongest impression. They make
writing seem to express a one-dimensional thinking and so, too,
a one-dimensional feeling—desire, judgment, and conduct—a
consciousness that was able, through writing, to emerge from the
dizzying circles of preliterate consciousness. We know this writ-
ing consciousness because it is our own, and we have thought and
read about it.
The present book is not the first “superscript.” A great deal has
been written about writing, if under other titles. In these titles,
writing consciousness has been given various names. It has been
called “critical” or “progressive,” “numerate” or “narrative.” But
there is a common denominator among all these names. Writing
consciousness should be referred to as historical consciousness.
The matter is more radical than it seems, for it is not as if there
were a historical consciousness capable of expressing itself in vari-
ous codes, writing being one of them; rather writing, this linear
alignment of signs, made historical consciousness possible in the
first place. Only one who writes lines can think logically, calculate,
criticize, pursue knowledge, philosophize—and conduct himself
appropriately. Before that, one turned in circles. And the longer
one writes lines, the more historically one can think and act. The
gesture of writing produces historical consciousness, which be-
comes stronger and penetrates more deeply with more writing, in
8 ✴ does writing have a future?
turn making writing steadily stronger and denser. This feedback
between those who write and historical consciousness lends that
consciousness a rising tension that enables it to keep pushing
forward. That is the dynamic of history.
It is therefore an error to suppose that there has always been
history because things have always happened, to suppose that writ-
ing only recorded what had happened, to regard historical time
as that period in history when people recorded events in writing.
It is an error because before writing was invented, nothing hap-
pened; rather things merely occurred. For something to happen,
it has to be noticed and conceived as an event (process) by some
consciousness. In prehistory (the term is accurate) nothing could
happen because there was no consciousness capable of conceiving
events. Everything seemed to move in endless circles. Only with the
invention of writing, with the rise of historical consciousness, did
events become possible. When we speak of prehistoric events, we
are writing supplementary history and committing anachronisms.
Even more so when we speak of natural history, for then we are
committing historicism. History is a function of writing and the
consciousness that expresses itself in writing.
Writing, this ordering of written signs into rows, can be mecha-
nized and automated. Machines write faster than human beings.
And not only that: they can vary the rules for assembling signs
(the rules of orthography) automatically. We can already see both
the speed and the variability of writing in the new orthographic
writing machines, word processors, however primitive they still
are for now. And artificial intelligences will surely become more
intelligent in the future. They will possess a historical conscious-
ness far superior to ours. They will make better, faster, and more
varied history than we ever did. History will become unimaginably
more dynamic: more will happen; events will overtake one another
and become more diverse. As far as we are concerned, all history
can be confidently left to automated machines. Because all these
mechanical and automated things make better history than we do,
 Superscript ✴ 9
we can concentrate on something else. On what? That is what the
present essay means when it asks, does writing have a future?
This first chapter is called “Superscript” because it is the first
and announces an intention to write about writing. For reasons of
symmetry, the last chapter is called “Subscript.” This symmetry is in
keeping with the intention of the work. It looks like an announce-
ment that writing has been surpassed by more effective codes and
that historical consciousness has been surpassed by something
new that is still beyond our conceptual powers. But the chapter
title “Superscript” is not meant in this way. On the contrary, the
intention is that only he who has previously subscribed to every-
thing that is hidden in writing—who is engaged in and who will
eventually underwrite everything that will be lost with the loss of
writing—only he has the right to write about writing. Only such
a person has the right not only to write about writing but also to
write past that into writing no more.
This page intentionally left blank
Inscriptions
Before asking whether writing could be abandoned, one must
ask how writing began. Etymology may be helpful here. Writing
comes from the Latin scribere, meaning “to scratch.” And the Greek
graphein means “to dig.” Accordingly, writing was originally a ges-
ture of digging into an object with something, so making use of
a wedge-shaped tool (a stylus). It is true that writing is no longer
done this way. Now, writing usually involves putting pigment on
a surface. We write on-scriptions rather than in-scriptions—and
we usually write styluslessly.
If we call on archaeology rather than etymology, it becomes
uncertain whether inscription actually preceded writing on a
surface. Perhaps, for example, Egyptians were the first to use pig-
ment. We do have a myth, however, in fact one of the foundational
myths of the West, that establishes the etymological precedence of
engraving over painting.
According to this myth, God made his own image in clay
(Hebrew: adamah), infused the clay with his own breath, and so
created a human being (Hebrew: adam). Like every myth, this one
is meaningful, and its content can be interpreted. For example, clay
is the material (the Great Mother) in which God (the Great Father)
buried his breath (spirit), and so we arose from this intercourse as
material imbued with spirit. Without rejecting this interpretation,
the invention of writing can be recognized in this myth. The Meso-
potamian clay in the myth is shaped into a tablet, which is engraved
with the holy wedge-shaped stylus, and so the first inscription

11
12 ✴ does writing have a future?
(human being) was created. Of course, the two interpretations
may be combined with others, leading to unsupportable (in part,
esoteric) interpretations. But that is not the intention here. Here the
myth is taken seriously as a depiction of the digging gesture. What
did God actually do when he buried his breath in the clay?
First, he took an object in his hand (he grasped it), then he
reshaped it into a parallelepiped (he worked it), and finally, he
informed it (he dug forms into it). We do know that the matter did
not end there: he went on to burn the informed tablets to harden
them. That is not in the myth under consideration here but rather
in the one that tells of the expulsion from paradise.
The preparatory grasping and working can be bracketed out
of what follows, for this is about the gesture of writing. What is of
interest here is the informing and the burning. Informing is a nega-
tive gesture, directed against the object. It digs holes into objects. It
digs holes of “spirit” into things too full of themselves so that these
things no longer condition the subject. It is the gesture of wanting-
to-be-free from the stolid resistance objects present to subjects.
The digging aspect of writing is an informative gesture that seeks
to break out of the prison of the conditional, that is, to dig escape
tunnels into the imprisoning walls of the objective world.
Although to inform originally meant “to dig forms into some-
thing,” it has taken on a whole series of additional meanings in
the present (and, in this way, it has become a term that people use
to torment one another). Still, all these meanings have a common
denominator: “the more improbable, the more informative.”
Information is the mirror image of entropy, the reverse of the
tendency of all objects (the objective world as a whole) to decay
into more and more probable situations and finally into a form-
less, extremely probable situation. However, this tendency toward
entropy, inherent in all objects, may turn on itself and accidentally
lead to improbable situations (in nature, such information as spiral
nebulae or human brains appear again and again). The gesture of
 Inscriptions ✴ 13
informing characteristically expresses the intention of a subject
to negate the objective tendency toward entropy. One informs
(produces improbable situations) to set spirit against material that
tends, absurdly, toward heat death. Writing, like digging, presses this
spirit into the object to inspire it, that is, to make it improbable.
But objects are malicious. Their tendency toward entropy will
eventually cause all information engraved in objects to disappear.
Everything that spirit presses into objects will be forgotten in time.
The absurd objective world is stronger than the subject’s will to
inform it. Spirit can only hope that it will take a long time before
its information disintegrates. One who writes by digging can only
hope that the object one has engraved doesn’t decay too quickly
(even if the digging writer was God). By grasping and working
objects, the writer realizes that the reverse of the tendency to decay
is his resistance to the spirit that wants to inform him: the better
a memory is, the more laborious it is to dig into it (e.g., bronze or
marble); the easier it is to dig into it (e.g., clay), the more quickly
the information dug into it will disappear. Either writing remains
legible for a long time, in which case, the writing is a laborious
undertaking, or the writing is effortless, in which case, it will
quickly become illegible. Engraving—or any sort of in-forming
prior to the electromagnetic transmission of information, faces
this unpleasant choice.
There is a way out of this dilemma: one can write on clay tablets
and burn these tablets later. One chooses a soft object, informs it,
then hardens it, to insist that it not forgetten too quickly. In this
way, it is possible both to inform without appreciable objective
resistance and to overcome the malice of objects for a long time.
Heating tablets for the purpose of hardening their memory is a
supreme achievement of the spirit, and the entire history of the
West can be seen as a series of variations on this theme: from the
copying of manuscripts to print to automated memories and ar-
tificial intelligences. It is about variations on one theme: produce
14 ✴ does writing have a future?
information, pass it on, and store it safely (if possible, aere peren-
nius) to set the free spirit of the subject, its desire to be immortal,
against the malicious laziness of objects, their tendency toward
heat death. Seen in this way, writing as digging, inscription, is an
expression of free will.
There is another aspect of the myth of the creation of mankind,
read as a model of writing as digging. It offers an insight into the
critical thing about inscription (and writing as such). God forms his
likeness on clay to bury his breath in this likeness. God inscribed
not amorphous clay but an image. He wrote not against the given
(the datum “clay”) but against something made (the image “God”)—
against a fact, that is. The gesture of writing does not move directly
against an object but rather indirectly, through an image or with
the intervention of an image. He digs into clay to tear an image
apart. Inscription (writing, as such) is iconoclastic.
Let etymology bear witness once again. The English to write
(that in fact means “scratch,” as does the Latin “scribere”) reminds
us that scratching and tearing come from the same stem. The
scratching stylus is an incisor, and one who writes inscriptions
is an incising tiger: he tears images to pieces. Inscriptions are the
torn pieces, the cadavers of images; they are images that fell victim
to the murderous incisor teeth of writing—hence the shock with
which inscription was greeted by those who first received it. The
ancient Jews fell on their knees in terror before the two tablets,
and in the Metamorphoses, the Golden Age was one in which
there were not yet any inscriptions: nec verba minantia fixo aere
legebantur (“At that time there were no threatening words to be
read, fixed in bronze”).
The writing incisor turns against the images we have made
of and from the objective world. It turns against that zone of the
imaginary, magical, and ritual that we set in front of the objective
world. It tears our representations of the world apart to order the
parts so torn into directional lines, into countable, accountable,
 Inscriptions ✴ 15
criticisable concepts. The myth of human creation shows the anti-
magical engagement of all writing. This is why all writing is basi-
cally shocking: it shocks us out of our prescriptive notions. It tears
us away from images that meant the world, and ourselves in it, to
our consciousness as it was before writing.
The claim was made in a previous argument that writing seeks a
way out of dizzying circular thinking and into a thinking arranged
in lines. Now this can become: out of the magic circles of prehis-
toric thinking and into linear, historical thinking. Writing really is
a transcoding of thought, a translation from the two-dimensional
surface of images into a one-dimensional linear code: out of com-
pact, blurred pictorial codes into clear, distinct written codes; out
of the imaginary into the conceptual; out of scenes into processes;
out of contexts into texts. Writing is a method of tearing imaginary
things apart and making them clear. The further writing advances,
the more deeply the writing incisor penetrates into the abysses of
imaginary things stored in our memory, tearing them apart, to
“describe,” to “explain,” to recode them into concepts. This advance
of writing along lines toward the abysses of memories (of the un-
conscious) and toward an objective world, stripped of imaginary
things, is what we call “history.” It is progressive understanding.
According to the myth, God tore his likeness apart (no matter
whether we take this likeness to be an anthropomorphic doll or
a tablet) and, in so doing, wrote us. So he sent us into the world
as his inscriptions, drove us out of paradise into the world, then
burned and hardened us so that we would describe, explain, grasp,
and rule the world (and ourselves). We were made in this way,
written for this purpose, sent on this mission—that is our destiny.
The Arabic word maktub means both “destiny” and “inscription.”
What will we give up when we replace written codes with other,
more efficient ones? Surely all those anthropologies rooted directly
or indirectly in the myth under discussion here. This is probably
all the anthropologies we, as occidentals, have at our disposal.
16 ✴ does writing have a future?
The inscriptions under consideration here, this engraving of
information into objects, has not been modern for a long time.
Today we are surrounded not by fired clay tiles or chiseled tablets.
Instead we swim in a flood of printed material, pages of paper
marked with color. Not inscriptions but rather notations are the
writings in which we bathe. The question to ask is this: How is
notation different from inscription, and what do we do when we
write something down?
Notation
Whether written signs are engraved into objects or carried on the
surfaces of objects is solely a question of technology. There is a
complex feedback loop between technology and the people who
use it. A changing consciousness calls for a changing technology,
and a changing technology changes consciousness. Producing
tools out of bronze rather than stone both expressed a changing
consciousness and opened on to a new form of consciousness. One
can justly speak of a Stone Age people and a Bronze Age people—or
of a people that write in material and a people that write on it.
The most striking technical difference between the two writing
methods is this: a stylus is used for inscription, a brush (or one
of the brush’s successors) for writing things down. The stylus is a
wedge whose exact mechanical properties were recognized by the
ancient Greeks at the very latest. It took physics and chemistry to
see the complex behavior of a drop of pigment in a brush. The
stylus is a more primitive tool than the brush. On the other hand,
brushing is more comfortable than chiseling. A stylus is structurally
simpler and functionally more complex than a brush. That is the
mark of progress: everything becomes structurally more complex
to become functionally simpler. (More evidence that writing-in
came before writing-down.)
People brushed rather than chiseled to be able to write faster and
more easily. The speed of writing is the basic difference between
writing-in and writing-down. One picks up a brush or quill (a
natural brush) to write as if feathered, winged, as if in flight. Then
one turns the quill around and writes with the tip to write still

17
18 ✴ does writing have a future?
faster. (Incidentally, this turning of the quill, this anti-Oriental,
Western gesture, deserves closer consideration.) After the goose
quill came faster and faster writing instruments: ballpoint pen,
typewriter, and word processor—faster and faster quills. Western
writers are feathered creatures.
Inscriptions are laborious, slow, and therefore considered writ-
ings. They are monuments (monere, “to consider”). Notes are writ-
ings thrown in passing onto surfaces with the intention of instructing
a reader by means of a message. They are documents (docere, “to
teach”). Inscriptions are monumental; notations are documentary.
This difference is not always clear. As the Romans were scratching
into the wax tablets with their gravers, their concern was to hold on
to the things they had grasped. They wanted to document. And as
monks with their goose quills laid one holy letter after another onto
the parchment, laboriously and with consideration, their concern
was to contemplate godliness—to erect monuments to it. It’s hard
to shake the feeling that the Romans would have been better off
with brushes and the monks with chisels.
Our literature is not monumental (as, say, Mesopotamian litera-
ture is). It does not demand consideration and contemplation. It is
documentary, it teaches and instructs. Our literature wants doctors
rather than wise men. It is written quickly to be read quickly. And
this speed explains the dynamics of the ever-increasing flow of
literature in which we are swimming.
Quills and their successors are channels. Whether they are tubes,
they usually carry black ink to be laid on a surface that is usually
white. The writing hand, holding the pen, directs the channel to lay
ink down in the form of written signs. So the writer is a designer
rather than a painter. He does not put ink on the surface to cover it
up so that the ink could put something forward; rather he produces
a contrast between the color of the ink and that of the surface so
that the signs become clear and distinct (black and white). The
intention is not to be imaginative but rather to be unambiguous
(legible in one way only). Writing does not express magical and
 Notation ✴ 19
condensed thought but rather discursive, historical thought.
A writer is one who places signs, a draftsman, a designer, a semi-
ologist. And he is in fact a very fast draftsman. His drawing is called
sketching, a word that comes from the Greek root sche, meaning
“seize.” Unlike inscriptions, notational writings are sketches and are
schematic. They convey a sense of haste and an absence of leisure,
of winged writing and reading. Any literary criticism should really
start from this, the hectic character of what is under consideration.
Criticism does not usually do this because, as a rule, it is not obvious
from the texts themselves that they were thrown together in haste.
On the contrary, one finds many places in them—just because it is
impossible to write in one sitting—where interruptions and pauses
appear to invite reflection. It is important to take these unavoidable
gaps (epochs) in writing into account.
Quills must be removed again and again to dip them into the
inkwell. Even a typewriter, technically relatively advanced, must
have its ribbon changed from time to time. No stream of ink, how-
ever advanced, is exempt. Even the surfaces to be covered are not
without limits, for a new page must be inserted when the first one
is full. Only when notation is replaced with teletype does it become
technically possible to write in an uninterrupted stream.
Even should such tangible, objective brakes on notation be
overcome, however, a continuous flow of writing would not be
possible. Orthographic rules (whether logical or syntactic, or in the
case of the alphabet, phonetic and musical) are calculations; that
is, they require intervals between the signs. These intervals must
be inserted between words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters.
The gesture of notation is staccato because the code of writing itself
is particulate (discrete).
That the gesture of writing is at once hectic and intermittent
refers back to the consciousness of one who writes, the conscious-
ness structured as historical. We do write (and think) hastily and
schematically (the full stop, rushing toward the future), but we
write asthmatically. We always have to stop to catch our breath.
20 ✴ does writing have a future?
This inner dialectic of writing and its associated consciousness,
this thinking that is driven by a pressing impulse, on one hand,
and forced into contemplative pauses, on the other, is what we call
“critical thinking.” We are repeatedly forced to come up from the
flow of notation to get a critical overview. Notation is a critical
gesture, leading to constant interruptions. Such crises demand
criteria. What is true of notation is true for all history.
The simultaneously hectic and stuttering, schematic and critical
character of notation offers deep insight into a structure of think-
ing (and behavior) that is set up in lines, that is, into a structure of
thinking occurring in time that rushes from the past toward the
future, passing through the present without stopping. Such time
is existentially untenable. For the present we rush past is exactly
the place where we are “there”: the present is wherever we are. It is
therefore the site where the world—in fact, the past as well as the
future—is realized (is made present). The future is the horizon of
the present, from which the possibilities come and to which we in
the present look to realize these possibilities, to make them present.
The past is nothing (it’s over), unless it is lifted into the present.
Thought (and behavior) that rushes through the present without
stopping is existentially false thought (and behavior).
As long as people wrote inscriptions, slowly, with effort and
consideration, the madness of historically structured thought re-
mained hidden. This good old time passed slowly and peacefully,
not yet being really Heraclitean. Such time was livable. But with
notation, progress began to accelerate. Now it is racing. Historical
consciousness only really got going with notation. It is intolerable,
this abandonment of everything real in favor of mere possibilities,
all being in favor of becoming. That is the underlying reason we
are continually forced to interrupt our writing, that we can’t avoid
landing in a crisis. Progress carries us along with it, but we con-
tinually bob up above it so as not to completely lose contact with
reality, so as not to become completely progressive, mad.
 Notation ✴ 21
It is beginning to become clear that continuous notation, con-
tinuous and accelerating progress, concerns apparatuses. It is enough
to observe the breathless speed with which videotexts appear on
terminals, for example. Apparatuses have no existential brakes: they
don’t exist, and they don’t need to come up for air. And so we can
leave progress, historical thinking and action, to apparatuses. They
do it better. And we can free ourselves from all history, become
mere observers of it, and become open to something else—to a
concrete experience of the present.
Writings are not suitable codes for such observation or spec-
tatorship. Images are more appropriate. We are just about to leave
notation (writing as such) to apparatuses and focus our attention
on making and looking at images. We are about to emigrate into
the “universe of technical images” so that we can look down from
there at history being written by apparatuses. But this colonization
is an extremely complex process. Writing cannot just be overcome.
For one thing, the images we contemplate feed on history (the ap-
paratuses); for another, these images program history (the appara-
tuses); for a third, these apparatuses do not write in the same way
we did; rather they use other codes. History written (and made) by
apparatuses is another history. It is no longer history in the literal
sense of the word. Emigration into the universe of technical im-
ages is a complex process primarily because it stumbles on literal
thinking, on letters.
Notation is first and foremost literary, literal writing, whether
other kinds of signs, such as Arabic numerals, appear in it. The
laborious emigration to a postliterate universe of technical images
demands that we reflect on letters before we repudiate them and
consign them to the past.
This page intentionally left blank
Letters of the Alphabet
The alphanumeric code we have adopted for linear notation over
the centuries is a mixture of various kinds of signs: letters (signs
for sounds), numbers (signs for quantities), and an inexact number
of signs for the rules of the writing game (e.g., stops, brackets, and
quotation marks). Each of these types of signs demands that the
writer think in the way that uniquely corresponds to it. Writing
equations requires a different kind of thinking from writing rules
of logic or the words of language. We are unaware of the mental
leaps we are obliged to make when we read and write only because
we meekly follow the apparently smooth lines. In the present essay,
we are concerned with the mode of thought that corresponds to the
characters characteristic of alphanumeric code. Works of writing
are called, after all, “literature” (meaning quantities of letters), and
we speak of a “literary” (literal) heritage.

Excursus: Numbers
A typewriter is built to arrange signs into lines. The resulting order
is suited to letters but not to numbers—evidence that in alphanu-
meric code, letters have overpowered numbers. It is actually pos-
sible, with certain special moves, to make a typewriter reproduce
mathematical equations or complicated formulas from physics,
but it is easy to see that these signs form lines only with effort,
by force. The assault on numbers by letters concerns a violation
of numerical by literal thought. It concerns, that is, an important
feature of thought supported by alphanumeric code, which is to
say Western thought.

23
24 ✴ does writing have a future?
Because letters are signs for spoken sounds, an alphabetic text
is a score for an audible performance: it makes sounds visible.
Numbers, on the other hand, are signs for ideas, for images seen
with an inner eye (2 as a sign for the mental picture of a pair).
Numbers can, of course, designate exceptionally abstract images so
that only a practiced eye is able to draw out the intended image. So
letters codify acoustic perceptions, whereas numbers codify optical
perceptions. Letters belong to the field of music, numbers to that of
the visual arts. Neurophysiology, in fact, suggests that letters and
numbers mobilize different brain functions and that both halves
of the brain behave differently depending on whether numbers or
letters are being read. Alphanumeric code appears to produce a
dislocation in the brain that causes letters to suppress numbers.
The dialectic between word and image (logos and eidos) does not
appear only in the inner tension of alphanumeric code. It is espe-
cially clear in alphanumerically coded texts. In a page of scientific
text, for example, one sees lines of letters interspersed with islands
of numbers. The eye follows the lines from left to right and stops
at the islands, where it circles. The lines of letters demand that the
message be translated into something audible somewhere in the
brain. The eye itself, on the other hand, can see what is meant by
the number islands (the algorithms). It need only follow the threads
connecting the separate elements of the algorithm. So reading letters
is one-dimensional, whereas reading numbers is a two-dimensional
movement. Letters are about a discourse, numbers about content.
A page of scientific text therefore has the same structure as a page
of a picture book. The lines of letters describe the algorithms (the
pictures), and these illustrate the lines of letters. The islands of
numbers in scientific text should be regarded as exceptionally
abstract images subordinated to a discourse.
But that is not the view represented by contemporary art criti-
cism. Art critics do not recognize scientific algorithms as works of
art—they are probably not experienced enough to recognize the
power of visualization these constructs represent. Contemporary
 Letters of the Alphabet ✴ 25
art criticism is not only blind with respect to scientific equations,
it is also deaf with respect to linear scientific texts. So we’re not
used to recognizing a Bach fugue flowing around and flooding over
Mondrian forms in a scientific text. We are not used to applying
any aesthetic criteria to scientific texts, although such a criticism
of science would be productive in terms of perception theory. It
might proceed something like this.
A scientific text differs from a Bach fugue and a Mondrian image
primarily in that it raises the expectation of meaning something “out
there,” for example, atomic particles. It seeks to be “true,” adequate
to what is out there. And here aesthetic perception is faced with a
potentially perplexing question: what in the text is actually adequate
to what is out there? Letters or numbers? The auditory or the vi-
sual? Is it the literal thinking that describes things or the pictorial
that counts things? Are there things that want to be described and
others that want to be counted? And are there things that can be
neither described nor counted—and for which science is therefore
not adequate? Or are letters and numbers something like nets that
we throw out to fish for things, leaving all indescribable and un-
countable things to disappear? Or even, do the letter and number
nets themselves actually form describable and countable things out
of a formless mass? This last question suggests that science is not
fundamentally so different from art. Letters and numbers function
as chisels do in sculpture, and external reality is like the block of
marble from which science carves an image of the world.
To criticize scientific texts using such an aesthetics of percep-
tion is, however, far less comfortable than it first appears. It would
even be straightforward if it were possible to refer the rules of
letters (logic) to the rules of numbers (mathesis). For then one
could say that the letters and numbers (the auditory and visual
forms of perception) have the same basic structure and that this
basic structure is somehow appropriate to things out there. But a
complete reduction of logic to mathematics has, unfortunately,
proven impossible. Gödel has shown why it is impossible even to
26 ✴ does writing have a future?
try. We must accept that we are condemned, on the basis of our
perceptual organs and our central nervous systems, to live in at
least two realities that cannot be unified: in the auditory, one of
letters, and in the visual, one of numbers. It becomes clear that
scientific texts try to bridge this fundamental disjunction between
ear and eye by subordinating the eye to the ear. It is an extremely
unpleasant epistemological proposition.
In the meantime, numbers are beginning to free themselves from
letters. We are witnessing a revolution to give the eye precedence
over the ear. So far the ear still dominates, and music is our best
way of justifying everything else we have set in motion.
The instrument that best characterizes the contemporary up-
heaval is a counting device. The computer appears to be slowly
(and inexorably) taking over one human intellectual function after
another: calculation, logical thinking, decision making, forecasting.
Under the influence of this counting device, science is drawing a
picture of the world that is composed of countable pebbles (calculi),
like a mosaic, and not only at the level of inanimate nature (atomic
particles) but also at the level of the animate (gene). Even society
is seen as a mosaic, within which the building blocks (individuals)
link and detach themselves according to calculable rules. Our own
thinking is understood to be a calculating of quantifiable elements.
What was once regarded as a process, wavelike, linear, is now
dissected into particles and computed on to curves that can then
be projected in any direction (e.g., into the future). Faced with a
problem, be it physical, biological, social, or psychological, we no
longer try to describe it; rather we make a diagram of it. We don’t
think literally anymore, but numerically, no longer with the ear
but rather with the eye. Our continuing use of names rather than
numbers should be considered a passing stage.
It isn’t true that we’re in the realm of numbers, however. The
world of numbers that is moving into the foreground is no longer
the one whose divinity was celebrated by the Pythagoreans. It is far
more primitive and methodical. As they migrate from alphanumeric
 Letters of the Alphabet ✴ 27
into digital codes, numbers behave differently. They no longer form
islands of algorithms rich in complex and creative visionary power;
they form heaps that can be picked at. Even something as simple
as the decimal system that ordered numbers has been abandoned
in favor of the infantile binary system. The world of numbers has
become more primitive because it is artificial, rather than human
intelligences that are doing the counting. These intelligences are
stupider but far faster. They are not capable of carrying out the
elegant mathematical operations we have developed over centu-
ries, but they don’t need to, either. For all of these operations were
intended to reduce the time needed to methodically add up many
numbers. Artificial intelligences add with a speed that approaches
that of light.
That computation has been forcibly reduced to its most primi-
tive level is crucial to an understanding of the present revolution.
Computation, the manipulation of numbers in general, can be
mechanized—and it is beneath human dignity to be concerned
with matters that can be left to machines. The New Man stands
above numbers, not under them. He sits in front of a computer
and commands it. He no longer idolizes numbers but rather plays
with them, and they obey him. This attitude toward numbers is
not entirely new—there have always been glass bead games like the
abacus and dice. On the other hand, the game strategies that are
becoming available to us are breathtakingly new. With mechani-
cally manipulated numbers, we can play in a way that transforms
numbers into the support and springboard for a completely new
visionary capacity. For the moment, we are still clumsy. But a
few examples can suggest the possibilities concealed within such
number games.
We can order the computer to light up cone shapes in various
colors on the screen, then to have them turn, collide, entangle
themselves with one another, even to vibrate acoustically, like
strings; that is, we can order it to make the concept of a “cone” ex-
periential. Or we can order the computer to separate body surfaces
28 ✴ does writing have a future?
into particles and to play with these particles (this wire netting)
so as to make bodies appear on the screen that would once have
been considered impossible. In short, we can order it to make real
what was once impossible—to act creatively. Or we can order the
computer to visualize equations that are opaque and that therefore
cannot be represented (e.g., fractals) on the screen. That is to say,
we can order it to make something completely abstract into some-
thing concrete so that it can be experienced, thereby expanding
our experience in adventurous ways.
Now that numbers are beginning to liberate themselves from
the pressure of letters and computing is being mechanized, their
visionary power can unfold. Having undergone centuries of puri-
fication through the discipline of clarity and distinctness, numbers
can now serve creative vision as they have never and nowhere been
able to do before. Our experiences, observations, values, and actions
will be enlarged immeasurably in this way. Several things obstruct
this utopian view of a free, exact, clear, and distinct creative eye,
however. The first of these is certainly our own conceptual categories
that keep us from risking a plunge into adventure.
We speak of “computer art” when we are looking at the new
images on monitors, as if we were concerned only with a new
technique for producing images. By using the category “art,” we
block our own access to these images. Computer keys simulate
mental processes. These glowing images are nearly unmediated—if
unmediated means anything to such estranged creatures as human
beings—images drawn from the brain outward. It is therefore
misleading to call these published and particularized dreams “art”
without adding that all previous art is only a hesitant approach to
these images. Even understood in this way, however, the concept
of art is a category that bypasses these images. Most computer im-
ages produced so far have been fabricated in laboratories, not in
artists’ ateliers transfigured by Benjamin’s aura. Images produced
in laboratories make at least as strong an aesthetic impact as those
produced by so-called computer artists. Such images disregard the
 Letters of the Alphabet ✴ 29
boundary between the category “art” and the category “science
and technology.” Science presents itself as an art form and art as a
source of scientific knowledge.
This does not address the crucial feature of the inadequate cat-
egories we have inherited. For if the eye (in the form of numbers) is
beginning to predominate over the ear (in the form of letters), then
it will be theoretically as well as practically possible to manipulate
(digitalize) auditory perception numerically. So-called computer
music is only one embryonic example of it. Numbers will soon make
sounds visible and images audible. “Electronic intermix” is just
one first step in this direction. For some time, in fact, is has been
possible to anticipate the collapse of the boundary between music
and the visual arts and even the rise of mathematics. Composition
is a synonym for computation, and even for Pythagoras, the lyre
lay close to the triangle.
This utopia that is appearing to our unbelieving eyes and our
eye-compliant ears, this utopia where numbers migrate from
Platonic heaven into artificial intelligences to serve our powers
of visualization, is not new but rather ancient, at least as old as
the Greeks. At highly inspired moments, they spoke of musike
kai mathematike techne as the means of attaining wisdom. This
utopia, this method, this technology is now attainable—which is
not to say that we will attain it. It is possible to count any process
in particles, to compute it into a curve, then to project the curve
into the future (to futurize it), and even, should one feel like it, to
make it vibrate acoustically. But there are also random events that
will, with a probability bordering on certainty, keep the curves from
behaving as we project them. The preceding reflections should be
read with such reservations in mind.

Letters belong to the oldest culturemes we have. In the fifteen hun-

dred years since their invention, their original form has changed
repeatedly, and yet it remains recognizable: the two horns of the
Semitic steer (Hebrew: aleph) in the A, the two domes of the
30 ✴ does writing have a future?
Semitic house (Hebrew: beth) in the B, the hump of the Semitic
camel (Hebrew: gimul) in the C. Letters are pictures of a cultural
scene as it was perceived by those who invented the alphabet in the
second millennium b.c. on the eastern Mediterranean. They are
pictograms of things like steers, houses, and camels. And because
the letters are so ancient, the archaizing word Buchstaben is used for
them in German rather than Buchenstäbe,1 although they come from
a Semitic area and not from a German Buchenwald (beech forest).
We no longer use letters as pictograms for ancient things but
rather as signs for roughly the first sound of the Semitic words
that name these things. But why do we make spoken sound visible
when we write? Why, when we want to get an idea down on paper,
do we take this convoluted detour through the spoken language
instead of using signs for ideas, that is, ideograms, as Chinese or
some new computer codes do? Is it not much easier to write “2”
than “two”? There must have been weighty reasons that led the
Sumerian inventors of the alphabet to such a counterintuitive code
as the one they inserted between thinking and writing. It is possible
to investigate the reason.
Letters’ obscure development from pictograms through re-
buses is not at issue here; rather the question is concerned with
cause: what motivated people to write alphabetically and through
a spoken language? That is not a historical question but rather an
absolutely contemporary one. In it lies an awareness of the deci-
sion we are facing: to give up the alphabet in favor of a code that
is no longer spoken.
The alphabet is a clear rejection of ideographic writing. Despite
all the ideogram’s advantages, writing was to be in letters.
Ideograms are signs for ideas, for images seen with the inner
eye. The preservation of images, however, was exactly what writ-
ing sought to avoid. Writing set out to explain images, to explain
them away. Pictorial, fanciful, imaginative thinking was to yield to
conceptual, discursive, critical thinking. It was necessary to write
alphabetically rather than ideographically to be able to think icono-
 Letters of the Alphabet ✴ 31
clastically. This is the reason for denoting the sounds of a language.
In speech, one talks “about” ideas and “about” images and, in
doing so, stands above imagistic thinking, speaking down from
on high. As the score of a spoken language, the alphabet permits
us to stabilize and discipline a transcendence of images that has
been won, with effort, through speech. One writes alphabetically
to maintain and extend a level of consciousness that is conceptual,
superior to images, rather than continually falling back into picto-
rial thinking, as we did before writing was invented.
We know that the alphabet has proven to be a remarkably
productive invention. It has facilitated discourse that was never
achieved in nonalphabetic areas: Greek philosophy, medieval theol-
ogy, the discourses of the modern sciences. Without the alphabet,
there would have been no such discourses, for they are conceptual,
critical discourses that detach themselves further and further from
imagination, becoming more and more abstract, more unimagi-
nable. In the process, it becomes clear that the alphabet cannot do
without ideograms. The discourse of modern science is impossible
without numbers. Although ideograms are signs for pictures, they
can scale heights of abstraction inaccessible to language-bound
thought. The question arises whether the alphabet as the code of
pure conceptual thought really was a lucky break. Perhaps bind-
ing thought to language inhibited our extraordinary capacity for
abstraction so that this capacity could only develop in the areas
of mathematics and symbolic logic. Perhaps the surpassing of the
alphabet will offer these capacities new avenues for development
such as that of synthetic images. Perhaps without the alphabet, we
would have been still more iconoclastic (of course, our culture would
have turned out much differently). In the matter of consigning the
alphabet to history, such considerations are pertinent.
To say that the alphabet was invented to write concepts rather
than ideas is by no means to say it all. For how is the long detour
through language to be explained? Something in the spoken lan-
guage itself calls out to be fixed in place—and in fact, not so much
32 ✴ does writing have a future?
in the memories of speakers and hearers, or in records or tapes,
but rather in writing itself. Spoken language seems to rush toward
writing almost on its own, to become a written language and so
to achieve its full maturity. After the invention of writing, spoken
language appears to be a preparation for a written language, to
teach people how to speak properly in the first place.
Today we have hardly any access to preliterate speech. Even in
nurseries and among illiterates, writing has permeated the language.
We can reconstruct the way people spoke before the invention of
writing, however, mythically, meaning “with mouth closed.” The
root word can be recognized in the Latin mutus (mute).
From our contemporary perspective, people then stuttered
and stammered. They engaged in discourse (if by discourse, we
mean a flow of sounds from one mouth into the ear of another).
But it didn’t have a direction. It wasn’t a proper discourse: it ran
into obstacles (refutations), went backward, turned itself in a
circle, and ended in silence. Since the romantic era, we’ve become
accustomed to seeking wisdom in these mythical utterances and,
of course, to finding it. It is also possible to claim that people of
that time babbled.
With the help of the alphabet, the mythical babble was leveled
so that it could run along a clear line toward an exclamation, ques-
tion mark, or full stop instead of turning itself in circles, so that it
could begin to raise proper questions, issue proper orders, narrate,
and explain things properly. The alphabet was invented to replace
mythical speech with logical speech and so to be able, literally for
the first time, to “think.”
Children and illiterates are inducted into the code of letters,
learning first spelling and not reading. They learn signs to be able
to jump from them into the signified, into the spoken language.
They learn to speak properly right from the start. And when they
have learned it, spoken language becomes a phenomenon they
approach with the help of signs. They no longer speak as it comes
 Letters of the Alphabet ✴ 33
naturally. (They leave that to the gabblers; rather they speak literary
German, Oxford English, French of the Encylopédie, or Dante’s
Italian. They speak properly.)
The alphabet does not write spoken language down; rather it
writes it up, lifting and taking hold of it to bring it into the order
of its rules. In this way, the alphabet also orders and regulates
that which is meant by language: thinking. And so for those who
are able to write, spoken language becomes more than a medium
through which they express themselves (as it is for illiterates and
children); language is rather the material against which they press
the alphabet, against which they literally ex-press. In short, they
work on the language. Only at the point when language ceases to be
a means (a medium) and begins to be a purpose does the essence
of alphabetic writing come into view.
A writer forces the spoken language to accommodate itself to
orthographic rules. Language defends itself. Each language defends
itself according to its character. German is slippery, English brittle,
French deceptive, Portuguese sly. The writer’s linguistic work is an
assault on a language that twists, slides away, shatters, and seduces
him as he grasps it. Writing literally has the tone of a quarrel be-
tween lovers, between the one who writes and the language (odi
et amo). In this lovers’ quarrel, we see what language is capable of
doing: its capacities exceed all expectations.
Unfortunately, literary criticism, above all romantic literary
criticism, allowed itself to be carried away in the turmoil of the
struggling writer. And in fact, there is something that happens in
writing that cool words fail to convey. The writer presses the let-
ters, these dead marks, against the living body of the language so
that they can suck life out, and lo and behold: these vampires take
on an eventful life of their own under his fingers. No wonder he
swoons, feeling his life energies have been spent. Literary criticism
speaks of the work of creating language.
At the distance afforded by information theory, the writing
34 ✴ does writing have a future?
process can be described somewhat differently, say, like this: the
alphabet forces the language into the chains of its orthographic
rules. In this way, language is distorted, taking on forms that
would have otherwise been improbable. Improbable is a synonym
for informative, making it right to say that the alphabetic writing
has been continually drawing new information out of language
for three and a half millennia. Since its invention, writing has
been carving and chiseling every language available to us, always
trying to bring new information to light. So these languages have
become extremely fine and valuable instruments. No writer has
ever encountered a virgin language, a language that has not already
passed through the beds of countless rapists. In his struggle with
language, a writer reworks the information of previous writers
freshly, producing new information from it, passing it on to the
next writers so that they may produce new information in turn.
The process of writing is a discourse of thousands of years that has
continually generated new information, with which every single
writer is in dialogue. Even if this was not the inventor’s intention,
the invention of the alphabet has shaped discourse in these ways.
There have apparently been two results of the inquiry into the
hidden impulses behind the invention of the alphabet. One sug-
gests that the inventor was iconoclastic: writing would not indicate
images (nor ideograms) but rather sounds, so that consciousness
might free itself from pictorial, magical thinking. The other con-
clusion suggests that the inventor’s intention was to construct a
linear discourse: writing was to indicate sounds so that mythical,
circular, halting speech could be replaced by consequential speech.
On closer consideration, however, it becomes clear that these two
answers say the same thing.
The inventor of the alphabet saw image making and mythmak-
ing as enemies, and he rightly made no distinction between the
two. Image making and image worship (magic), like dark, circular
tales (myth), are two sides of the same coin. The motivation behind
 Letters of the Alphabet ✴ 35
the invention of the alphabet was to supersede magical–mythical
(prehistoric) thought and to make room for a new (historical)
consciousness. The alphabet was developed as the code of historical
consciousness. If we should give up the alphabet, it will surely be
because we are trying to supersede historical consciousness. We
are tired of progress, and not only tired: historical thinking has
shown itself to be murderous and mad. That (and not the technical
disadvantages of the alphabet) is the real reason we are prepared
to abandon this code.
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Texts
In their battle against the spoken language, characters of the al-
phabet (which are basically nothing but dead letters, invented
to spin the magical promise of myth out into lines) suck the life
of the language up into themselves: letters are vampires. Lines
formed from these letters that have come alive are called “texts.”
Etymologically, the word text means a textile and the word line a
linen thread. But texts are unfinished textiles: they consist of lines
(the woof) and are not held in place by vertical threads (the warp)
as a finished textile would be. Literature (the universe of texts) is
half finished. It seeks completion. Literature is directed toward a
receiver, from whom it demands completion. The writer weaves
threads that are to be picked up by the receiver to be woven in.
Only then does the text achieve a meaning. A text has as many
meanings as it has readers.
The well-known phrase habent [sua] fata libelli (books have
destinies) gives only a rough idea of what is meant here. It is not
that the writer transmits powers to his texts so that the text can
put those powers into play according to its particular dynamics;
it is that the text goes out to be completed. So the text does not
have a destiny; it is a destiny. In other words, the text is meaning-
full, and this fullness can only be exploited (explained) by each of
its readers in a particular way. The greater the number of ways a
text can be read, the more meaningful it is. Artistotelian texts are
meaningful because they have meant something to Alexandrian
readers different from what they meant to Thomas Aquinas, Hegel,
Galileo, or twentieth-century historians. A text meets its fate (the

37
38 ✴ does writing have a future?
message that it is) in its receiver. Texts without receivers, unread
texts, are meaningless lines of letters that take on meaning only
when they are read.
Oddly, there are lapses in awareness that texts are media (bridges
supported as much by the receiver’s as by the sender’s pylon).
There are writers who forget that, by their very structure, texts are
directed toward others and are meaningless in isolation. Forget-
ting others while writing is the result of forgetting oneself. Armed
with his letters, a writer struggles against a resistant language. He
wants to take hold of the language—and that which is meant by
it as well, namely, his thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and desires.
The struggle is absorbing, making him forget himself and every-
one else. Writing is an intoxicating enterprise. In fact, those texts
written un-self-consciously are among the most important we
possess. It is one among countless contradictions that lie in wait
for us within writing.
Let us distinguish between two types of text. One type com-
municates, informs, transmits. The other is expressionistic, intense,
written under pressure. An example of the first type would be sci-
entific communication, of the second, lyric poetry. These extreme
examples could mislead us into dividing the whole of literature into
two branches, one that consciously seeks to be read and another
that is unaware of this intention. But the following consideration
argues against such a literary criticism: most communicative texts
want to be comfortably received, to be easy to read. They must
therefore be denotative; that is, they must transmit a message
with a single meaning. As a result, any reader will interpret such
texts in the same way. Scientific texts, especially those that make
extensive use of numerical signs, are easy to receive, even if they
appear difficult to an uninitiated reader. Their difficulty lies not in
the text but in the codification that must be learned beforehand.
There are texts that appear to be scientific but are nevertheless dark.
This is especially the case with some texts in the humanities. The
literary criticism proposed here would be able to show on formal
 Texts ✴ 39
grounds that such texts were not scientific but merely presented
themselves as such.
Expressionistic texts, on the other hand, pay no attention to
the receiver. They can afford to be difficult to read. They can be
connotative (dark), which is to say that they can transmit multiple
meanings. The result is that such a text can be interpreted by each
of its readers in a different way. Are expressionistic texts therefore
more meaningful than communicative ones? The literary criticism
proposed here would be forced to the paradoxical conclusion that
the very branch of literature that is unaware of its communicative
intention transmits the more meaningful messages.
But it is unnecessary to pursue such a literary classification any
further. Consciously, communicative texts can be exceptionally
connotative. An example is the Bible, the founding text of the West.
The Bible is a text that seeks to be read by any reader whatsoever
and to be interpreted by each in his own way. It speaks to all, and
to each in a manner of his own choosing. It is destiny and wants
to be. At the same time, the Bible is expressive, written under pres-
sure. In this sense, it is a model for all texts, for it was written in an
un-self-conscious state and in an awareness of others. This aware-
ness of others extends to the disposition of the Hebrew “original”
of the Bible to be continually translated by others. So we speak of
the destiny of the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the King James, and the
Luther Bible as well as the unfolding destinies of original texts, many
of which have been lost. The unfolding of the destiny of the West,
inasmuch as it can be seen in the history of biblical texts, could
serve as a model for the structure of the history of ideas, although
the Bible challenges the familiar axiom of communication theory
that says that “the better one communicates, the less information
he transmits, and the more information to be transmitted, the more
difficult it is to communicate it.”
Texts are half finished. Their signs rush toward an end point
but past this toward a reader who, they hope, will complete them.
It makes no difference whether the writer is aware of it, or even
40 ✴ does writing have a future?
whether, like Kafka, he expressly rejects a completing reader;
texts are a search for the Other. Of course, it is possible to divide
up the universe of texts according to various criteria, but all texts
are outstretched arms trying, whether optimistically or in despair,
to be taken up by another. This is what the gesture of writing is
disposed to do.
For whom am I there when I write? That is the political ques-
tion of a society dominated by writing: in such a society, the truly
political gesture is to write and publish texts. All other political
engagement follows from and submits to texts. If we pose the previ-
ous question in the concrete context of the textual universe rather
than in a vacuum, it becomes clear that I, the one who writes, am
there not for everyone but for the audience I am able to reach. The
illusion that I write for everyone is not only megalomaniacal but
also a symptom of false political consciousness. A writer can reach
only that audience with whom he is linked through the channels
that transmit his text. He therefore writes not directly to his read-
ers but rather to his transmitters. He is there first and foremost
for his transmitters, and first is to be taken literally. From the first
to the last line, a text is written for its transmitter. The entire text
is imbued with its primary commitment to its transmitters. No
literary criticism should disregard this fact. The transmitter stands
not outside but in the center of any text. Since the invention of the
book press, the transmitter has usually been the publisher.
A publisher is a grid in the stream of texts whose duty is to
block most texts from getting into print. The vast swell of printed
texts in which we currently swim is just the tip of an iceberg of
texts that did not succeed in passing through the grid.
A text is an expression with the conscious or unconscious in-
tention of making an impression. Texts that remain unprinted are
expressions that made a poor impression on the publisher. They did
not pass through the publisher’s criteria (the holes in the grid) and
so save their lives. “To make a bad impression” means not to have
met the criteria of the one to be impressed. This poses the question
 Texts ✴ 41
of criteria of censorship (the way the grid is constructed).
Although we can see the beginnings of automated censorship
everywhere (e.g., in the editorial policy of the mass media), publish-
ers have not so far become automata. At the moment, publishers
are still sufficiently elastic to adjust themselves to suit some of the
texts seeking to meet their criteria. There are still dialogues between
publishers and texts that can change the publisher’s criteria. (The
degree of elasticity a publisher enjoys may, incidentally, serve to
gauge the level of freedom available in a particular society.) This
dialogue between texts and publisher may sometimes change the
publishing criteria, but it also changes texts. That is, after all, the
essence of dialogue: the participant becomes the other of the other,
himself changing by changing another. A printed text is not only
one that has changed (moved, impressed) the publisher but also
one that has been changed (moved, impressed) by the publisher.
The printed text is a result of a handshake between the writer and
the publisher and carries the traces of both hands. Here the writer’s
hand has been grasped by the publisher’s hand. The handshake is
among the most gripping of gestures, for it is at once one of the
most public and one of the most intimate: the publisher is there for
the writer, the writer for the publisher, and both for the reader.
Accordingly, the pressure on the printed text, unlike that on an
unprinted text, is twofold. It carries the charge of both the writer’s
expression and the publisher’s resistance. It is a clenched fist, and as
a clenched text, it is meant to impress both intentions on its future
reader. It is meant—as one says unthinkingly, without being aware
of the dynamics inherent in the concept—to inform a reader. To
inform means to press a form into something that offers resistance
to the pressure. With printed texts, writers and publishers have com-
mitted themselves to informing readers—to making an impression
on them: first the expression of the writer, then the resistance of
the publisher, then the pressure of print, and finally the impression
on the readers. That is Gutenberg’s dynamic of texts.
But there is still a question whether such textual dynamics are
42 ✴ does writing have a future?
losing energy in the face of an overwhelming textual inflation,
whether this loss of energy could be one of the reasons for giving
up writing. The mountains of printed material that are delivered
to us in our homes daily, the primeval forests in which we lose
ourselves in bookstores—these are surely no longer clenched
fists with which writers and publishers have sworn to inform us.
They seem to be chloroformed cotton wads that publishers have
produced to anesthetize us, having sought out writers suited to the
purpose. Most contemporary publishing sets out to numb readers,
and publisher and writer appear to be no more than functionaries
in this benumbing business. They are functionaries, furthermore,
who can be replaced by automatic apparatuses in the foreseeable
future: publishers by programmed grids, writers by word proces-
sors, until finally the alphabet will be abandoned as an ineffective
code and society will be informed (benumbed) exclusively by
programmed images with sound. In other words: in the face of
textual inflation and the informatic revolution, does it still make
sense to write, publish, print, and read?
The question at hand concerns the clenching of fists, potentially
penetrating through the anesthetizing cotton wads. It is about an
aesthetic question. Aisthetstai means “perceive.” The question is
whether informative texts can be perceived at all, now and in the
future, whether it is still possible for writers and publishers to con-
spire against an increasingly automated anesthetization industry.
Such a conspiracy against numbness and in favor of information,
this clenching of texts to bring them out of the Gutenberg and
into the electronic era, is a strategy we know from Occam’s razor.
Only those texts that submit to the razor can penetrate. The more
tightly the text is clenched, the more perceptible it is in the cotton
wads of software.
Occam’s razor goes entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter neces-
sitatem (things should not be multiplied unnecessarily). It is an
instrument for cutting away the unnecessary—the redundant, as it
is said today. The publisher’s resistance to the writer’s expression is
 Texts ✴ 43
like a swipe of Occam’s razor. The difference between unpublished
and published texts is clear: the first go to the guillotine; the second
go into battle.
Despite the carnage among texts, we’re flooded with them. The
publishers’ guillotine has proven ineffective. Occam’s razor facilitates
better criteria, publishers’ criteria (holes in their grids) appropriate
to the transition from Gutenbergian to electromagnetic conditions.
Briefly, the shorter a text—the more succinct, the better. That is
an informatic criterion, implying that the less redundant a text
is, the more informative it will be. The shorter it is, the truer it is
as well, for everything superfluous is untrue. Einstein’s equations
are truer than Newton’s because they rule out grams and content
themselves with centimeters and seconds. The shorter a text, the
better, for everything superfluous is invalid. Short instructions (laws,
directions) are better than long ones because they offer behavioral
models that are easier to follow.
It looks as though nothing could be simpler or therefore easier
to automate than the publishing of texts. They can be shortened to
an absolute minimum. Today it seems that textual criticism of any
sort would have to say that only minimal texts have any prospect
of surviving the informatic revolution.
Unfortunately, the matter is not so simple. There are texts
that force information precisely from their redundancy (e.g., the
convoluted digressions of Thomas Mann). But it is not so much
for this reason as it is, above all, because there is a certain critical
point at which the use of Occam’s razor castrates a text rather than
circumcising it. If most of the redundancies were removed, there
would remain in most cases only noise and no perceptible infor-
mation. The dialogical battle between the writer and the publisher
is about locating this critical point, where the highest quantity of
information is conveyed before the whole begins to disintegrate
into noise. Finding this critical point is, finally, a publisher’s de-
termining criterion.
Texts are discourses. The written signs flow in them past an end
44 ✴ does writing have a future?
point toward a reader who completes them. If Occam’s razor slices
this discourse apart, the reader will no longer be able to receive
(decode) it. The shorter a text, the more difficult it is to decode.
From the critical point onward, it becomes unintelligible. The battle
between the writer and the publisher has to drive the difficulty of
reading to its extreme point—and stay there. It has to make the
highest possible demands on the reader without overwhelming
him. The publisher’s criterion is the reader’s reading capability.
Texts must flow. Compressed letters, words, sentences, and
paragraphs must follow one on the other without gaps. Particles
of text must be built into a wave structure. It is about rhythm,
about layered levels of rhythm. Each single level of letters, words,
sentences, and paragraphs must resonate in a rhythm particular
to itself, and all must resonate together. Texts must harmonize.
A unified pitch must resonate on the musical, lexical, semantic,
and logical levels of the text. Only if a text is in harmony can a
reader agree or disagree with it, can a reader resonate in sympa-
thy or antipathy. For this reason, Occam’s razor needs not only to
circumcise discourse but also to reassemble it into a harmonious
unity. Publishers have to make a collage from the text, without the
reader seeing it as a collage.
Texts must harmonize. There are two sorts of harmonies, rhythms.
In the first, one wave of discourse follows another. In the second,
they crash, foaming, into one another. This second sort of rhythm
could be called “syncopation.” A text is syncopated if it continu-
ally contradicts itself and still flows smoothly along. Such a text
grips the reader by going against the heartbeat, tempting him into
contradiction, drawing him in against his will. Such a text really is
that clenched fist, striking through anesthetizing media to inform.
The internal contradiction in a text, its syncopating force, is one
of the consequences of the external contradiction between the
writer and the publisher. True, good, and beautiful texts, that is,
concise texts that flow without interruption and are nevertheless
contradictory, are works of a creative dialogue between the writer
 Texts ✴ 45
and the publisher. They justify some hope that not all texts will be
sacrificed to the rising universe of technical images.
The writer is above all there for his publisher, to share with him
the making of a clenched fist from a half-made text. The hope is that
the clenched fist will reach across informatic conditions and seize
readers who will complete the text, even after alphanumeric code
has become obsolete. Even if he is not always aware of his search,
a writer is searching for another, a way out of his loneliness and
into a community, assisted by the common ground he shares with
his publisher. Before print, it was not publishers, but above all the
Church, that took up the task of criticizing texts and transmitting
them to readers. Writers wrote in search of the Absolute Other (ad
maiorem Dei gloriam). At that time, a reader transmitted the text
of a writer on his way to godliness (to the completion of his text).
The invention of print changed writing: a religious engagement
became a political one.
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Print
Typography is to be considered here less as a technology for the
production of printed materials or as a method for distributing
alphanumeric information than as a new way of writing and of
thinking. These aspects of print are in fact of great importance for
an understanding of the current information revolution (electro-
magnetic information can be regarded as a further development
in the technology and distribution methods of print). But here we
are concerned with a very radical question, namely, whether it was
only with the invention of print that writers became aware of what
they were actually doing by putting characters in rows, whether
this theoretical and practical mastery of writing didn’t exceed the
historical consciousness that writing expresses, whether the infor-
mation revolution can’t be grasped as the result of an exhaustion
of the potentiality inherent in writing.
The Greek word typos generally means “trace,” and in this sense,
such traces as those left on the beach by birds’ feet could be called
typoi. At another level, the word refers to the way these tracks can
be used as models for classifying the birds that have walked by.
Finally, the word means that I myself have the capacity to make
such bird tracks in the sand and so to distinguish and compare
various kinds of birds. So typos refers to that which all bird tracks
have in common (the typical); it means the universal behind all
that is characteristic and distinctive.
The Greek work graphein generally means “to dig.” In this sense,
such marks as those left by a stylus in clay are typographies. But we
know that in ordinary language, the word graphein means writing.

47
48 ✴ does writing have a future?
It means the engraving of written signs, exactly these traces that
classify, compare, and distinguish. So the word typography is really
a pleonasm that could be translated as inscriptionengraving or
writtensignwriting. It is entirely sufficient to say “writing.”
Since writing (and particularly alphanumeric writing) was
invented, people have been typographing. Gutenberg didn’t really
invent anything: printing would have been possible by the middle
of the second millennium b.c. in this sense. All the technical re-
quirements (presses, inks, page-shaped supports, even the art of
negative casting in metal) were then already in place. But there was
as yet no printing because no one was yet aware that by drawing
letters, one was dealing with types. Written signs were taken to be
characters. “Type-identifying” thought had not yet pressed itself
into consciousness. Gutenberg’s great deed was the discovery of
the types inherent in alphanumeric script.
The difficulty of achieving standardizing consciousness can
be illuminated through an example. The medieval dispute over
universals concerned the problem of comparison. What do I do
when I compare a table and a chair? Do these two objects have
something in common, something to be revealed as typical? Perhaps
their shared “furnitureness”? That was the view of the realists. Or
must I accept that the characteristics of these two things are not
comparable and that I have to pluck a word out of thin air (such
as the word furniture) to induce a comparison where no real one
is possible. That was the view of the nominalists. For the former,
the typical, the universal is actually embedded in particulars and
can be discovered: universalia sunt realia. Hence the designation
“realists.” For the latter, there is nothing behind particulars, and the
typical is nothing but a name we invent to facilitate comparisons:
universalia sunt nomina. Hence their designation “nominalists.”
Yet this dispute is not exclusively a matter of logic (does com-
parison refer back to a common feature or is it a trick for turning
unlike into like?). It really concerns an existential question; that is,
if universals are real, then they must form a hierarchical pyramid. If
 Print ✴ 49
I can establish furnitureness in the comparison between table and
chair, I must be able to proceed to a higher universal by comparing
furniture with clothing, and so on to the tip of the pyramid, the
universal of all universals, and from there to God. Through com-
parisons, then, I can approach God and save my soul, and this by
two complementary methods: either through thought, by drawing
broader and broader generalities out of particulars, and rising by
means of this inductive method from a lower to a higher level of
reality until I finally reach God by the intellectual route (philoso-
phy and theology), or practically, through works, by extracting the
general (the essence) from the particular (the accident) and from
this essence to a higher one, until I finally extract the final essence
of all essences (the “fifth,” the quintessence), that is, God. From lead
I can precipitate gold, from that a virgin spring, the philosopher’s
stone, and finally God. Through disciplined actions (e.g., alchemy),
I can find God and save my soul.
If the universals are nothing but words, all philosophy and
theology turns into sheer wordplay ( flatus vocis—a breath of air
produced by a voice, a vocal grunt), and all practices that seek
God, such as alchemy, become the devil’s work. For then I must
accept that the world into which I was thrown at birth is made up
entirely of unique phenomena that cannot be compared. Should I
pay attention to them, my soul will become entangled, as in a trap.
And so I must turn my back on this vale of tears and open myself
to God in pure, inarticulate faith (sola fide) if I would avoid the
devil and save my soul.
Whatever history books say about it, the invention of print
settled the dispute over universals in favor of the realists. It is true
that many nominalists have made substantial contributions to the
development of modern philosophy and science, but the realist
watchword universalie sunt realia has become a foundational idea in
modern thought and research. We believe in the reality of universals,
of types, in the reality of atomic particles, genes, social classes, and
races, and we try to identify and manipulate them. If this belief is
50 ✴ does writing have a future?
now beginning to wobble, if we are surreptitiously tending toward
nominalism (e.g., as positivists or phenomenologists), it is because
typifying thought is exhausted. It is becoming absurd.
The invention of print settled the dispute over universals in favor
of the realists. Print showed clearly that when we write (and when
we think in the way that is expressed in writing), we manipulate
types. Print made types handy. It took them in hand. In this way,
it shifted the idea of the reality of ideas (this belief that sponsored
medieval realism) from the speculative into the practical. Print
became one of the pillars of modern science.
Prior to Gutenberg, a writer considered written signs to be
characters that made the characteristic sound of a specific spoken
language visible. According to this erroneous belief, each specific
language demanded a characteristic alphabet of its own, for the
Latin A meant a different sound from the Greek alpha. There were
at that time four alphabets in use simultaneously—that is, the Latin,
the Greek, the Hebraic, and the Arabic—so that each language
could make itself visible in its characteristic way. Now there was
also a dim awareness that written signs actually were types and not
characters and that it is therefore possible to refer to, say, Slavic
languages with Greek letters, Germanic ones with Latin letters, and
Iranian ones with Arabic letters, but this awareness remained dim:
the four languages characteristic of each alphabet were held to be
sacred. If these four alphabets are still preserved today, despite a
clear awareness of the typology of writing, it is because remnants
of the dim awareness continue to resist typifying thought today.
Print threw a clear light on the dim consciousness of types, and
so, too, on the problematical (doubtful) features of this thinking.
Two problems will be identified here because they illuminate the
contemporary crisis in this thinking.
1. Print demonstrates that types are not unchanging, eternal
forms (as Plato and the medieval realists thought) but that they can
be adapted, improved, and discarded. For example, because the Latin
alphabet had no sign for the German sound “sch,” the type sch was
 Print ✴ 51
invented (incidentally, not an especially brilliant achievement). That
did not prove the nominalist thesis that “types are pure invention.”
On the contrary, it meant that although there really are types, they
still must be adapted to what is characteristic. The type sch does not
hover over us in some sort of Platonic heaven, but neither can it just
be plucked from the air. Rather one is forced to accommodate the
sound to sch. In doing so, one has in fact understood the sound to
be typical. The concept of “theory” is thereby changed radically. No
longer does it mean a pious, passive contemplation of eternal forms,
no more an empty play of words. It means a progressive modeling
of better and better (and in this sense truer) types. Theories offer
knowledge, but they are inventions. The seeds of this underlying
problem with scientific knowledge lay in the invention of print.
The contemporary crisis in historical thought is in part rooted in
an awareness of this problem.
2. Something printed is a typical thing, and not a distinctive,
incomparable, unique thing. A printed paper is a specimen, one
among many examples of one unique thing (e.g., of a manuscript).
Something printed is valuable not as a distinctive object (as this
singular piece of paper) but as a type. The interesting thing about
it is not the production of print (of papers, of printed writing) but
the production of the types (of the text). The sight of something
in print makes a mockery of the classical anthropology of homo
faber. It confirms the Christian theory of work as punishment.
In the presence of print, it becomes evident that the occupation
worthy of human beings is typifying, the manipulation of signs,
the “making of meaning”: better, informing. Work—the produc-
tion of distinctive things, comes in for distain, as a subhuman
gesture to be dismissed with the flip of a switch. Among the first
effects of this contempt for work and esteem for typification was
the Industrial Revolution, that is, the installation of machines.
Print can be understood as the model and core of the Industrial
Revolution: information was to be pressed not only into books but
also mechanically into textiles, metal, and plastic.
52 ✴ does writing have a future?
Print reaches further, past the Industrial Revolution into postin-
dustrial society. It is the core of the current rising contempt for
distinctive objects and esteem for typical, pure information. The
revaluation of all standards associated with work is relevant here,
and consciousness of this problem is one of the bases of the cur-
rent crisis.
As writers of the Gutenberg era became aware that they were
manipulating types, that they were “informaticians,” they unfurled
the typifying mode of thought in all areas of culture. This consists
in finding types suited to distinctive features of the world, in
continually improving them, and in then impressing them on the
world. This way of thinking took rough form about the middle
of the second millennium b.c. in the eastern Mediterranean. It
pressed into consciousness clearly with print, and in modern times
conquered the world. The Gutenberg galaxy reaches further back
and further forward than McLuhan realized.
But there are some signs that the victory was not definitive, that
is, the victory of typifying thought—this modified realism—over
a previously suppressed nominalism. It is possible to hear again
the nominalist objection to sweeping classification and typification
of all phenomena through science, technology, politics, art, and
philosophy, namely, that none of it is anything more than a “vocal
grunt.” Husserl’s battle cry “back to the things themselves,” away
from typological abstraction and back to the concrete instance, is
an example of this. It challenges progress. For progress—of science,
technology, economics, and politics—from the concrete object to
an abstract type is slowly but surely revealing itself to be destructive
madness, for example, in Auschwitz, in thermonuclear armaments,
in environmental pollution, in short, in the apparatuses that typify
and universalize everything. We are beginning to lose faith in the
reality of universals, and the nominalistic, vale-of-tears feeling
has begun, with Kafka at the latest, to crystallize in and around
us. Print-based thought is about to be overhauled.
The informatic revolution, this production of signs and their
 Print ✴ 53
positioning in electromagnetic fields, openly breaks with print
consciousness. The new signs that appear on computer or televi-
sion screens are no longer traces engraved in objects; they are no
longer “typographic.” The kind of thought that is producing the
new information is no longer a typographic, typifying kind of
thought. The gesture of print and the mentality that expresses itself
in this gesture are becoming archaic. Western, historical, typifying
thought is becoming archaic. Progress is becoming archaic so that
the progressive of the present will become the reactionary of the
future. That said, most of us are condemned to think in a reaction-
ary way because we have been imprinted with the trace-making
mode of thought. We would prefer to go on writing and printing:
we face the informatic revolution with fear and loathing.
It is fairly clear what will be lost in the transition from Guten-
bergian to electromagnetic culture, namely, everything we treasure
in the Western legacy. On the other hand, we do not see what we
have to gain. If we could do that, we would already have reached
the first step toward the new way of thinking. But by trying to im-
merse ourselves in nominalistic thought, say, in the life and poetry
of Francis of Assisi, we can get a sense of the future. Sola fide?
We can regard print, this alphabetic writing that has become
self-aware, as the expression of Western, historical, scientific,
progressive thought. The informatic revolution makes print, the
alphabet, and this kind of thought superfluous. It leads to a new
mode of thought that can be anticipated but not yet perceived. That
sounds like an assertion, but it is really a concerned and hopeful
question directed toward the future.
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Instructions
One way to anticipate the kind of thinking that characterized the
informatic revolution is to observe those who manipulate the ap-
paratus, setting the new signs into electromagnetic fields. The word
program is the Greek equivalent of the Latin praescriptio and the
German Vorschrift. Are these people continuing to write or start-
ing again? Are contemporary reactionaries on the mark when they
assert that nothing has changed fundamentally, that the essential
always stays the same? To whom are these people writing? For they
are not writing past a conclusion to another human being. Rather
they write with and for apparatuses. Didn’t the earlier discussion
show that writing to other people was the essential thing about
writing? So the essence of writing has changed for these people;
it is another writing, in need of another name: programming. For
reactionaries, this is not just uncomfortable; it is terrifying.
From a certain angle, such terror in the face of the new appears
harmless. So people don’t write alphabetically anymore but rather
use other, so-called binary codes. Artificial intelligences are too
stupid (perhaps only for the time being) to be able to decode let-
ters. The new computer codes are in fact extraordinarily simple (as
simple as artificial intelligences), but it is not simple to use them.
They are structurally simple and functionally complex systems.
Most of us have not mastered them; on the other hand, we have all
learned the alphabet, and print has resulted in a comprehensive,
democratizing literacy. The new computer codes have made us all
illiterate again. A new literate caste has arisen. For most of us, the
new writing (computer programs) is suffused with that kind of

55
56 ✴ does writing have a future?
mystery that surrounded alphabetic writing before the invention of
print. What cannot be decoded is a frightening secret. People fall to
their knees (supplex turba) and try to appease it (the Golden Calf
before the two tablets). Of course, nothing could be easier than to
penetrate the mystery. One has only to learn the secret codes (in the
case of the Romans and Jews, the alphabet; in our case, computer
codes). But that is exactly what our fear of the new makes impos-
sible. Learning it is child’s play only for our fearless children. We
have to try other things. We have to try to use a typographic way
of thinking to get to grips with post-typographic “writing.” Since
this essay is literal, it will try to dispel a terror of programs.
If a program is to be understood as writing directed not toward
human beings but toward apparatuses, then people have been
programming since writing was invented—before there were any
apparatuses. For one wrote to human beings as though they were
apparatuses. One prescribed models of human behavior, and these
instructions constitute a prominent thread in the advancing discur-
sive mesh we call Western literature. Using this thread to guide us
in a survey of Western history, the development can be represented
as follows: at the beginning, since the Stele of Hammurabi, these
instructions were called “commandments”; then, with the Twelve
Tablets, they became “laws,” which later branched out into decrees,
regulations, and other forms of instruction; during the Industrial
Revolution, instructions were added that pertained to people’s
behavior toward machines, or “user’s manuals”; until finally, since
the informatic revolutions, the program discussed earlier—namely,
instructions to machines—completed this development. Programs
are not only a completely new way of writing, they are also the
culmination of a pattern established when writing began.
The thread of instructions just described (and with it the history
of the West that is articulated in it) can be understood in various
ways, for example, as a tendency toward desacralization. The com-
mandments (say, the Ten Commandments) were holy. They had a
heavenly author. It was a superhuman authority that made human
 Instructions ✴ 57
beings into marionettes (apparatuses). The laws (say, constitutional
law) had, if not a heavenly, at least a mythical author (e.g., the
people), and this mythical authority manipulated the people’s behav-
ior. It became more and more clear subsequently that instructions
were made by people manipulating other people. User’s manuals
revealed that all instruction seeks machine-like, automatic human
behavior. This is why user’s guides are shorter the more automated
the machine, until, with fully automatic machines, they become
superfluous. In their place are the programs. Here no human beings
require instruction. Instructions can instead be issued to appara-
tuses. In this way, it becomes clear that the goal of instructions (and
of Western history) has been completely profane behavior and that,
when this goal is achieved, it is superfluous to instruct people at all
or to manipulate them. They behave as they should automatically.
The thread of instructions can be read equally well as a ten-
dency to devalue behavior, to reduce it to an object of scientific
study (should “science” be understood as value-free thinking and
action). The commandments prescribe behavior according to
eternal values, the laws, behavior consistent with high values.
Subsequent instructions tend to become value-free, until finally,
user’s manuals apply to functional behavior only. So it concerns
a depoliticization and functionalization of behavior, which can
be read from the syntactical construction of instructions. They
change from imperative propositions (“thou shalt”) to functional
if–then propositions. The commandment “thou shalt honor thy
father and mother” becomes advice for use: “If you want to eat
chicken soup, do this and this with the tin of chicken soup.” This
steady devaluing of behavior concludes with programs. In logically
constructed computer programs, there is no symbol for should. Ac-
cordingly, it becomes clear that the tendency of instructions (and
of Western history as a whole) is toward a complete depoliticiza-
tion of all behavior and that when this goal is achieved, human
beings and their society will steer themselves automatically, like
a cybernetic system.
58 ✴ does writing have a future?
These two readings of the tendency inherent in instructions
convey some sense of the rising functional way of thinking. It is
a profane, value-free thought. It can no longer be grasped in his-
torical, political, or ethical categories. Other cybernetic, comput-
able, functional categories must be applied to it. For this reason,
programming cannot actually be called writing. It is a gesture that
expresses a different kind of thought.
The question remains whether the effort undertaken earlier
to demystify programming has dispelled the terror. Of course,
the matter can be approached from an optimistic point of view.
Because programs instruct apparatuses, the burden of instruction
shifts from human beings to inanimate objects, and human be-
ings become free to behave as they like. From this standpoint, the
tendency inherent in instructions and culminating in programs
is aimed at freedom. Apparatuses behave better and faster than
human beings: they assemble automobiles better, they sew better,
dig better, and soon will be able to do their cherry-picking more
efficiently. And they think better too: they calculate, draw, and make
decisions faster. (They are, curiously, better at calculation than they
are at cherry-picking.) From now on, people can concentrate on
programming apparatuses. Could that not be the freedom we have
sought since history began?
Two quite different kinds of objections come to mind. The
first one, close at hand, is fairly easy to dismiss. It is concerned
that some behavior cannot be taken over by apparatuses and that
the sort of behavior that cannot be automated is exactly the sort
that constitutes human dignity, for example, the commandment
to “honor thy father and mother.” That is an error. All modes of
behavior, of any sort, can be programmed and automated. It is a
matter of breaking the behavior down into its constituent elements,
into actemes, and then computing them back together again. Just
such breaking down and recalculating is what programming is. The
commandment mentioned earlier can be broken down into actemes
 Instructions ✴ 59
such as “feed your bedridden mother rice pudding.” Apparatuses
will obey this commandment better, more quickly, and more pre-
cisely than human beings do.
The second hesitation to be optimistic weighs more heavily. It
is concerned that freeing people from the obligation to behave in
particular ways will result in a complete lack of freedom. If there
is no necessity to act in a particular way (to work, to walk, to sit, to
calculate, to draw), then all behavior will revert to an acte gratuit, a
meaningless, absurd gesture. This objection assumes that freedom
can open up only in the struggle against necessity. Completely un-
conditioned behavior is no more free than completely conditioned
behavior. At this point, an optimist might object that any human
behavior, whether compliant with instructions, is absurd in the face
of death (the inevitability of death) and that the underlying inten-
tion of all instruction was always to give this absurdity a meaning.
When instructions are shifted from human beings to apparatuses,
human beings are free to give meaning to the absurd behavior of
apparatuses (and in so doing, to their own behavior as a function
of the apparatuses). Accordingly, to program is to give meaning,
and the intention behind programming is to free human beings to
give the world meaning and to make their lives in it free.
Maintaining an optimism that dispels our fear of programming,
one could claim that with the demise of writing through program-
ming, the goal of history is achieved. All behavior has become
profane, scientific, functional, apolitical, and people are free to
give such behavior meaning. History, and the mode of thought that
produces history, is over. A new, posthistorical mode of thought
is arising that assigns meaning to absurdity. Let us leave aside the
question whether this optimism actually satisfies all conditions.
Even if we do accept it, the question whether programming will
render all writing obsolete remains open. All instructions can be
programmed, but things other than instructions will be written.
Literature does not consist wholly of commandments, laws, and
60 ✴ does writing have a future?
user’s manuals, after all. And these other threads in the literary mesh
may well not be programmable. So writing will continue after all.
And by means of this sustained writing, historical, political, ethical,
and aesthetic modes of thought will be preserved.
This (reactionary) objection proves to be an error. It is true that
literature does not consist exclusively of instruction, of models of
behavior. There are also models of knowledge (e.g., scientific and
philosophical texts) and models of experience (e.g., poetry and
everything understood by belles lettres). Dividing literature into
models for behavior, knowledge, and experience follows the classical
division of ideals into good, true, and beautiful, a division that has
been insupportable since the Industrial Revolution. Today we have
a way of reducing models of knowledge and experience to models
of behavior by tracing all propositions back to if–then propositions.
Propositional calculus permits all statements of whatever kind to
be translated into functions. All literature becomes programmable.
A programmed literature would take all texts back to instruc-
tions so as to then be computed by artificial intelligences. Even
judging by the synthetic images that are already available now, it
is clear that exceptionally effective models of knowledge and ex-
perience can be produced in this way. As binarily, digitally coded
models of knowledge illuminate the screen, from simple statistical
curves to complex representations of whole theories, they put all
scientific, alphanumerically coded texts in the shade. So-called
computer art is just beginning to generate models of experience
(fantastic, impossible configurations) that are in fact images, but
images that rely on digitally coded programs that are themselves
transcodings of alphanumerically coded texts. These remarkably
powerful models of experience should be seen in the first instance
as programmed poetry and fiction, and only then as “visual art.”
In this way, an optimistic perspective on the programming of
all writing seems justified: if alphabetic writing is to be replaced
by digital programming, then all the messages, texts, behavior,
 Instructions ✴ 61
knowledge, and experience that were once mediated by texts will
be transmitted more effectively and more creatively through the
new informatic media.
But we should not let ourselves be swept up by this optimism.
Much would be gained by the programming of everything that
has been written alphanumerically until now, but the terror of
reactionaries cannot be dismissed so lightly. For in the recoding
from alphanumeric into digital codes, something would be lost
that not only reactionaries may acknowledge as the critical value
of writing. For spoken language would lose its position as media-
tor between thinking and writing. Digital codes are ideographic in
the sense of making concepts (ideas) visible. They differ from the
alphabet in signifying no spoken sounds. In programming what
was formerly alphabetically written, thought will have detached
itself from language. And that is terrifying.
Writing, as we learned it in school, is a gesture of historical
consciousness. Programming, as our children are beginning to
learn it, is a gesture of a different sort, a gesture better compared to
a mathematical than to a literary consciousness. The codes it uses
are as ideographic as numbers. Wittgenstein, in his remark on the
meaninglessness of saying “two and two is four at six o’clock in the
afternoon,” showed that mathematical thought is unhistorical. But
until now, mathematical thought has been organically immersed
in alphanumeric code and swept along in the flow of historical
thought. Now programming is rising up from alphanumeric code,
becoming independent and separating itself from spoken language.
That justifies a degree of pessimism.
This page intentionally left blank
Spoken Languages
When programming has set itself free of alphanumeric writing,
thought will no longer need to work through a spoken language
to become visible. The detour through language to the sign, such a
distinguishing mark of Western cultures (and all other alphabetic
cultures), will become superfluous. Thought and speech will no
longer be fused, as they were when the alphabet was predominant.
This fusion is the reason the rules of thinking are called “logic”
(rules of words), that we use language criticism as a method of
analyzing thought, that the Bible claims the Word to have been
the beginning, or that Heidegger calls words the “house of being.”
This fusion of thinking and speaking is actually remarkable. For
there certainly have always been other codes besides the alphabet
for making thought visible, for example, codes of painting and
codes of mathematics. So people were always aware that speaking
was only one of the ways to play with thought, and they repeat-
edly attempted to find a common denominator among them. An
impressive example is the (failed) effort to reduce the rules of logic
and of mathematics to one another (see Russell and Whitehead,
Principia Mathematica). But the alphabet was the dominant code.
For thousands of years, it overshadowed all others. As the alphabet
is surpassed, thought will liberate itself from speech, and other,
nonlinguistic thought (mathematical and pictorial, and presum-
ably completely new ones as well) will expand in ways we cannot
yet anticipate.
Speaking, on the other hand, will not be surpassed at all. On the
contrary: released from the alphabet, spoken language will flood

63
64 ✴ does writing have a future?
the scene, tapes and speaking images will scream and whisper to
society. Even artificial intelligences will learn to speak. There will
be technical developments in speech, the skill of perceiving spo-
ken language. The danger will be that language, released from the
alphabet, will revert to an uncultivated state. Our languages have
passed through the filtering and caustic grid of the alphabet for
thousands of years, and in this way, they have become powerful and
beautiful, delicate and precise instruments. If they are allowed to
grow unchecked, they—along with a great deal of thinking—will
become barbaric.
The alphabet’s effect on speaking should not be overestimated,
however. For in observing the contemporary linguistic situation,
one notices that the overwhelming majority of writing and speech
is nonsense and worse. About 95 percent of everything spoken
and written is grammatically incorrect (say, such statements as
“this washing machine is better” or “Berlin lies in the north”) and
for this reason actually says nothing. After listening to people in
the street and reading the flood of newspapers, magazines, and
novels, a glance at a computer program can come as an aesthetic
refreshment. If this twaddle, this demagoguery, ceases to dominate
thinking after the loss of the alphabet, it might be regarded as an
epistemological, political, and aesthetic catharsis.
Language is certainly a high intellectual achievement, and the
languages available to us belong to our greatest treasures. Some of
the innumerable aspects of this legacy that have been left to us to
preserve and expand are sketched in what follows.
Our languages (the Indo-Germanic and Hamito-Semitic) are
inflected; that is, in them, words change meaning according to
their position in the sentence order. Sentences formed from such
words are pro-nouncements: predicates pushed out by their sub-
jects. Accordingly, the things our languages say (the universe of
our languages) consist of projectile, arrow-shaped situations. For
example, the sentence “Hansel loves Gretel” is a sketch of “loves”
that goes out from Hansel and aims at Gretel. This is not true of all
 Spoken Languages ✴ 65
types of languages. In agglutinative languages (e.g., Tupi-Guarani),
there are word collages instead of sentences so that their universe
(that of which they speak) has a circumstantial rather than a pro-
jectile character. In some isolating languages (say, in Chinese),
there are no sentences, but there are juxtapositions of syllables,
and instead of a projectile character, their universe therefore has
a mosaic character. So long as we think in ways bound up with
language, we will be disoriented in these two universes. They make
our thought unsteady because they offer evidence that our universe
is structured not by reality but by our languages. So the unsteadi-
ness is a good thing, but it also shows what we owe our languages:
they offer us the net in whose threads and knots we think, feel,
desire, and act.
All our languages have the same inflected character (although
German, for example, tends toward agglutination, as in Donau-
dampfschiffarhtskapitän [Danube-steam-ship-journey-captain]
and English toward isolations, such as “put” or “set”). But each of
our languages manipulates this structure in its own unique way.
Each has its own grammar. That enables us to relocate from our
own language into another without falling out of the net that sup-
ports us. And translation is a powerful method of expanding and
deepening our universe. For our languages are open systems: ele-
ments of other languages (words and rules) may be incorporated
without loss of character. Translation enables us to say something
we’ve said before in our own language differently. The variety, the
structural similarity, and the functional difference among our lan-
guages means our universe is always open to a creative renewing
of ideas, feelings, desires, and acts.
This variation in our languages has one more aspect. Spoken
languages are acoustic phenomena. Each language has its own
melody and distinctive rhythm, and this on multiple levels: from
that of phonemes to the level of words and sentences and from
there to the level of discourse. Many of these linguistic melodies
and rhythms converge (e.g., the musicality of Italian with that
66 ✴ does writing have a future?
of Russian), whereas others face off against each other (e.g., the
rhythm of Czech with that of French). As a result, we are in a posi-
tion to create linguistic compositions and to continually bring new
resonances to our universe.
Our languages are codes in which various wordings are locked
into symbols for concepts, and the rules of sentence construction are
locked into rules for thinking. They are double-locked codes. Now
codes tend toward two opposed horizons, toward denotation, where
each single symbol means one particular element in its universe,
and toward connotation, where each symbol refers to a region of
that universe that is ambiguously defined, and each element in the
universe may be referred to by more than one symbol. The advan-
tage of a denotative code (e.g., symbolic logic) is that it is clear and
distinct; that of a connotative code (e.g., painting) is the wealth of
references and resulting variety of possible interpretations. The
double locking of our languages means they can be expanded toward
both horizons. We can speak exactly and precisely (denotatively)
as well as allusively and suggestively. We can even do both at the
same time. Our languages are exceptionally productive codes as a
result. Our universe is an exceptionally rich one.
Our languages are youthful creatures compared to the age of
the species “man.” Indo-Germanic and Hamito-Semitic languages
appear to have a common root that doesn’t reach back very far into
the Neolithic. But human beings have probably been speaking for
hundreds of thousands of years. So our languages are systems that
have hardly been deployed at all so far and that could be deployed
in untold ways. And yet the experience of hundreds of generations
is stored in our word forms and sentence construction. When we
speak, this collective memory presses from us out into the public
arena, where it is enriched. This is not the case for all spoken lan-
guages. Most languages—the so-called primitive ones—are not
sufficiently codified to serve as memory. In some Indian languages,
the vocabulary changes from decade to decade because many words
become taboo and may no longer be used. Some other languages
 Spoken Languages ✴ 67
are by contrast so highly codified that they seize up and can no
longer be developed (ancient Egyptian would offer an example).
We face the challenge of preserving and passing on our languages’
precious balance between rigor and elasticity.
The enthusiasm for our languages that has been expressed here
explains the pessimism with which the last chapter closed. For if
the future brings a new code that relies less and less on linguistic
codes and more and more on codes of calculation and computa-
tion, if the swell of speech that will then flood over us turns out to
be no more than background noise for the new mode of thought,
then we may well fear the loss of language, the precious legacy
we have abandoned. We may comfort ourselves with the thought
that before the invention of the alphabet, spoken language as a
unique code was continually enriched and transmitted, and that
the same might happen after the alphabet becomes obsolete. But
this does not diminish the fear. For with respect to spoken lan-
guage, prealphabetic conditions are categorically different from
postalphabetic ones.
Prior to the invention of the alphabet, spoken language was (to
the extent we can establish it in retrospect) a carrier of myths, that
is, of models of social experience, knowledge, and behavior. And
there were people, the mythagogues (probably predominantly the
old and wise), whose task it was to pass the myths on. With the
task came the further responsibility of preserving and enriching
the languages, a duty that was taken over by alphabetic writing.
Homer may be an example of the transition from speaking to
writing as a language-preserving and language-creating gesture.
(The mythagogues were probably singers, incidentally, so that
the transition to alphabetic writing could have been perceived as
an impoverishment of a whole dimension of spoken language.)
After the alphabet becomes obsolete, there will no longer be an
elite entrusted with the preservation and enrichment of spoken
language. Left to itself (that is, to prattle), language will run wild.
A glance at the current situation, though still embryonic, shows
68 ✴ does writing have a future?
how little hope there is that an illiterate elite of the future might
take care of the language.
Certain phenomena seem to signal the formation of such an
elite. Let us consider two of them: the books spoken on cassette
and oral poetry on cassettes and records. Both examples were
identified because they represent extreme cases. Spoken books
are texts read aloud so that the spoken language depends on what
has been written alphabetically, whereas oral poetry specifically
rejects any transmission through writing. The first example can be
provisionally bracketed out of this discussion: if no more books are
written, there will be no spoken books either. Such communication
without images would be an unnecessary impoverishment of the
message. The second example does deserve attention. Here the
new mythagogues (Dylan Thomas, Brazilians, Indian and African
bards) seem to have a creative effect on language and to restore
its lost musical dimension. Not until the invention of the tape
recorder, one would think, had linguistic creativity had such an
immediate and extensive impact as with these poems distributed
in their millions. But are we actually dealing with poetry? However
one defines this word etymologically—whether as dictation or as
adage—on closer consideration, there is something different going
on with these new mythagogues.
For cassettes and records are largely obsolete. Not so much
because an opera on videotape carries more information than one
on a record but rather because images suit the rising new mode of
thought better than sound. For this reason, poetry on cassettes or
records will soon be displaced by video clips. That is just a question
of the rapidly diminishing costs of the requisite apparatus. Poets
who are still making cassettes and records will program video
clips, not only because they are not actually poets (engaged with
language) but also because they create new models of experience.
They address those who cannot yet afford clips. Their linguistic
creativity serves a rising technology, and the speaking and sing-
ing images they will produce—in fact, already produce—will use
 Spoken Languages ✴ 69
language among more prominent codes. And so exactly because
contemporary spoken poetry is so creative, it shows that spoken
language is doomed to enter the service of new codes and to become
background noise—as we know it from sound film, in music, and
still more in speaking as an auxiliary function, so that it can be
said of silent film that it is the true filmic language.
In the postalphabetic situation there will be no elite entrusted
with the care of language. People will be subject to persuasion from
all sides, and it will penetrate into them more deeply than ever
before, but in terms of effect, speaking will merely assist (as, say,
gestural codes do today) the dominant codes. This suggests that
with the rise of speech in an unimaginably distant past, a rich and
creative gestural code was degraded into something auxiliary, just
as speech is about to be degraded. That justifies pessimism. In the
future, people will speak as Neapolitans gesticulate. Considering
the treasure that language is, that is a misfortune.
This page intentionally left blank
Poetry
A distinction is traditionally made between poetry and mimicry
(poiesis and mimesis). But under the sway of the alphabet, this
close connection between thinking and language—poetry—is
usually understood as a language game whose strategy is to cre-
atively enlarge the universe of languages. This universe becomes
poetically broader and deeper through the manipulation of words
and sentences, the modulation of linguistic functions, a game
with the meanings of words and sentences, rhythmic and melodic
modulation of phonemes. Poetry in this sense is that source from
which language always springs anew and, in fact, overall in litera-
ture, even in scientific, philosophical, or political texts, not only
in poetic ones. The preceding reflections imply that poetry, as the
opposite of imitation, will break new ground, in fact, ground that
only opens with the introduction of apparatuses and the codes that
go with them. Images will detach themselves from their imitative,
mimetic function and become inventive and poetic. This poetic
power is already clearly visible in films, videos, and synthetic im-
ages. As for poetry, in the sense of a language game, on the other
hand, its route to the new culture appears to be blocked: for it is
bound to alphabetic writing.
At first glance, it looks as though there could also be nonalpha-
betic language games. Can’t apparatuses play with language just as
well as with images and musical sounds? Could there not be elec-
tronic poetry along with electronic images and electronic music?
It’s possible to think of programs that produce linguistic modula-
tions automatically that could far surpass alphabetic modulation

71
72 ✴ does writing have a future?
in poetic force. Such programming could liberate alphabetic poetry
from the elitist prison it occupies today and, mindful of the decay-
ing alphabet, lead to finer, stronger speech. Should this strategy
be employed, we could expect psalms and epics such as those of
David and Homer to be brought to a new level. A new song to the
Lord would then be at hand.
To detach poetry as a language game from the alphabet and
to transpose it to computing apparatuses assumes that there are
people engaged in strengthening and honing the language. This
is exactly what the previous chapter put into question. To forecast
future poetic activity, we must reflect on poetry as the opposite
of imitation to then look closely at the special case of poetry as a
creator of language.
We are not always aware of what we owe to poetry in the broader
sense: almost everything we perceive and experience. Poetry pro-
duces models of experience, and without such models, we would
scarcely be able to perceive anything. We would be anesthetized and
would—having to rely on our atrophied instincts—stagger about
blind, deaf, and numb. Poets are our organs of perception. We see,
hear, taste, and smell on the basis of models we have from poets.
The world appears for us through these models. Poets created these
models. They did not just work from raw, shapeless material they
found somewhere: if we see colors, then it is through van Gogh
and Kodak; if we hear sounds, then it is through Bach and Rock;
if we taste, then it is through Brillat-Savarin and fast food. These
colors, sounds, and tastes are as they are not because they come to
us naturally but because they have been culturally—that is to say,
poetically—shaped from some imperceptible natural ground.
Let us attempt a history of perception on the hypothetical as-
sumption that colors were perceived differently before and after
van Gogh. It would be a history of aesthetics, of experience. Let
us choose the experience of love.
In our contemporary experience of love, we recognize models
 Poetry ✴ 73
of love made in Hollywood, shaped from those of romantic poetry
that in turn was shaped from those of the troubadours. Behind
these models, we find Christian love models, and behind this, Jew-
ish and Greek love models, until the roots are lost in prehistory.
Within this genealogical tree of love models, we can confirm such
offshoots as the eros of Plato, the Amor intellectualis of Spinoza, or
the Amor fati of Nietzsche. This historical view leads to a kind of
aesthetic Darwinism. Our own experience of love is related to that
of the ancient Greeks as a mammalian ear is related to a fish’s gills
or the Toltecs’ experience of love as a mammal’s eye to an insect’s
eye. Here the Hollywood models appear to be the most recent
and highest limb of a linear development: aesthetic imperialism.
We perceive better and experience better than any older or so-
called underdeveloped cultures. What we perceive to be true is the
truest of all.
Given that we know how models are produced, how poetry is
made, namely, through the computation of existing models with
intrusive noise, such a history of perception is no longer tenable.
We have before us not a branching genealogical tree but so many
compartmentalized models that proliferate in all directions, with
links between single models running through them. We should
speak not of progress but of multiplicity in perception, not of a
history of aesthetics but of a complex system of aesthetic models.
That our lives are conducted according to only a few experiential
models should be interpreted not historically (or by implication
politically, as a victory of the stronger over the weaker) but cy-
bernetically.
The model of love that channels the contemporary love experi-
ence is Hollywood’s rather than the Buddhist or the central African
because media channels are built on an historic, imperialistic
pattern. When this pattern becomes obsolete, these channels can
be reordered. If cable were introduced to the media, for example,
central African love models could be transmitted as well as those
74 ✴ does writing have a future?
of Hollywood. No historical revolution (resistance of the weak
against the strong) is needed for such a reordering. It is already
happening because the media demand cross-connections on the
basis of their inherent communicological1 structure. And that is
why a great many models of perceptions that had been suppressed
until now are pushing their way into the channels that feed us.
We already perceive in a far more complex manner than earlier
generations did. Not only our love lives, but also our perceptions
of color, sound, and taste are becoming more complex. Poetry in
the sense of a construction of experiential models is already be-
ginning to develop now and will achieve dimensions in the near
future that will exceed all expectations. What all we will perceive
and experience in the future is unimaginable.
The discussion was about sounding and moving images. Of
course, it is possible to consider spoken languages in this context
and say that poetry in the narrower sense, poetry as language
game, will also undergo a powerful development, thanks to the
cross-connections in media in the form of speaking images. We
could then anticipate a new poetic creativity, not only in images and
music but in language as well. But so detached from the alphabet,
wasn’t everything we treasured about poetry lost?
The alphabetic poet manipulates words and linguistic rules
by means of letters to produce a model of experience for others.
In doing so, he thinks he has forced his own, concrete experience
(sensibility, idea, desire) into the language and so made this expe-
rience and the language that has been changed by this experience
accessible to others. The new poet, equipped with apparatuses and
dining on them digitally, cannot be so naive. He knows he has to
calculate his experience, to dissect it into atoms of experience to
be able to program it digitally. And in making this calculation, he
must confirm the extent to which others previously modeled his
experience. He no longer identifies himself as author but rather
as remixer. Even the language he manipulates no longer seems
 Poetry ✴ 75
like raw material stacked up inside him but rather like a complex
system pressing in around him to be remixed. His attitude to a
poem is no longer that of the inspired and intuitive poet but that
of an information designer. He relies on theories and no longer
works empirically.
Such an informatic approach to poetry has long been in prepa-
ration. In Mallarmé, for example, this attitude finds theoretical,
nearly informatic expression; and the cool, calculating, exact, even
mechanical dimension of poetry is clearly visible in the precision of
many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. One could almost say that poetry
matures as it abandons its empirical, intuitive attitude in favor of a
theoretical one. Except that with the abandonment of the alphabet,
poetry loses all its naivety. All our conceptions of poets favored
by the muse must yield to a conception of the poet as a language
technician. Poetry will be desanctified.
Two comments should be made at this point, however. First,
a reflection on the transition from oral to alphabetic poetry is in
order, in particular, the way this transition is personified for us
in the figure of Homer. Didn’t people at that time speak in the
same way about the technologizing and desanctifying of poetry
as they compared the inspired singing of the bards with the liter-
ate poet’s manipulation of letters? Second, we should question
the detachment of the calculating poet. The new poet, sitting at
his terminal and waiting expectantly to see which unanticipated
word and sentence formations appear on the screen, is gripped
by a creative delirium no less intense than the one a writing poet
felt in his struggle with language. Each time a technical threshold
is crossed, observers have the sense that technology is getting the
upper hand, and each time, it turns out that the new technology
opens new creative possibilities.
So it looks as though intuition will give way to calculation after
poetry becomes informatic. But really, it is about a displacement
of the poet’s intentions. The alphabetic poet set out to change the
76 ✴ does writing have a future?
rules and repertoire of a language according to a prior design. He
saw the poem to be written in his mind’s eye, and he tried to force
the language to do justice to the vision. The calculating poet turns
the rules and repertoire of the language into a game of random
permutations, and his intention is to select the most suitable ones
from these computations that arise at random. This new level of
intentional play with chance is what distinguishes the new poetry
from alphabetic poetry.
We would accordingly expect two kinds of poetry in the sense of
a language game. On one hand, there will be artificial intelligences
that speak, presenting a continuous program of new poems in
keeping with their programs. And on the other hand, informa-
tion designers will, with the help of a permutation game, cause
poems—coded alphabetically or not—to light up on our screens
before us at a breathtaking pace, like some kind of artificial Eliot
or Rilke. Of course, it will also be possible to connect the bards
to the Rilkes, assuming there are still people who are interested in
language games. In light of the unimaginable number of perceptual
and experiential models that will flood over society in the form of
image and sound, it is doubtful whether language, by then form-
ing no more than a background code, will still be used to model
perception and experience. The forces of poetry will then prob-
ably be concentrating on nonlinguistic codes, some of them still
unknown. Such codes will no longer be read but will have to be
decoded in another way. This raises the now unavoidable question
of the future of reading.
A poet writing alphabetically directs his lines toward a reader.
He constructs an experiential model for people who presumably
read to the end before starting to live in accordance with it. That
means that the poet who writes alphabetically writes above all and
in the first instance to critics. The new poet is not facing such an
audience. The models he builds are to be received, changed, and
sent on. He is playing a permutation game that he received from
 Poetry ✴ 77
earlier poets and that he will pass on to future poets. In the future,
there will be no criticism in the traditional sense of the word.
What we fear, as we anticipate the most perfect form and the
end of alphabetic writing, is the decline of reading, that is, of criti-
cal decoding. We fear that in the future, all messages, especially
models of perception and experience, will be taken in uncritically,
that the informatic revolution could turn people into receivers who
remix messages uncritically, that is, into robots.
This page intentionally left blank
Ways of Reading
Common sense (known to be untrustworthy) suggests that writing
precedes reading, for to be able to read, one must have something
written. That is incorrect. There was reading (e.g., of peas) long
before the invention of writing. Writing itself is just a way of read-
ing: it involves selecting written signs from a heap, like peas, to
be strung into lines. To read (legere, legein) means “to pick out, to
peck.” This pecking activity is called “election,” the capacity to do
it, “intelligence.” And the result of pecking is called “elegance” and
“elite.” Writers are not the first intellectuals but only the intellectu-
als characteristic of a particular historical period. They peck more
elegantly than before. Assuming that reading precedes writing, and
pecking precedes stringing (and so calculating computing), then
we are facing difficulties common sense covers up.
Intelligence is the capacity to pick something out from a mass.
Our prehuman ancestors were intelligent beings as they read fleas
from one another’s pelts. Hens, too, are intelligent: they peck
kernels of corn from heaps. There are two methods of reading:
according to criteria (knowing what to pick) or unselectively. The
first method is called “critical”; the second is what the English
word to read means—“to guess.” Hens are critical. They peck ac-
cording to the criterion edible–inedible. But such a criterion poses
a problem for hens when it comes to writing. They eat the kernels
instead of threading them. Our prehuman ancestors may, on the
other hand, have arranged the selected fleas in rows before they
ate them. The setting of stones in rows argues in favor of such a
conclusion and suggests—uncomfortably—that critical thinking

79
80 ✴ does writing have a future?
came before writing. Those who claim that writing initiates and
promotes our critical faculties (an argument of this book as well)
must try to adjust their position to account for the hens.
Not everything can be pecked. There are illegible things. But
everything can be picked apart so that it can be pecked. It depends
on how sharp the picking beak is, and science hones the beak finer
and finer. But one hesitates before this formulation of the theory
of perception on which science is based. The beak needs to pick
apart to be able to peck later. If the beak becomes finer and finer,
then the kernels it can eventually peck will have to be smaller and
smaller until they can’t be pecked anymore. If science has calculated
everything down into kernels that it can no longer peck, then the
world has become illegible again. Criticism, which precedes reading
and is meant to make reading possible, can become too exact and
so prevent reading. That, too, is uncomfortable. It appears to leave
things illegible, mysterious—despite our having seen the capacity to
be critical as the root of human dignity since Kant at the latest.
To read critically (e.g., the way hens distinguish between kernels
of corn and kernels of sand) is to evaluate. Corn is good; sand is
not good. If interpretation has something to do with pretium (price
and/or value), then hens interpret. The opposite of critical reading
is puzzle solving (to read). This is not about the pecking of the pro-
verbial blind hen, who, of course, is known to find a kernel now and
then but is rather about a way of reading that categorically rejects
evaluation. Science claims to read in this way. It claims that as far
as it’s concerned, a kernel of sand has the same value as a kernel
of corn, and both may be pecked in equal quantities. And science
goes a step further, claiming that the puzzle-solving mode of read-
ing represents an advance over the critical mode. To leave values
behind and approach symptoms, a disciplined way would be the
ideal way to read. Cultural sciences, in interpreting the phenomena
they select, are imperfect sciences compared to natural sciences,
which refuse to interpret phenomena. That, too, is uncomfortable.
For it would seem that the critical faculty—far from being the basis
 Ways of Reading ✴ 81
of human dignity—is more characteristic of hens than of people.
The claim of natural science must be picked apart.
In their natural state, people were omnivores. They read every-
thing around them and in them interpretively: trees and dreams,
stars and coffee grounds, the flight of birds and their own livers.
They evaluated and priced all of it. Then, hesitantly and one step
at a time, they learned to read symptoms. They progressively re-
moved all the price tags from phenomena and fitted out the heap
of peckable kernels with value-free numbers instead. In fact, this
price tag removing progressed from the outer reaches of the world
closer and closer to the center, toward the readers themselves. First
the price tags were removed from stones and stars. In this way,
the first value-free sciences of astronomy and mechanics were
established. Then came the devaluation of kernels in the forms of
chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, and so on, closer and
closer to a human being, until finally, puzzle-solving, value-free
reading penetrated into the most secret corners of our thoughts,
feelings, and desires, driving out all values, all interpretations.
The hard science of symptomatology is about to eliminate all soft
interpretation from the legible world. There is nothing to criticize
in a world that has become value-free. No one is holy and no one
is criminal if he can be read as holy and/or criminal because he
acted under the influence of an ill wind and/or because he couldn’t
sleep with his mother.
If reading symptoms is the only right way to read at all, and all
interpretive, evaluative reading is seen to be primitive, gallinaceous,
reading in general can be turned over to artificial intelligences.
They are less like hens than we are. They don’t keep slipping into
evaluations; they are simply stricter. As far as we are concerned, we
can give up reading and learning to read. And along with reading,
we can give up writing—this reading that threads letters into lines.
How is critical reading actually different from reading symp-
toms, solving puzzles? From a heap of kernels that are to be read,
the critical reading picks out the good kernels until the only ones
82 ✴ does writing have a future?
in the heap are not good. For puzzle-solving reading, there are no
good or not good kernels, but even this way of reading must peck
some of the kernels and leave the rest. Puzzle-solving reading,
too, must stand before two heaps in the end, perhaps before one
heap of large and another of small kernels. Large and small are in
fact not values (but quantities), not price tags (but numbers), but
there must be some criterion for distinguishing between large and
small. There actually is such a criterion. It is called a “standard.” A
kernel is large or small in comparison to a standard. This standard
is calibrated, that is, equipped with a zero point from which all
other points are established. So puzzle-solving reading reveals itself
to be critical reading in disguise. Its criterion is a zero. The hard
sciences are not value free but rather order all values in relation to
an absolute zero. For them, the statement that a kernel is large (or
good or beautiful) in and of itself makes no sense; rather it must
be described as relatively large.
So interest shifts to this absolute zero. Let us call it something
positive to get to the bottom of all this measuring in the hard
sciences. Let us call this zero “truth.” It is a zero point because it
means an extreme position, unattainable and therefore empty.
In this context, it does not present any great difficulty. Whether
truth is something that eventually manifests itself, something we
finally uncover, or something we keep trying to achieve on the
basis of adequatio intellectus ad rem (the adaptation of the beak
to the heap of kernels), it is always at an unattainable borderline.
A puzzle-solving reader is attracted to this borderline. Popper
calls it “falsifying”: one pecks at the heap of false kernels until (at
the end of time) only the true kernels are left. And behold: truth
is unattainable, but somehow it must have been there all the time.
Otherwise, how could the false kernels have been recognized as
false and read out of the heap? The puzzle-solving reader reveals
himself to be just as primitive as the reader who uses criteria: like
the hens, scientists know from the start which kernels to peck.
The salient point here is Newton’s sentence hypotheses non fingo
 Ways of Reading ✴ 83
(I feign no hypotheses). The verb to feign (to behave as if) has three
substantives, namely, fiction, figure, and feint. Newton means that
his hypotheses are not fictions. But he must admit that they are
figures meant to assist in sifting out the truth once and for all, and
that they are feints, like all other figures such as parables, hyper-
boles, allegories, similes, and metaphors. Puzzle-solving reading,
unwilling to assume any prior values of any kind, nevertheless has
a fictive character. So Leonardo came to speak of fantasia essata,
a fiction of precision.
The assertions of science are on shaky ground. The puzzle-
solving way of reading is a criterion-setting one in disguise, and
science establishes values just as politics and art do. Science, like
art and politics, is a fiction. It is becoming more and more clear
that it is nonsense to try to distinguish sharply between science, art,
and politics. We can assume that in science, there are normative-
political as well as fictional, artistic, and poetic impulses at work,
and that in art and politics, the search for truth continues. In the
future, we must learn not to distinguish between value-free read-
ing (science) and interpretive reading (art and politics). We must
see, with Rilke, that it is an error to distinguish too strictly. If we
learn to do this, we can expect surprises. What science, art, and
politics will draw out of us, once they are bound into a unified way
of reading, will exceed our wildest dreams.
The uncomfortable aspect of this by now unavoidable merg-
ing of science with art and politics is, of course, that it will shortly
become impossible to distinguish between fictional and nonfic-
tional. If science has shown itself to be one fiction among others,
then it no longer makes sense to speak of “real” reality: “real” is
what the fictions say when they speak to us. That is surely what
Nietzsche meant with his assertion that art is better than truth. If
puzzle-solving reading, shown to be a criterion-bound reading in
disguise, is lost, with it goes our capacity to criticize, and here we
surely mean knowing the difference between fiction and truth. We
will then have seen through critical reading and will no longer be
84 ✴ does writing have a future?
able to criticize. The basis of all critical reading is exposed as a
belief that cannot be criticized.
Hens believe that corn kernels are good. Science makes this
belief relative: corn kernels are good in relation to eating (and
sand kernels in relation to the beach). That rests on the scientific
belief that reality is value free. To approach this belief critically is
to realize that reality is as we believe it to be. And this third belief
can no longer be criticized. For now it is clear that to be able to
criticize what is there, another belief must come into play. Only on
the basis of some kind of belief is reading possible. All critical read-
ing must start from a belief that is not open to criticism. Without
it, nothing can be criticized, nothing is legible. We have lost this
uncritical belief. With it, we’ve lost the capacity to criticize and to
read at all. It makes no sense to learn to read and write. There is
nothing more to read and even less to write.
The puzzle-solving reading that science endorses as the alterna-
tive to interpretive, critical reading has shown itself to be critical
reading in disguise. This shatters the foundation of reading, namely,
the belief in legibility (unconditional decoding). Yet it is still possible
to find within this crisis an entirely different kind of reading and to
go on reading in the future. Until now, to read was understood to
be the unraveling of a mystery. Wittgenstein rightly points out that
there is no longer anything to unravel. Having lost our faith, we
are actually incapable of recognizing a mystery in the world or in
ourselves that can be read and resolved. But it is also possible to
translate to read as “to guess,” and rather than mystery, one might
have a montage game—a jigsaw puzzle—in mind. So to read could
mean to peck and assemble kernels in such a way that something
meaningful is produced. This new way of reading is beginning to
crystallize now. It is called, of course, “computing.”
It is characteristic of computing to assume that the world and
we are meaningless (absurd), that either can be picked into kernels,
and that the kernels can then be assembled into something that
does have meaning. The calculating way of reading lends meaning
 Ways of Reading ✴ 85
to a meaningless original text. We are dealing with a reversal of the
vectors of meaning: no longer does the reader draw a meaning from
what is read; rather he is the one who confers meaning on what
is read. To this new reader (and to artificial intelligences), there
is nothing out there or in here that means anything at all: there is
nothing behind it. The only meaning to be derived from the whole
nonsense will be that projected through peckable, assembled mosa-
ics, selected from particles out there and in here (e.g., synthesized
images). The mosaics are fictions, figures, feints; in the aftermath
of the antiquated ways of reading, they are the only reality we will
have in which to live.
With this, all criticism has reached its original goal, the En-
lightenment is everywhere victorious, and there is nothing more
to criticize or illuminate. Everything has become clear, above all
that all criteria, values, and measurements are ideological and that
nothing stands behind these ways of reading (appearances). A fully
enlightened consciousness no longer needs to be intelligent, to be
about extracting meaning. It can concentrate on creative amalga-
mation. This transition from the old ways of reading to the new
involves a leap from historical, evaluative, political consciousness
into a consciousness that is cybernetic and playful, that confers
meaning. This will be the consciousness that reads in the future.
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Deciphering
The word cipher comes from the Arabic sifr (empty). The words
chiffre and zero are derivatives as well. It was the Arabs who intro-
duced us to numbers—and above all to zero. It is not necessary to
understand set theory to know that numbers are empty containers
meant to peck out quantities of something. For example, the cipher
“2” is an empty container for pecking pairs, and the cipher “a” is an
empty container for pecking any number of specific spoken sounds.
The difference between “2” and “a” can be found only in that from
which they peck: “2” pecks from a set of ideas (is an ideogram),
and “a” pecks from a set of spoken sounds. Pieces of writing, texts,
are rows of ciphers, whether they are letters or other written signs,
and to read them means to de-cipher them, that is, to peck out
the quantities (the contents) the ciphers contain. Writing pecks
contents by means of ciphers, and reading pecks out again what
has been pecked in. That is what encoding and decoding mean.
One takes the nominalist view in supposing that numbers, types,
and universals are purely conventions and that the kernels could
be pecked in containers of any form at all. Numbers just happen
to be convenient containers. The problematic aspect of this view
and its reappearance now, after centuries of “realist” hegemony, has
already been discussed at an earlier point in this essay.
Numbers are not simply lying around us like teaspoons or bowls;
rather they are ordered in a system, exactly because for pecking
kernels, it is important to have special containers for special types
of kernels. Such numerical systems have rules governing the re-
lationships between numbers. These systems are called “codes.”

87
88 ✴ does writing have a future?
One speaks, for example, of the alphabetic code and of the code
of Arabic numerals, and when these two codes are combined, one
can speak of an alphanumeric code. The word code comes from
the Latin caudex, meaning “tree trunk.” The word book, too, came
from the name of a tree. Letters are ciphers of a code.
Before reading a piece of writing, one must know what code it
uses. One must decode it first, before one starts to decipher it. That
is not always an easy matter. For example, the scribblings near and
below the cave paintings at Lascaux were recognized as codes only
with the aid of computers, and the traces left by rain on a mountain
near Rio de Janeiro were long thought to be in code (phonetic
letters). A Martian fallen to earth would conclude, based on the
strange regularity of irregularities in the distribution of ciphers
in any given phenomenon—that is, with the help of information
theory—that he was dealing with some kind of codified message.
Computers are such Martians come to earth. Champollion, who
unlocked hieroglyphic code, was a computer avant la lettre. But
all this is unnecessary in everyday reading. We received the key to
alphanumeric code in our schoolbags. We can confine ourselves
to the deciphering of texts.
Deciphering is pecking out the contents from their containers; it
is an unfolding of that which the encoder put in, folded in, implied.
And this not only at the level of single ciphers but at all levels of the
encoded message. Should these contents be folded strongly (as, say,
in the fragments of Heraclitus or in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), then
deciphering is a strenuous activity. But usually, our eyes fly along
the lines and pick up the contents easily; that is, as we know, an
error. For in this way, not only can many hidden contents, sitting
deep inside the container, get past us, but also, and worse, we can
be letting the encoder lead us down the garden path. For he can
give an A for an O, he can lie, and attentive deciphering will catch
him out. That shows that there are various ways of deciphering,
at least the following: the careful unfolding, the hasty once-over,
and the mistrustful sniffing about. The first could be called the
 Deciphering ✴ 89
“commenting,” the second the “obedient,” and the third the “critical”
sort of deciphering, in the awareness that any deciphering requires
that the reader have a critical attitude: he must have criteria to
recognize ciphers as such and then to decipher them. The sniffing
sort of deciphering is called “critical” because in it the critical at-
titude takes on the character of a method.
Pieces of writing are directed at the decoder. The writer reaches
his hand out toward the other to reach a decoder. His political ges-
ture of writing goes out not to people in general but to take hold of
a decoder. As a result, decoding and encoding, reading and writing,
should be divided into the categories suggested earlier. There are
texts that intend to be commented on. Others are to be obeyed,
and still others are to be criticized. There are not many categories
that classify literature better than these. But they are hardly ever
actually used because they address literature from the standpoint
of the writer rather than from the standpoint of the reader. The
reader can justifiably ignore or mistrust the writer’s intention. He
can obey texts that demand commentary (e.g., scientific ones),
obey those that demand criticism (e.g., poetic ones), and criticize
any kind of text whatsoever. If his text remains unread, perhaps
even more forcefully: if his text is deciphered incorrectly with
respect to his intention, the tragic aspect of writing comes into
view—the writer feels cornered. This is why the destiny that is his
text persecutes him with fear and loathing—although with helpless
concern as well. For he can do nothing more than wait passively
to see whether his text will find a decoder to read it correctly. This
addresses an aspect of all intersubjective connections, but one that
is especially clear with writing.

1. To comment: The word means “to think together,” inasmuch

as mens can be translated into English as “think.” The concept
of “mind” or “mente” is missing. It corresponds to the gesture
of writing, this gesture that produces something half made in
the expectation of being completed, that is, commented on, by
90 ✴ does writing have a future?
a reader; that the reader should think with the writer to think
through what has been thought, to lengthen the lines of the
text to a conclusion. The Bible springs to mind as an example
of commentarial reading, the Talmud as an even more impres-
sive one, on whose pages sequential commentaries surround
the object—the biblical text—in concentric circles. On a page
of the Talmud, the destiny of a text is made visible. But the
example also shows how commentary serves to render a text
banal, to profane (spread out) the text message. The biblical
sentence “honor the Sabbath, to keep it holy” (a formulation
already profaned through translation) has received so much
commentary that its contents have been emptied, and so
exhausted. The text has been written down and spoken away.
This, too, is a tragic aspect of writing: writing seeks commen-
tary, and when it is successful, that which has been written is
eroded away to banalities.
2. To obey: In principle, only texts that transmit models of con-
duct (should propositions) expect to be obeyed. The problem
with instructions is that, on one hand, all should propositions
can be translated into if–then propositions, and on the other
hand, that all statements, whether they are indicative models of
knowledge or optative models of experience, contain a hidden
grain of obligation. We know, for example, that the obligation
hidden in the indicative statements “the earth rotates around
the sun” and “the sun rotates around the earth” was contested to
the point that a life was sacrificed (Giordano Bruno). Whether
a text is deciphered as a should proposition depends at least as
much on the reader’s intention as on the writer’s. It is actually
amusing to watch scientific texts being twisted into rules of
conduct through “scientistic” reading. Such obedient reading,
turning scientists into unwilling authorities, comes from the
linear construction of texts. The eye must follow the line to
receive the message. In this way, all writers become authors and
authorities, whether they want to or not. Faith in the text, that
 Deciphering ✴ 91
sly form of slavery, can lead to monstrous contortions, however.
For an obedient reading of a text need not be a quick flyover;
it may be a slow crawl along each line. With such crawling, all
levels of a text except the absolutely literal one are lost to the
reader. Faith in letters (e.g., in some kabbalistic practices and
in some religious and political movements) shows the extreme
edge of such obedient reading, namely, the danger of textual
idolatry that lurks in writing of any kind. Those who fear a
totalitarianism of images need to consider this murderous
textual totalitarianism as well.
3. To criticize: The words critique and criminal come from the
Greek krinein and the Latin cernere, which mean something
like “break” in the sense of “break apart” or “break the law.”
We have known these double meanings at least since the En-
lightenment (and especially since Kant), as it became clear that
the one criticized saw the critic as a criminal, as did the critic
the criticized. To read a text critically is to take the writer to
be criminal and to commit a crime against him. The whole
thing is steeped in a criminal ambience. The reader becomes
a detective or a murderer, and it can happen—as in some de-
tective fiction—that the detective is the murderer. The writer
is always a criminal because he always lies, even if he is not
aware of it. The critical reader suspects him by reading against
the lines, into him, into his context, into his unconscious. So
he discovers that what the writer holds to be true is actually
class ideology, a sublimation or some other objectively de-
monstrable prejudice. The critical reader can further discover
that the writer lies consciously. Such deciphering is especially
successful with newspaper texts that count on obedient, uncriti-
cal reading and so can lie with impunity. The critical reader
is always a criminal because he does not grasp the arm that
has been extended to him in brotherly way but rather pushes
forward along this arm toward the writer, to take him apart.
Many writers nevertheless search for such a critique because
92 ✴ does writing have a future?
it is the way they discover what was going on inside them as
they wrote. Ideally, they would like to get commentary and
criticism simultaneously, but that is an impossible demand.
For commentary proceeds from the text outward, and criticism
penetrates into and through it. The history of the Enlightenment
could be described as the progress of this penetration: at the
beginning, the Enlightenment advanced against texts (in Kant’s
case, against scientific and philosophical texts; in Rousseau’s,
against political and aesthetic ones), then it penetrated into
writers (e.g., with Marx or Freud), and finally, as for example
in the Frankfurt School, into a confused massacre to end all
lies by means of lies. In this sense, too, critical reading, the
Enlightenment, can be seen as having ended successfully. All
texts, even critical ones, have become critically decipherable,
and all lines are turned against themselves, like Ouroboros,
to swallow their own tails.

There are two basic reasons to write: the private motivation (to
put one’s thoughts in order) and a political one (to inform oth-
ers). Today we are sufficiently enlightened to call these motives to
account. The ordering of ideas is a mechanical process, attribut-
able in any case to the order of writing, and can be left to artificial
intelligences. The readers to whom one writes are commentators
(who wear away what has been written) or followers (who subject
themselves to it like objects) or critics (who tear it apart), should
readers be found at all. So the feeling that writing is absurd, which
seizes and gnaws away at many writers, cannot be attributed to
superficial matters like textual inflation or the rise of more suitable
codes alone. It is rather the result of becoming conscious of writing
as engagement and as an expressive gesture. A glance not only at
the cultural scene but above all into himself shows the writer that
his hour has begun to strike.
An example of this depressed mood is the following. As I
type, I try to do two things: to put my ideas concerning the fall of
 Deciphering ✴ 93
writing in order and to share them with others. I know, however,
with a certainty bordering on probability that in ordering my
ideas, I have made mistakes that would have been corrected had
I programmed them into a computer. And I know with certainty
how my text will be read, should it be read despite text inflation.
It will, namely, be spoken away, or it will be passed over, or it will
be possible to show that I lied, consciously or unconsciously. What
is the case for what has been written here is also the case for the
example just conceived in the course of writing: Ouroboros. And
I wrote it nevertheless. This “nevertheless” stands as an invisible
title over all texts written today.
And why should writers actually complain? They are, after all,
readers first, before they become writers, if reading comes before
writing biographically as well as ontologically. Everything written
comments in answer to hastily and critically read texts. It is finally
the reader who hides writings in various ways. When the writer as
reader hides the writing of others, it is hardly surprising that he,
once enlightened, also hides his own writings—even as they are
being written. He has just learned how to decode his own coding.
What remains are empty containers. Once we know that to write
is to draw all zeros, the word cipher has won back its original
dreary meaning.
A reflection on writing and reading cannot rest at such a zero
point. If it doesn’t work this way, one must try another.
This page intentionally left blank
Books
This written reflection on writing, this “superscript,” has unwill-
ingly arrived at the conclusion that we should expect writing to
decline—for reasons that converge from various directions on this
conclusion. This bundle of reasons can be summarized as follows:
a new consciousness is coming into being. To express and transmit
itself, it has developed codes that are not alphanumeric and has
recognized the gesture of writing as an absurd act and so something
from which to be free. The question arises whether we are forced
to accept this unwelcome conclusion or whether it is still possible
to avoid it. We are, in fact, concerned that with the decline of writ-
ing, the critical faculty will also be lost. Whether this motivation
is justified (whether our continued engagement with writing is
rational, whether criticism is linked to writing, or whether it is a
desirable way of thinking at all), the motivation is strong enough
to start these considerations again. Not the gesture of writing but
the concrete actuality of writing will be the starting point.
If writing were to be abandoned, packing paper would be the
only kind of paper left. Overcome with homesickness, cellulose
would withdraw back into its cells, forests would flourish, and
reeds would sway in the morning wind, not only on the banks
of the Nile but in all the waters of the world. Doesn’t this green
utopia fill us bookworms, termites who chew through paper, with
sheer horror?
By then, there will be artificial memories different from and
better than libraries, to be sure. Everything that was once stored in
libraries will be transferred into these new memories. The contents

95
96 ✴ does writing have a future?
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica will take up less than a cubic cen-
timeter of space, and any information it contains will be instantly
available at the press of a key. There will be apparatuses that make
any piece information one wants light up the screen as a sounding
image, that test it from various angles automatically and follow its
logical consequences. All this testing and following will then be
automatically fed back into the cubic centimeter encyclopedia. It
will grow of its own accord, without being more than a tiny frag-
ment of the information stored in the artificial memory. This, along
with the green forests and the reeds swaying in the wind, should
be cause for joy rather than horror.
But high-function automatic memories, on one hand, and green
forests, on the other, are for us paper people places to visit, not to
live. We inhabit paper, we are used to it, and because it is so familiar,
so ordinary, we have made it sacred so as to be able to perceive
it at all under cover of its familiarity. Bible, for example, comes
from the Greek byblos, which is the way the Greeks pronounced
papyrus. We have been chewing paper for so many millennia that
this papier-mâché, saturated with our spittle, has become a part of
our being. Without paper, we would no longer properly be there
and so couldn’t set out on journeys to the lands of green forests
or artificial memories. Paper is that substrate that absorbs all our
knowledge and experience, be it the adventurous new signs of ar-
tificial memories or the green blur of the forests. We suspect that
whatever cannot be put on paper may not be anything at all. Paper is
our home, even if this home threatens to flood over us like a raging
sea. One might say, then, that the informatic revolution would save
more than the forests. It would save us from the danger of being
inundated with paper. But we’re bookworms, and we eat the very
thing that is eating us. We live from books and for books.
A book is, from one point of view, an intermediate stage on the
way from the forest into the land of artificial intelligences. It is always
some part of a forest: book is a tree name; liber is tree bark and comes
from the Greek lepis (shell), which in turn derives from the ancient
 Books ✴ 97
lep (to peel). The book was peeled from the forest, and its leaves say
what they say. But the book is also a piece of artificial intelligence,
for it is an artificial support for memory consisting of bits (letters) of
computed information. The book may be seen as what one must go
through to get to artificial intelligences (even if this passage took a
few millennia). But we don’t see the book in this way at all. We don’t
think of it as it was peeled out of the Egyptian reeds and rolled up,
as having been folded, cut, sewn, and bound to be dissolved finally
in the aforementioned cubic centimeter. We don’t see these things
in it because it turns its back on us. It doesn’t turn its back silently
or with contempt but with an attractive and promising gesture. It
carries seduction on its back. It wants to be turned around, opened
up, and paged through. These three movements, to which a book’s
spine seduces us, can’t be done with trees or artificial intelligences.
They are characteristic of the intermediary stage between the two.
What we gained by leaving the forest, and what will be taken away
from us again, is turning around, opening up, and paging through.

Turning Around
The wall of a library is fundamentally different from all other walls.
Walls are arrangements for distinguishing between public and
private space. Walls facilitate vital decisions, for human life oscil-
lates between public and private. A human being inhabits a back
wall and experiences a front wall. Walls must be set up to allow for
oscillation. There are openings to be made (doors) for going out
and coming back in; others (windows) through which publicity
may be desired in private and through which the private is publicly
inspected. And pictures are to be put on the walls to hold on to
that which has been seen and experienced. Whether television and
computer screens are to be regarded as windows or pictures, there
is no difficulty fitting them into the structure and function of the
wall. We are dealing with technically developed walls, in which the
window and picture functions overtake and suspend one another
dialectically, making the doors superfluous.
98 ✴ does writing have a future?
But the wall of the library is different and functions differently.
The spines of the books, lined up beside one another and over one
another, form a secondary wall, positioned in front of the actual
wall. Between the spines of the books and the actual wall is a zone
of paper, where, in consideration of the reflections just undertaken
here, numerous arms are trying to take hold of us. They can only
do this if we ourselves stretch out an arm in their direction, pull
a spine out from the wall, and turn the book around, to allow
ourselves to be taken in by it.
Turning around is a synonym for revolution. Two things hap-
pen with the pulling out and turning over of the book. First, the
actual wall becomes visible behind the book that has been pulled
out. Second, the arm of another, stretched out toward us, can be
grasped. Revolution surely means to become aware of the walls that
separate us, to be able to take hold of the other (be it a stranglehold,
an intellectual grasp, or a mutual holding of interest).
Revolutions raise two questions: for what and against what?
Usually, the answer to the question of against what is easier to give.
It is clear in the case of turning the book over: against walls. In the
case of the scientific revolution, it was clear: the walls of science,
their paradigms, were to be uncovered so as to be broken through.
In fundamental revolutions, for example, in the industrial or the
current informatic revolution, the walls cannot be recognized so
clearly. Even less clear is the “for what” of the revolution. It does
not help very much to pay attention to the revolutionaries’ stated
intentions because they themselves can’t conceive of the “for what.”
The Russian revolutionaries didn’t know that they would bring
the present Soviet Union into being. With the turning over of a
book, however, the “for what” of all revolutions becomes clear: for
the other. To pull out and turn a book over can serve as a model
revolutionary gesture.
No wall can be revolutionized except the library wall. It makes
no sense to beat one’s head against it. It is more reasonable to
go through the door, to look through the window, or to hang
 Books ✴ 99
pictures, for all others are outside and can only be reached there.
The library wall, however, not only permits but even encourages
the revolutionary gesture because the other is already inside. Only
in the historical universe of the library wall are revolutions possible,
not in that of technical images.

Opening Up
A book that has been pulled out and turned over is lying on the
table to be opened up. Here one is faced with a different kind of
choice from the one that decided on one book among others. The
choice of one among many books challenges choice itself because
it becomes clear that the choice can only be made from a limited
quantity, and that in light of the library wall having become gigantic
and incomprehensible, one grasps without choosing—either taking
one’s luck or directed by criteria unrelated to books (perhaps more
on this decline in representative democracy later). In the choice of
opening up, on the other hand, there are four methods. One opens
to the table of contents or to the index, looks for pictures, or doesn’t
open at all but rather pages through. This last method, which actu-
ally avoids the choice, will be singled out for discussion.
One opens to the table of contents to determine what the book
is about. One grasps the arm of the other not for his sake but for
the content’s sake. This detached opening sees the book as a treatise
“about.” When one reads it, one stands above the matter so as to
be able to treat it from high to low. It is not quite right to want to
grasp the contents-page-opening reader statistically. How many of
us take the trouble to climb over the subject matter so as to dive
into it again from above?
One opens to the index to determine what company the au-
thor keeps. Not only the names, but the things, too, show this,
for they are things a society shares. One grasps the arm of the
other to participate in his society. This intersubjective opening
sees the book as part of a dialogue and an invitation to take part
in it. Many books, including this one, have no such index,1 not
100 ✴ does writing have a future?
necessarily because they are refusing the reader but because they
refuse to align themselves in a society. So the absence of such an
index is irritation and a challenge to someone who opens a book
in this way: he is irritated because he doesn’t know with whom he
is dealing, and he is challenged to recognize the other, whose arm
he is grasping, as an other (rather than being able to locate him).
Should this challenge be accepted, a new dialogue may arise instead
of a continuation of one that had already begun.
One opens to illustrations to get an idea about what should
have been grasped at the outset. A decent person does this with a
guilty conscience, for he knows that the illustrations were put into
the book so that they would be seen as a function of the writing.
That bad conscience is a symptom of a troubled sense of history:
prehistoric images are preferable to those integrated into a text.
Here, too, a statistic would be helpful: how many of us open books
in this way (like children and other illiterates), and do they do it out
of the remaining fragments of a prehistoric consciousness or out
of the new consciousness that is currently arising? Books without
illustrations are those that transmit concepts that either can’t be
represented or that don’t wish to be represented. These books either
can’t be illustrated or someone doesn’t want them to be.
Opening up a book is a gesture that makes a choice about the
way the book in question is to be read. Now it is possible to get help
with this (e.g., card files, and adopting the technology developed
for artificial memories, opening apparatuses as well as abstract
services, information and documentation centers, etc.) so that the
actual choice in library practice need not take place in front of the
wall but is taken over by the wall itself. The ability to choose is an
important aspect of freedom. The revolution of turning the book
over should be followed by the choice of how to open it. Artificial
memories do not open books up, and even old books start to
withdraw from the choice. This can be seen as a symptom of the
decline of representative democracy.
 Books ✴ 101
Paging Through
Freedom includes the ability to choose, and the necessity to choose
shows a lack of freedom presenting itself as freedom. Two borderline
cases disavow this: the one in which the choice is impossible because
of inadequate criteria (such as incomprehensible quantities) and
the one in which all alternatives have the same value (Buridan’s
donkey). So not being able to choose is an important aspect of
freedom as well. Leaving things to chance is about freedom. This
is about the gesture of paging through.
If one lets the pages of the book run through one’s fingers, it is in
the expectation of accidentally stumbling on a way to find the loose
end of a thread the book spins. There is something labyrinthine
about this search for the end of an Ariadnian thread.
In analyzing the probability, one finds a series of reasons—
among them distinctive letter forms—that are designed to make
the paging person “accidentally” stop. In analyzing the reasons,
however, one finds a series of coincidences behind them, for ex-
ample, that the distinctive letter forms were pecked on a whim by
the author or typesetter from the available letter forms. The layers
of chance and causation, this sandwich structure of all explana-
tion, has the effect of making the pages the reason for a specific
way of reading, according to which the book is to be decoded, just
like the various methods of opening the book. (That is just what
is meant by the saying that chaos is unexplained order and order
is unexplained chaos.)
There is no paging through truly artificial memories.
Should books be replaced by memories that function better,
there will be far cleverer methods of getting a look at the infor-
mation stored in them than paging through. A whole science and
technology concerned with such methods is emerging. It would
make no sense to try, say, to turn these memories around—unless
one were a specialist charged with repairing possible damage. But
as for revolutions by specialists, there are none. The low-function
102 ✴ does writing have a future?
possibility of turning around, choosing, or leaving things to chance,
the low-function historical freedom, would be lost. We are book-
worms, beings opposed to automated apparatuses and green forests,
not out of bibliophilia—which today registers as necrophilia—but
out of an engagement with historical freedom. This, our “worm-
like feeling,” this sense of nourishing ourselves on corpses (books),
explains our horror of dispensing with books.
Letters
The German word Brief (letter) means “short writing” (French:
brevet) and in English “short written summary.” But it is no longer
used in German with this meaning. There are long Briefs. The refer-
ence is to texts that are not intended for the public, not directed to
a publisher—even though many letters have been published, and
many more, apparently directed to a specific addressee, are really
eyeing up a publisher.
In the previous chapter, the era of writing appeared as a transi-
tional stage on the route between the forest and the land of auto-
mated apparatuses. In this context, letters, too, are just transitional
manifestations between sounds reverberating in the forest and
those we hear in a robotic automobile when we forget to fasten
the seatbelt. Even now, their transitional status is unmistakable.
For example, at a time before writing, “in time of suffering you
should call me” meant one should scream to God. In historical
times, there were written commandments for this purpose, and
today one thinks first of the telephone, even knowing it will be
impossible to find the right number in the directory.
It is curious that the telephone, this first instance of cable net-
working, has not displaced the postal service. So in the French PTT,1
P remains the first letter and T the last. That will change as soon as
the telephone is telematically linked to computers. This, as we are
beginning to realize, need not lead to central nationalization but
can lead to decentralized privatization (see the United States and
Japan). Yet it is still true that the postal system is currently just as
overburdened as the telephone network (and Minitel as well, first

103
104 ✴ does writing have a future?
introduced in France, the first inkling of telematics). There must
be something about writing letters—and reading letters—that al-
lows both to stay afloat.
I don’t know whether anyone has written a postal philosophy. It
would have to start from an analysis of waiting. Letters are things
one waits for—or they arrive unexpectedly. Of course, waiting is a
religious category: it means hoping. The post office is founded on
the principle of hope. Postal carriers, these functionaries who seem
practically medieval, are angels (from angeloi, “messages”), and
what they carry are evangels (good news, with respect to the hope
that sustains the post office). It can’t be said that all hope would be
lost if the post office disappeared. Telephone calls are awaited with
fear and loathing as well, and if it rings unexpectedly, the telephone
is a lightning strike from a clear sky. But expecting a letter has a
different duration and a different rhythm. Letters may be expected
for weeks, and this expectation intensifies at specific hours of the
day. What has just been said describes the duration and rhythm
of celebrations. Perhaps the letter has barely kept its head above
water because it offers one of the very few elements of celebration
we have left. This reflection on correspondence starts at this point:
a letter as a piece of writing in honor of someone or something.
Like everything concerning celebrations, letters follow estab-
lished rituals. For example, a letter carries a return address (often
printed), a so-called date with an indication of the place and day of
completion, the address of the one to whom the letter is directed,
and a formal greeting to the addressee. A letter closes with an
equally formalized farewell and is signed. Each one of these forms
can be justified, for each has a rational function within the goal
the letter is pursuing. The same is true of all rituals: Jewish food
rituals, for example, can be justified as hygienic measures. But that
kind of explanation misses the crucial point, namely, that we are
dealing with absurd gestures. The absurdity becomes evident in
imagining someone addressing another person orally with “dear
sir” or ending a conversation with “best regards.”
 Letters ✴ 105
A study of correspondence rituals from an historical, geo-
graphical, or sociocultural perspective (to say nothing of others)
would make a valuable contribution to our knowledge of society.
In comparing contemporary flourishes with those of the Baroque,
English with French, or those of a business letter with those of a
love letter, one would be looking at formal, not to say structural,
social criteria. Letters involve a certain solemnity that is in fact
catholic (all participate) but whose ritual is appropriate to the
social position of the celebrant. These rituals are plastic as well:
a celebrant has a number of nuanced formulae available and can
shape them himself. The contemporary reform of church rituals
is far from having attained the catholicity and plasticity of letter-
writing rituals.
So it becomes clear that writing letters is closely related to writ-
ing poetry. In addition to the rules of grammar and orthography,
the writer of letters is charged with others (such as the verse form
of rhyme pattern in poetry), and these supplementary rules are
festive: at once justifiable and absurd, both rigid and flexible. That
leaves the writer with two strategies open to him: first, the classic,
in which the writer is concerned with a structured whole, produced
according to the rules and by means of the rules; second, the ro-
mantic, in which he is concerned with a relaxation and creative
extension of the rules. The pendulum between classic and romantic,
this dynamic of poetry (and from there to art in general), and this
as much in an historical as in an individual sense, is characteristic
of letter writing. It is for this reason to be regarded as one of the
most refined of the arts.
It is in decline. There have been times of full bloom, as, say
the late Roman, the Hebrew “response literature,” the eighteenth
century. And the current time of decline is not the first. But it has
a new character. This is not about the decline of the art of letter
writing, this is about a decline in art in the traditional sense, about
a decline in writing altogether, about a loss of the disposition to
celebrate.
106 ✴ does writing have a future?
Letters are sealed and thrown into black boxes (painted yellow,
red, or blue), to be drawn out of black boxes somewhere else (e.g.,
post boxes) and opened. The whole process is a secret, steeped in
epistolary secrecy. Hermes, messenger of the gods, is, in fact, the
winged angel that watches over the post office. The hermeneutic
of the postal service is analogous to that of all black boxes and can
be broken down cybernetically. Along with other spheres (such as
the atmosphere and the biosphere), the earth has a postal sphere, a
network of letter channels that is becoming more and more dense.
But the postal sphere cannot be regarded as a closed system (as
can, say, the biosphere). It nourishes itself on plants pounded into
paper, on human beings who write characters, and on plucked
birds—when people were still writing with quills. Because it is not
a closed system, entropy is not a threat, but its sources could dry
up. The felling of the Amazon forest threatens the postal sphere
as much as the decline of alphanumeric code. In anticipation of
this possible collapse of its sources, the postal sphere merged with
those of telegraphy and telephony to form PTT. But these are both
different kinds of spheres. Unlike oceangoing ships, earthbound
trains and automobiles, or airborne airplanes, they are no longer
supported by the earth. They run, by contrast, through unsupported
electromagnetic fields. The connection with TT tears the P away
from the earth—and so out of its secret.
The postal link that spans the earth (like the link of freemasonry)
tries in vain to accommodate itself to this separation from the earth,
but in vain, because it (like the Freemasons) is archaic by its very
nature. All its avatars notwithstanding, it looks like the Roman
couriers who hurried from military post to military post and the pos-
tilion who entered the medieval village with a blast from his horn.
Looking more closely, it’s possible to recognize troubadours, those
poets who rushed from town to town. But it is exactly the archaic
aspect of the postal service, these archaic gestures of sealing and
seal breaking, that explains the attraction it continues to exert. We
are at the point of jumping off the earth, physically and even more
 Letters ✴ 107
mentally, of leaving everything chthonic, everything that rests on
mother earth behind. We therefore long to return to the great mother
earth, the womb of the cave, the secret hidden behind seven seals,
to the Eleusinian mysteries whose last form is the postal service.
Kierkegaard described the way letters are received, anxiously
awaited, or unexpectedly appear, spit out of the postal carrier’s
great pouch. First they are decoded, like all other texts. Then they
are read between the lines. Kierkegaard means that they are read
in the same way as the Bible, that letter of all letters. And if they
are not read in this way, they are not Bibles. Any text can be read
like a letter, that is, not critically, but in an attempt to recognize
the sender. Of course, the recognition can turn into criticism if
the letter turns out to be a lie. The letter models the highest form
of any textual reading.
We possess images that enable us to visualize the reading of
letters: those of the Annunciation of the Immaculate Conception.
The messenger is the archangel Gabriel, and the receiver is the Vir-
gin. We latecomers interpret Maria’s surprised, hesitant demeanor
as a reaction to the hidden angelic phallus that will introduce the
logos spermatikos to the virgin. Theology insists that this is about
a symbolic rather than a physiological event, however. The angel
is carrying a letter, not a phallus. Mary draws back because she is
being told to read the letter and then to provide the word (logos)
with a body. Mohammed must have been just as shocked when
the same archangel began to dictate the Koran to him (God had
to try it twice because the post doesn’t always work properly, as we
know). What is happening with Mary, with Mohammed, and with
the receipt of letters in general is the opening of the self to another,
who becomes manifest from out of a hermetic secrecy.
That can no longer be achieved given the current conditions
of the postal service. What becomes manifest from secrecy today
is largely advertisements (in the form of disingenuous letters)
and bills to pay, that is, letters that contain unarticulated threats.
Advertisements are to be thrown away without breaking the seal,
108 ✴ does writing have a future?
and bills are to be made to disappear as quickly as possible. There
is the occasional genuine letter in this unholy flood of paper, but in
most cases, they turn out to be about matters that resolve themselves
of their own accord, given some time. Today the postal service no
longer facilitates an opening but rather a closing against the other,
no longer an immaculate conception but rather one soiled with
protective measures, a conception by preservative. Not only is it
impossible to read all texts as though they were letters; it has also
become just as impossible to read letters differently from texts that
are subject to criticism.
The festivity of letters, their religious ambience, depends on
their secrecy, this mysterious sealing with which we cast a letter
into the opening in the hermetic system. That is religious, for it is
faith in the postal service and trust in it that cause us to entrust it
with our secret. In the meantime, we’ve learned that we are wise
to approach the postal service with a measure of doubt. No seal,
however it works, can keep a secret. The profane light of public
enlightenment permeates all things locked and sealed, for the cave
of secrecy has developed cracks. The interests of transparency, the
public, the “someone” has cracked its way into all things private,
dark, and unexplained. “Someone” in the shape of a censor is press-
ing through the cracks into the secrecy of the letter. A letter is no
longer directed toward an intended other only but unwillingly also
toward an intruder who appears, faceless, in the undifferentiated
mist of “someone.” The faceless intruder actually obscures the
faces of those who willingly recognize one another: festivity is not
absurd; it has become contradictory.
Letters are writings not intended for public access that neverthe-
less can find their way, by means of a censor, into an anonymous
public sphere. The postal service is secret, a black box that has
developed cracks. Nets that don’t need to be supported from the
ground but that can hover without support have become carriers
of intersubjective messages. The festivity and secrecy of letter writ-
ing and letter reading dissolve. The existential attitude of waiting,
 Letters ✴ 109
attending, anticipating has become superfluous with respect to the
global simultaneity of messages transmitted electromagnetically.
To hope is no longer to anticipate but to be surprised. It no longer
makes any sense to write letters.
To the extent that teletypes and, later, higher-function telematic
media took the place of letters and the postal service, we can see
what we are losing with the piece of paper called a “letter”: one of the
last openings through which we could hope to recognize another.
For however the telematic message is decoded, and however it is
answered, it will not be read between the lines. We have a new form
of festivity, a new form of secret, a new form of mutual recognition,
and it is so completely unanticipated and unexpected that we are too
surprised to be able to recognize the letter in it. We are forgetting
the art of letter writing and have not yet learned the art of inter-
subjectivity, computer art. The letter is being withdrawn from us
(by one who is faceless but wears various masks), and we are falling
into an unstructured mass; still we suspect that the mass media
are beginning to branch out into intersubjective, letterlike media.
This dull suspicion alone, for which the word hope is too strong,
enables us to witness the demise of letters and the postal service.
A dull suspicion is beginning to take shape, and this in the form
of a money order. A check is a letter directed to a bank, directing
it to give money to the bearer. Today there are plastic cards fitted
with artificial memories instead. Perhaps this intelligent bank
card is a harbinger of all future letters. It is possible that letters,
unlike books, will make the leap into the informatic situation and
that letters will survive writing. A look into the future: an earth
encased in intelligent plastic cards that whir about like bees, spin-
ning human relationships like threads of honey with an inaudible
hum. By then, we paper-boring termites would have turned into
honey-licking inhabitants of cells. An assessment of this develop-
ment must be left to those who still have access to values, or who
act as though they do.
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Newspapers
A vast literature concerned with newspapers, along with innu-
merable schools of journalism scattered around the earth, debate
the curious fact that despite television, radio, and until recently,
weekly news programs, there are still folded fliers that are flown
into our homes daily. Or they wait with folded wings every day in
specially constructed cages for us to fall into the trap. It cannot be
only because newsprint is suitable packing paper—an inadequate
explanation for two reasons: first, because better packing material
is available, and pieces of meat wrapped in newspaper seem as
antiquated as bridle paths; second, the explanation is not elegant
enough to be taken seriously. So are newspapers as antiquated as
bridle paths, even though they keep using improved technology,
even though their characteristic writing style changes in response to
the latest information and communication theory, and even though
their information is governed by increasingly refined systems of
production and marketing? Specialists in the study of newspapers
put forward far more complex and probing explanations for the
persistence of printed newspapers, even as they justify and forecast
a ubiquitous electromagnetization of information.
These complex and probing explanations (which will not be
pursued here) change nothing about the fact that there shouldn’t
be any newspapers anymore. But there is a banal explanation for
their not having disappeared: although they appear to have saved
themselves, unchanged, from the flood of electromagnetized in-
formation, they have, in fact, turned into the exact opposite of
what they once were. Before radio and other media, the newspaper

111
112 ✴ does writing have a future?
was an ephemeral, temporary, and quickly outdated memory in
comparison to all other media (books, magazines, etc.). It was
consigned to being forgotten. Nothing was so past and out of date
as yesterday’s newspaper. Later the newspaper became a durable
memory in comparison to the new media, and this was the case
even though it lagged chronologically behind that seen on screens
and heard on speakers. In fact, this, too, can be stored elsewhere
more safely on audio- and videotapes, but for the time being, these
new memories are not passed in massive quantities from senders
to receivers. They are jammed up somewhere, waiting patiently for
suitable distribution channels. Newspapers do not compete with
radio or television but rather with such storage tapes. The surprising
thing is not that there are newspapers but that there is such a traffic
jam in the media. It is worth considering a changed newspaper, one
provisionally transformed into audio- and videotape.
It is a question of duration. “Duration” is a category to be dis-
tinguished from “time.” Since electromagnetization, a newspaper
might better be called a “lasting paper.” The content of the newspaper
is supposed to last somewhat longer that the content broadcast on
radio or television; it should remain in the receiver’s present a bit
longer. Electromagnetic senders beam out roughly the same mes-
sages as the newspaper, but because they have no substrate (they’re
immaterial), they run uninterrupted though time, without stop-
ping in the present. The receiver is required to absorb the message
into memory as time is passing so as to store it there and process
it later. The newspaper, on the other hand, is an artificial memory
and allows itself to be handled, crumpled, cut apart—in short, to
be grasped. It doesn’t demand so much of the receiver’s memory.
So paper, which is an ephemeral memory in comparison to marble
or metal, becomes a durable one in the context of electromagnetic
media—until tapes and records take over this role.
The concept of “duration” points beyond time in the direction
of that nunc stans (the abiding Now) that is related to eternity.
Some of those who write for the newspaper may be aware that it
 Newspapers ✴ 113
has become a “lasting paper,” a message pointing in the direction
of the eternal, but few if any of those who read it will realize this.
For the receivers, the newspaper has retained the character of a
flyer. It flies over them. The division that has developed in this
way between many writers’ attitudes toward the newspaper and
those of most readers raises a more significant question about the
sustainability of newspapers than does the competition with elec-
tromagnetic senders. To provisionally bridge this gap, the layout
(the superficial aspect of the news page) tries to visually separate
the durable segments from the others, in the hope that a few readers
of texts so designated as durable may treat them differently (e.g.,
cut them out). In this way, an internal contradiction arises in the
newspaper contents: one part points to the library, a larger one to
the wastebasket. There are therefore two completely different types
of writers for newspapers: the one writes for libraries, the other for
the wastebasket. And the newspapers themselves can be classified
into two groups according to this criterion: into the predominantly
librarianish and the predominantly wastebasketish.
Formulating loosely, the wastebasketish group can be called
“journalists” and the other “news staff.” The first can be divided into
employees and freelance journalists, the second into permanent
and occasional. But it is still a mistake to consider such an attempt
at classification to be evaluative, say, to place a higher value on staff
members than on journalists (as is done by a tiny elite) or to value
the journalists more highly than the staff members (as is done by
most casual newspaper readers). The suggested classification of
newspaper writing is value free, and that means it is indifferent to
this sort of writing.
This indifference (the quality of being scientific) appears in crass
contradiction to the heated engagement of both staff members and
journalists. The engagement of staff, permanently employed writ-
ers, is easy to understand from the perspective of writing. These
people have a historical consciousness. Through temporal activity,
they want to enter into eternity, whether for their thinking or only
114 ✴ does writing have a future?
for their name having been preserved in the newspaper. For them,
the newspaper is a vehicle for getting out of time and into duration,
taking countless readers along.
The engagement of journalists, on the other hand, writers
conditioned to the wastebasket, cannot be understood from the
perspective of writing. These are people who are prepared, in ex-
treme circumstances, to risk their lives to see that, say, war reports
get past a diversion through the newspaper into the wastebasket.
They are prepared to give their lives not for something particular
to them (whether this be ideas, feelings, values, or even just their
own names) but for information. These journalists are the heroes of
the coming information society, which has given up duration and
for which time is no longer historically structured. A whole future
mythology will condense around the heroic figure of the journalist,
and we can already see how this mythology is to be programmed.
The newspaper staff writers with their historical conscious-
ness are distinguished from book and letter writers only by the
medium “newspaper.” These are writers who try to reach out a
hand to another to change the world together and to get along in
it. Journalists are of another sort. In the nineteenth century, before
the first electromagnetic media existed, they were, along with pho-
tographers, the first “informatic” people, individuals who helped to
develop a new consciousness. This close relationship, this common
intellectual ground between journalist and photographer, has been
preserved in the newspaper. That is the inner basis for the coupling
of picture and text in journalistic newspaper articles. But because
of the tendency toward electromagnetization, the medium that best
corresponds to the journalist’s own existence is the radio, and even
more, the television. Since the newspaper became durable, journal-
ists’ migration from the newspaper into the new media (where the
heroes of the future are) has become more and more evident. The
newspaper is more and more clearly becoming a playground for
staff—a document, even, that can’t be sustained in the long run.
“Duration” doesn’t suit the informatic situation.
 Newspapers ✴ 115
It is an anachronism to speak of the newspapers, of the press,
as a so-called fourth estate. In the nineteenth century—and even
still in the first half of the twentieth century—such an assertion was
not only justified but also prophetic. The press is—seen from the
past—the fourth estate: it is the most recent addition to the three
political powers (however one wants to name them). Seen from
the future, it is the first: it is where it first became clear that power
is located wherever information is produced and distributed. That
is the explanation for the rise of complex newspaper conglomerates
and newspaper polyps, whose slowly decaying corpses still pollute
the atmosphere. Power is there, where information is generated, in a
globally diffused jigsaw puzzle, as we’ve learned the meantime. One
can speak of a power of the press today only with nostalgia. The
press is no more than a preliminary to the work of contemporary
decision-making centers.
Above all, we should notice that the press trades in inherited
political categories, whereas contemporary decision-making centers
must be grasped cybernetically. There are still newspapers that
address one party and others that emphasize a position above or
beneath parties without saying whom they do address. There are
still critics who try, through the newspaper and beyond, to read a
political opinion and incoherent interest behind it. The whole thing
has a ghostly character with respect to the new power configuration.
Decision-making centers have become automated. They intersect
with one another in complex ways, and the decisions can no lon-
ger be grasped politically; they no longer function on the basis of
interests; rather they function on the basis of other functions of
apparatus. The press hides this because it is attached to political
power in decline—to survive. If there were no more newspapers,
only radio and television, the current depoliticization and cyber-
netization of power would emerge more clearly.
The press should not be regarded as a power but rather as a last
attempt to keep the deposed powers alive. It is as though the deposed
powers can still express themselves in the newspaper, although in
116 ✴ does writing have a future?
reality, they have nothing more to say. Political broadcasts on televi-
sion confirm this. There the political statement is absorbed into a
new, informatic consciousness: politics as a question of image is a
very inexact expression for it, and a videocast determines who our
presidential candidates will be. The newspaper is a last refuge of the
political, historical consciousness, and in this sense, it is reactionary,
even and especially when it presents itself as progressive. It cannot
be achieved, neither with progressive production methods nor with
a progressive layout nor with progressive distribution methods
nor with progressive contributions from progressive staff. The
newspaper is reactionary because it is a piece of writing and so a
product of historical consciousness. For this reason, it is impotent
in the face of the emerging posthistorical situation.
The newspaper will disappear as soon as video- and audiotapes
and records from electromagnetic senders flow, cheap and plenti-
ful (perhaps free), into all homes to be stored in video and audio
libraries. Many newspapers try to put themselves on videotapes and
survive, no doubt above all to preserve any advertising still left to
them, from which and for which they live. But this is only an excuse.
Advertising can be absorbed effortlessly from electromagnetic send-
ers. This confused rescue mission is actually about maintaining an
active political consciousness after the demise of writing, for video
newspapers are supposed to politicize, not depoliticize. That is a
contradictory undertaking. Political consciousness expresses itself
in alphanumeric code. Given its structure, it cannot be recoded into
images and sounds without losing its essential feature: linearity, a
writing forward from the past into the future.
With the newspaper, the last remaining bit of historical con-
sciousness disappears—and with it historical freedom. An observer
from Mars will notice how the battle for freedom in the nineteenth
and the first half of the twentieth centuries concentrated on freedom
of the press. Why is the freedom of newspaper writers actually
so important for the existential freedom of people from all sorts
of conditions and all sorts of actions? Because political freedom
 Newspapers ✴ 117
expresses itself in freedom of the press. It is regarded as the basis
for existential freedom. That may sound false to the Martian. How,
he might ask, when political freedom (whatever that might mean)
veils the existential sort so that people are given political freedom
(“given” above all by reading newspapers), while existentially they
vegetate, completely conditioned and utterly aimless? The answer
to this Martian question will determine our attitude toward the
disappearance of newspapers.
If we regard political freedom as the basis for freedom as such,
then we will be horrified to see the newspaper replaced by a cyber-
netically governed production and distribution of information. If
we see in political freedom an ideological veiling of the existential,
then the demise of the newspaper presents us with alternatives.
When the newspaper, this last remaining vestige of criticism, has
disappeared, either centrally positioned senders will program all
knowledge, values, and experience, in which case, we will no longer
be able to speak of freedom because the word itself would have no
meaning, or, when the newspaper—this centrally radiating flyer—
has disappeared, we will see a new, networked way of producing
information, and it will become meaningful for the first time to
speak of existential information.
Newspapers are pages that radiate out from a center. They are
structurally fascistic. But within this fascistic structure, freedom of
the press (and political freedom) found a voice. The disappearance
of the newspaper is beyond question. The question is whether the
fascistic structure of the newspaper will be transferred to the new
media, possibly strengthened, or whether, with the disappearance
of the newspaper, other, netlike circuits will appear. The question
concerns freedom.
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Stationeries
This is not about those shops that confront and seduce us through
paper but rather about shops that sell writing materials, although
even in stationery shops, we encounter the first sort of paper han-
dlers. Stationery shops are of concern because after the decline of
writing, they, too, will disappear from our environment. One might
argue that stationery shops should not be singled out from all the
others, that all shops are condemned to disappear with the decline
of writing. Once information can be called down onto screens in
private spaces, it will be possible to call down any goods that are
still of interest over a cable from central distribution points so that
all shops (and the city) will become redundant. But it is different
with stationery shops. They will become superfluous as shops, but
so will the things they have for sale. The informatic revolution is
a political one: we are losing the city (polis), and it is a cultural
revolution—we are losing the culture of writing.
The loss of a culture of writing can be observed in office statio-
neries. In addition to typewriters and even older writing tools, they
carry more and more word processors, which are evidently geared
toward replacement by higher-function artificial intelligences that
no longer use any paper. The design of stationery stores buries
paper rather than praising it. The most melancholy aspect of this
burial is surely the typewriter. What we mourn is not, say, the rather
paleotechnical keyboard or the malicious ink ribbon that continu-
ally jams but rather the alphanumeric memory. We welcome the
new keyboards and the absence of messy ribbons. But the letters,
Arabic numerals, and adventurous ideograms like §, &, or $, no

119
120 ✴ does writing have a future?
longer beckon us, as if they were secretly in league with us, namely,
in the league of alphanumeric code. That is regrettable.
How letters are stored in the brain’s memory, and whether there
is a specific part of the brain where they are stored, is unclear at
the moment. The problem itself is awkward: was there a place for
storing letters in the brain as Homo sapiens sapiens arose, and so
was such a place in the genetic information from the time life on
earth began? Or has the brain functioned this way for only three
thousand years? Neither Darwinism nor Lamarckism has the so-
lution to this problem (and it is apparently at our door). But the
problem looks different with typewriters. There letters are stored
according to the frequency with which they occur in relation to a
particular written language so that the fingers can call comfortably
on those that occur most frequently: applied information theory,
long before this theory was formulated. The typewriter comments
on a question in the theory of knowledge, about the dialectic be-
tween theory and practice.
Another dialectic is relevant here. To the extent that we type,
the letters are stored in our brain. On an English or German
typewriter, ABCDE becomes QWERT. As long as there have been
typewriters, letters must have been dancing in our brains, and the
choreography of that dance would surely provide an insight into
an important aspect of our thinking. This dialectic between brain
and typewriter (mediated by the eye and fingers) is such that a
part of the typewriter has migrated into our brains and a part of
our brains into the typewriter. With the typewriter, a part of our
brain will be lost, or to say this more optimistically, one brain
function will be free to do something else.
This raises the question of the boundaries of the subject with
respect to the objective world (of the difference between the I and
the not-I) with impressive clarity. It shows the many-layered gray
area that lies between what seems to be the “ego-nucleus” and what
seems to be the not-I. If I cut my fingernails, remove my appendix,
amputate an arm, or replace all organs with artificial ones, has the
 Stationeries ✴ 121
boundary between the world and me moved as a result? And what
happens in this respect if someone takes my pipe, my old suit, or
even my house away? In the gray zone, it is impossible to distinguish
ontologically between “my” body and “my” stuff at all: fingernails
are further from the ego-nucleus than the pipe. The same is true,
mutatis mutandis, for “my” memory as well. Fingernails are further
from the ego-nucleus than the Shakespeare stored in my memory,
although the nails appear to grow from the inside toward the outside
and Shakespeare from the outside to the inside through the gray
zone. When the typewriter disappears, something will fall from the
gray zone. This something is very close to my ego-nucleus. Should
this ego-nucleus prove to be a myth, namely, as the core of a gray
zone that becomes denser at its center, then the disappearance of
the typewriter should be regarded as an impoverishment of the
ego as such. That is an aspect of the dread that seizes us when we
reflect on the decline of writing.
Not all writers type, and many who do type also write by hand.
They do not have the close relationship with the typewriter de-
scribed earlier. Many people think one must learn to type (as one
learns to swim), and there are typewriting and swimming schools
that support this view. There are even professions for trained
typewriting writers. Informatization is bringing an end to this non-
sense, making clear that typing is about an automation (meaning
internalization, me-ification) that turns writing into a gesture like
walking and speaking, in that we forget whether we ever learned it.
Stationery stores also show that not all writers just type. In ad-
dition to typewriters, these stores also sell various kinds of fountain
pens, and in addition to machine and carbon paper, other writing
papers. As for the varieties of pens, some available for free, the range
of colors is worth considering. It contradicts the essence of writing
and recalls the practice of drawing, from which writing freed itself
in a development of hundreds of years. Pens are archaic because they
recall the stylus (French: stylo) and drawing. It becomes clear that
the true writing consciousness corresponds best to the typewriter,
122 ✴ does writing have a future?
as is the case, on another level, for print. Those who write by hand
find themselves on the outskirts of writing culture, where calligraphy
and graphology, these ways of reading that seem medieval, hold
sway. Handwriting is closer to ancient manuscript fragments than
to computer programs. That people still write by hand, despite print
and typewriter, may be attributed to the stubborn intractability of
habitual gestures. It suggests that out of stubbornness, the gesture
of writing will persist, like a useless appendix, for a long time into
the informatic situation—a small consolation.
More interesting than pencils, ballpoint pens, and fountain
pens is the writing paper on offer at the stationeries. It comes loose,
“endless,” or in notebooks. Among these bound papers, those for
making notes are particularly interesting. The words note, notice, and
notorious come from gnoscere (to know). Notepads serve knowledge,
and those who write in them are notaries. There are notepads that
have the weeks, days, and hours of a coming year printed in them.
They are designated with the word calendar, which is misleading,
for with notepads, we are at the heart of historical consciousness.
At the same time, there are calendars (colorful images for each
month) that point away from historical consciousness and into
mythical prehistory. In sharp contrast to such illustrated calendars,
note calendars do not serve reflection or leisure but rather histori-
cal activity, so it is more accurate to call them “agendas.” The note
calendar could serve as a model for all historical consciousness
and historical knowledge that corresponds to writing.
A note calendar can be considered from three standpoints: the
beginning, the middle, and the end of the year. From the beginning,
one sees the structure of the year, the basis of all historical activity,
which is to say, the temporal space of freedom and its boundaries.
From the second standpoint, it is possible to project actions into the
future, in the assumption that there is open space. From the third
standpoint, two things become clear: projects crossed out and the
history of the year. Taken together, these three standpoints reveal
the internal contradiction in the historical concept of freedom
 Stationeries ✴ 123
and so, too, in that of historical knowledge. A view toward the
future sees free space, a view toward the past sees conditions, and
a view from within linear time sees possibilities and probabili-
ties. So knowledge that looks back explains history causally, and
prognosticating knowledge explains it teleologically. Things will
happen as many want them to, but they happened as they had to.
The note calendar shows the core of the contradiction: it permits
no view from an extrahistorical present.
To read a note calendar at the end of the year is to read a biog-
raphy. To read it from the end to the beginning (an adventure) is
to see the world’s resistance to one’s plans in the form of accidents
and conditions. Both appear against the same background, a printed
grid. Once the note calendar is replaced by higher-functioning
memories and more nuanced futurizations, once we call on com-
puterized data rather than notes, the printed paper will disappear
from view to make room for invisible programs. A newer concept
of freedom will replace the historical one (or there won’t be one),
and instead of causal and teleological explanations, there will be
functional ones (should it be necessary to explain anything). The
drama of historical consciousness (its tragedy and comedy), as it
becomes manifest in the note calendar, will give way to another
way of life.
What is true of the note calendar is true of all notebooks. For
the moment, they are all empty playgrounds of freedom that will,
in the course of linear time, be filled with notorious conditions
and accidents. If stationers become superfluous because notebooks
have become superfluous, it will be superfluous to worry about this
tragicomic contradiction.
In addition to typewriters and pens, besides printer paper and
other writing paper, stationery stores carry other writing imple-
ments: clamps, folders, glue. Overall, they offer an insight into the
universe of literature. Erasers, in particular, clarify the difference
between nonliterate memory, texts, and computers with respect to
a possible loss of information. Further reflections could perhaps
124 ✴ does writing have a future?
show Freud’s theory of repression to be prealphabetic: a typographi-
cal error that occurs as the result of a faulty performance can be
typed over (it can be repressed), but it can also be erased. Given
the limits established for this essay, however, it is advisable to resist
such excursions into writing materials.
Writing paraphernalia migrates from the stationer’s to my
desk and from there into the wastebasket. The content of the
wastebasket migrates into the rubbish, and from there into nature,
to potentially migrate from there back into the stationer’s as new
writing material. But the return route from the wastebasket to the
stationer’s is unworldly and does not enter my writing conscious-
ness. In a sense, it isn’t right to speak of writing materials after the
wastebasket stage. Even in the wastebasket, they no longer deserve
the name. Real writing tools start life at the stationer’s. They end
with the transition from the desk into the wastebasket.
To write a biography of writing materials, these things that
emerge in an absurd cycle from nature through culture and back
into nature, would be to write about writing. For the concept
“writing material” can be understood very broadly. It can embrace
the whole of literate culture. A biography of literate culture (e.g.,
of Western history) would then appear as an arrow that starts at
a stationer’s somewhere and ends in a wastebasket now. And the
segment in the underworld, the part of the absurd circle no one
mentions, will only become visible behind the wastebasket, in
the informatic situation. We are probably the first generation in a
position to write Western history from the wastebasket. So we see,
when we look into the future, only the waste behind our basket.
Coming generations will have to climb out of the basket and survey
the whole circus.
So far, the effort to grasp the stationery and its eventual disap-
pearance from the standpoint of phenomenology has remained
fragmentary. There will be no more neglecting the crucial thing
about the stationery store, the point of it all, namely, the desk.
Desks
Before desks are compared with the apparatus that will come and
replace them, it is advantageous to clear the slate. An empty table
is more than just a plane: it is usually made of wood and supported
by four legs or is some kind of simplified artificial beast of burden.
It is, in addition, an unattainable ideal: one continually sets out
to relieve it of its burden, to clear the table once and for all. And
one is filled with envy noticing on television the vast and empty
writing desks behind which sit those said to be powerful. Putting
oneself in their place, one gains a new perspective on power and
the desk. The German word Macht, meaning “power,” is a substan-
tive of the verb mögen, “to like or desire.” Its equivalent in romance
languages is the substantive of the verb “to be able.” What would
the powerful still want to or be able to do while they are sitting at
an empty table? Do possibilities and potentialities burst out from
them into emptiness? And don’t these things become realities in
just that organized chaos on the writing desk? After centuries of
antiphenomenological discussion, a phenomenology of power
would have to start by recognizing it as an assertion of possibili-
ties that become real in resistance, that power is not something
already real with which one must comply or against which one
must struggle; rather power seeks resistance to become real in the
first place. Deferral of resistance (e.g., the case of the empty desk)
destroys power, and one need not be Gandhi to see it. The notion
of an empty desk is sufficient.
It is the will to power that seduces us into the stationery to

125
126 ✴ does writing have a future?
gather all sorts of writing materials, to continually replenish them
and to fill our desk. It isn’t a will to power in general, however, but
to a very specific power, namely, to the so-called power of the pen.
And even though different kinds of power have a whole classifica-
tion of their own, this one is ordinarily contrasted with that of the
sword. The power that radiates from the pen, the possibilities and
potentialities it generates, have a specific structure, despite our
not yet having a proper field theory for it. When there are iron
filings in a magnet’s force field, then we can see how this power is
realized. Even if we are just as deeply submerged in pen power as
electromagnetic power, we are still missing the relevant Einsteins,
probably because ideological fields, in contrast to natural ones,
were always unified ideologically before they were investigated
separately. An example would be the Marxist attempt to refer all
fields of power, including that of the pen, dialectically back to a
foundational field (the economic base). Einstein, as we know, was
not successful in reducing all fields in this way because the details
of discoveries in diverse fields tended against doing so.
What seduces the writer to go into the writer’s supply shop to
seize the power of the pen has already been discussed in part in
this essay, even though it did not achieve a proper field theory of
pen power.
The will to straighten circles out into lines and, on the basis of
these lines, to reach more lines seduces the writing into walking
to the stationer’s to seize the power of the pen. This essay suggests
that the will to this specific power is realized in the form of Western
culture and that the force field of the pen can be designated as the
base of our society in this sense—without excluding the possibility
that from other perspectives, other fields of power may constitute
the base. The will to this specific power takes the writing desk as
its starting point.
Chaos reigns on the average desk: papers, folders, clips, ash-
trays, typewriters, telephone, and other things lie on it and are
illuminated by a table lamp. There is no average desk, and any
 Desks ✴ 127
comprehensive chaos can only be in progress. The average desk is
an abstraction from all desks, and any phenomenology of the desk
must start from a concrete desk here and now, in an awareness of
the presumption of wanting to equate this desk here and now with
the average one.
Chaos means, provisionally, a situation whose structure is not
yet clear or a situation that arises after the structure has become
clear. In other words, we find chaos either where order has not yet
been confirmed or where order has been completely confirmed.
The chaos on my desk is analogous to that in the universe of
natural sciences. One who approaches unknowingly encounters
messy confusion. Then he begins to confirm relationships, a method
in the madness. When I sit at the desk and write, I am in a marvel-
ous space: everything is in its place and at my service. I am then the
Aristotle as well as the Newton of my desk: all writing instruments
are in their assigned places and will, should they move, inevitably
return there. With a knowledge of the table order, the locations
of all writing instruments can be determined in the past, present,
and future. But if I step back from myself and my desk and survey
the convoluted relationship between it and myself, I become more
and more Heisenbergian: what I regard as order on my desk reveals
itself to be a gross simplification I myself have projected onto it.
That becomes clear if I look for, say, a pin on it. Chaos reigns on
my desk to this extent.
Now I seize power, which is to say I reach into the chaos, to put
two pieces of paper and a sheet of carbon paper into the typewriter.
My gaze is directed neither at the paper nor at the desk but rather
past these to the text to be written. The whole writing desk is just
a contemptible means to an end. It will be redeemed for some
reason that is still nebulous for the moment. No seizure of power
can avoid this redemption of the means. However, one can try to
appreciate rather than despise the means. Only a strange confusion
results: the more attention I pay to the paper and the typewriter, the
more confused the intended piece of writing becomes. By looking
128 ✴ does writing have a future?
at the desk, I squeeze the text out of my field of vision. This is why,
when the powerless challenge the powerful to consider the means
before using them, they are refused: the powerful are being asked
to become impotent. And a glance directed at the table does in fact
show the impotence and not the power of writing. The old saying
“respice finem” no doubt means one ought always to keep death
in mind, but it could also be interpreted as advice to look past the
table: not to be inhibited by the means.
If I sit at my desk to look at it (rather than to write), it greets
me coldly. There are two main reasons: because two implements
antagonistic to writing are lying on it—namely, a telephone and a
radio, two extraterrestrial invaders of the universe of writing—and
because the power of the pen, aspiring to be a means of empower-
ing unbridled “intellect,” turns out to be in league with the malice
of writing instruments.
In considering the two ETs on the desk, one gets the impres-
sion that we are dealing with two opposing ways informatization
intrudes on writing. The radio provides background music and
serves writing. When the telephone shrieks in its idiotically insistent
way, it interrupts writing. So one could conclude that informati-
zation can intrude idiotically and disturb writing but that it can
also be enlisted successfully in the service of pen power. That is a
false conclusion. The background music the radio delivers is not
the white noise that serves to make the information produced in
writing perceptible (communication theory discusses it); rather
it mocks writing. It whispers in the writer’s ear: the information
you are producing is not directed to any reader after all but to
my black box to be made into background music itself. And the
insistently shrieking telephone doesn’t interrupt writing, it stops
it, saying: I am a new power of words, against which pen power
struggles in vain.
The empty tables of powerful people we see on television carry
batteries of telephones, whether we can see them or not. In the
case of the very powerful, there is a red telephone among them.
 Desks ✴ 129
The powerful sit at a desk to use telephones and not to write. This
function is regarded as power. A Wittgensteinian question arises:
what is the meaning of the sentence “that is a writing table, but
it isn’t used for writing”? The two ETs on the desk are inhibiting
because they undermine both the power of the pen and the concept
of power as such.
In turning one’s attention to the other things on the desk, the
definition of writing as the manipulation of symbols comes into
question. Do I actually struggle against such soft things (software)
as letters and the language they refer to when I write? Do I not have
to contend above all with the intractable stubbornness of the torn
ink ribbon, jammed controls, or hopelessly misplaced paper? You
heavenly powers of the pen, you know no one who has not tasted
the bread of tears (such as tears of frustration with a typewriter
that no longer works). Literary criticism sees only what is heavenly,
not what is earthly about writing, apart from extreme cases such
as texts written in the Gulag.
Is writing work after all, and, in fact, less “intellectual” (a doubtful
use of the concept “work”) than physical? Does a writer not have
to set ordinary hands, teeth, and licking tongue in motion at his
work, and not just elegant fingertips?
Suddenly the informatic revolution looks like a solution. For in
considering the tables shown in advertisements for so-called office
supplies—these white, clean laboratory tables with their paper-free
apparatuses, with smiling, elegant girls sitting at them—and compar-
ing them with the desks of one’s own experience, one appears to be
a dinosaur wallowing about in the Triassic slime. It is the smiling
girls, not I, who work with the “intellect” in the advertisements.
The writer sitting at a desk is the material resistance against which
they flutter. The girls are the ones who are really manipulating
software, and they are more intellectual than we are.
As soon as we turn our attention back from the means to the text,
of course, as soon as we disregard the stuff justifiably called “stupid,”
we are again caught up in a feeling of what’s called the “will to the
130 ✴ does writing have a future?
power of the pen.” Only a bitter aftertaste has crept into the feeling.
The stuff we are now disregarding really is stupid, but we have seen
intelligent desks in the advertisements. Perhaps writing inspires
us because our desks are so stupid? So as they become cleverer, do
we writers become stupider? This existential question, arising at
the office supply store and growing more insistent at the desk, will
accompany all our writing from now on. It shows in our texts and
can no longer be silenced. Once its doubtful position becomes clear,
the desk in transition—standing, as Serre put it, at the “Northwest
Passage”—will not be able to sustain itself. Its four legs wobble in
the earthquake. The poor creature cannot be saved.
A summarizing look at stationeries and desks permits us to grasp
the demise of writing as the demise of politics. Like all shops and
exhibitions, stationeries show that the city and the public sphere
(the space of publication) are doomed to disappear. Stationeries
show in particular how the disappearance of paper marks the
ends of trade. Desks, for their part, show how the power of the
pen encounters no resistance and so can no longer realize itself,
and the concept of power as such is displaced by a new concept of
an automatically governed functioning so that all political think-
ing (a thinking in categories of power) bypasses the postliterate
situation. A summarizing view of stationers and desks recognizes
any political engagement by writers to be a ridiculous error. And
so for most contemporary writers, such a perspective is not to be
recommended, a perspective that further reveals another version
of the known mismatch between means and ends. Throughout the
whole of literary culture, the means were small and unimportant,
and the ends were large and noble. It would be ridiculous to take
Dante’s goose quill into account in judging the purpose of the
Divine Comedy. In this case, the means have without a doubt been
redeemed by the result. But things have changed. Looking at the
extraordinarily complex means assembled at an intelligent desk,
and comparing them with the purposes they apparently serve, one
might speak of the exact opposite—a redemption of the ends by
 Desks ✴ 131
the means. A visit to the stationer’s alone shows that the stuff on
offer is more splendid than the notes to be written, than what it is
presumed to serve: how much more intelligence is embedded in
such stuff than in the scribbling it is used to produce. The means
have become so clever that they make the ends superfluous. They
become their own purpose. Means becoming their own ends and
ends become superfluous: this is what is meant by “media culture.”
That can be seen with exceptional clarity in thermonuclear arma-
ments: the means are so powerful that any question about the ends
borders on the stupid.
Attention has, finally, been focused on the means of writing.
Entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times, it has neglected
the purpose of writing. Is the question “to what purpose?” still
meaningful, when constructed lines are giving way to puzzles
made of particles?
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Scripts
In recent years, there have been texts that are not directed to a
publisher, and through him to readers, but rather to producers
of film, television, and radio, and through these to viewers and
listeners. People who write these texts are called “scriptwriters,” a
word that etymologically means something like “writing etcher,” but
no contemporary German equivalent occurs to me. This chapter
empathizes with these people. It is not easy, for these people stand
on slippery ground. It lies on a steep grade that forms a bridge be-
tween the uplands of literary culture and the abyss of the culture
of technical images. So scriptwriters are always slipping, about
to tumble head over heels into the abyss. Like tightrope walkers,
they try to maintain a balance between text and image (text and
sound) by means of literary acrobatics. But they can’t do it because
of the gravitational pull of the images. At least this circus act is not
a public spectacle, for it occurs within the media and can only be
taken in (read out) from media outputs (their programs). If scripts
were public circus acts (if scriptwriters were to confront the public
in the coliseum of the media), their reputation would spread far
and wide. It would fill the space of the departing literary culture
like a piercing scream: morituri te salutant.
A script is a hybrid: half of it is still a text for a drama to be
staged, and so in the lineage of Sophocles, the other half is already
the programming of apparatuses and as such an ancestor of pro-
grams calculated automatically by artificial intelligences. From the
standpoint of the past, the scriptwriter is the playwright, from the
standpoint of the future, a not quite fully automated word processor.

133
134 ✴ does writing have a future?
But like any chimera, the scriptwriter also has a life of his own,
however ephemeral and ghostly. It is an injustice to see him as an
informaticized Sophocles or as a tightrope walker. To empathize
with him, one must try to put oneself in his position.
Radio scripts should be distinguished from all others right from
the start. For while all the others are aimed at speaking images,
the radio script aims at a speaker without images. Earlier in this
essay, a claim was made that in the future, all sound of whatever
sort will rush toward images. This would make radio, records,
and tapes crippled communications media, amputated from im-
ages and able to preserve and reproduce themselves only because
they are temporarily cheaper than comparable audiovisual media.
This claim is vulnerable, for hasn’t radio asserted itself in the face
of the explosion in television and conquered a niche of its own in
the structure of the media? Only the current inflation in portable
radios, hi-fi systems, and Walkmans is probably little more than
a passing anomaly. Once images are small enough to be built into
armbands, and the sounds they emit are plastic enough to override
the other oscillations that reach the ears, then imageless messages
will prove to be an unnecessary impoverishment. No very bright
future can be predicted for the writer of radio scripts.
That is regrettable, as he still is, after all, the closest of all script-
writers to the playwright. As with Shakespeare, these are his own
words that are being sent into space, and as with Shakespeare, a
listener taken by the broadcast will read his text. These similarities
certainly have limits. One can read the text of Macbeth before, after,
or entirely independently of a theater production and each time
receive a different message. One reads beforehand to visualize the
drama. One reads afterward to determine how much of the text
was lost in the drama and how much was added. One reads inde-
pendently to dedramatize the text. In those rare cases when one
reads a radio script, there is always an awkward feeling of having
torn the text out of context, out of the context of a broadcast and
out of that of the whole radio station. The text does not stand on
 Scripts ✴ 135
its own two feet. Should it be complete in itself, it would be a bad
script, one that does not fulfill the requirements the station set for
it. Such a comparison of a script to a dramaturgical text shows a
more profound change in orientation. We don’t live dramatically
anymore; rather we live programmatically.
Dramas show actions; programs give instructions about how
to behave. Even those dramas that portray the greatest suffering
(e.g., passion plays) seek to arouse sympathy and fear in us, that
is, motivations for action. Programs enhanced by the most diverse
array of actions awaken sensations, feelings, suffering in us, so
that we will allow them to stimulate us. A dramatic orientation
depends on a belief in the uniqueness, the indelibility of every ac-
tion, that every past action is definitively past. It is the orientation
of historical consciousness. A programmatic orientation rests on
the belief in the eternal return of the same, on the indifference of
every action. Programs actually reinforce this belief continually.
It is the orientation of posthistorical consciousness.
However closely a scriptwriter for radio may resemble a play-
wright, he writes from a programmatic orientation. This (and not
the coming crisis in radio) is the reason his future is not bright: he
writes in an undramatic way when writing is a dramatic gesture.
In writing his scripts, he contradicts himself. He is the victim of a
particularly pernicious negative dialectic.
Other kinds of scripts present a far clearer case than does the
chimera of the radio script. These are no longer texts; they are
pretexts. This concept takes on its full meaning here: the sense
of “pretence–betrayal” as well as that of “preliminary text.” These
scripts are lines of letters that are to be recoded into images. With
them, the alphabet becomes an auxiliary code for making images.
At the end of literary culture, the alphabet turns into its opposite.
Having come from images to master them, it now turns back to
them to fabricate them. Seen as a single, three-thousand-year pas-
sage, the whole of literary culture looks like a loop that runs out
from images and back into them.
136 ✴ does writing have a future?
Literary texts that have been degraded to pretexts for images
can be no more than a passing phenomenon. Scripts are written
because, for the moment, there is all manner of alphabetically cali-
brated equipment lying around, that is, typewriters, word proces-
sors, and brains that store things alphabetically. Only spendthrifts
would leave all this unused. As horse-drawn carriages became more
rare and automobiles more common at the turn of the century, so
will such devices become more rare and those calibrated to new
codes more common in the near future. Very soon, there will be
no further need to approach images in horse-drawn carriages, and
scripts will give way to more functionally coded image instructions.
Scripts are therefore a double pretence: they pretend to be texts
while they are actually image programs; and they pretend that the
alphabet is still functioning in image culture when, in fact, they
are only using up a raw overstock of alphabet at the last minute,
before the whole thing vanishes.
Scripts are the swansong of texts: a melancholy farewell from
literature and, with it, from history in the exact sense of the word.
The essential thing about texts is that they are aimed at a reader.
Scripts no longer are. What is essential about texts, their hard
core, has escaped from scripts. Only misty ghosts of texts remain,
hovering about the grave of literature at the darkest hour of literary
culture, before the morning wind of the rising informatic culture
clears them from the air.
This is the way lines of letters look in their final stage, those
letters that in their initial stage drove us in the direction of history:
torn rags of lines with gaping holes in between. Discursive, critical
thinking keeps starting again in them and keeps being brutally
interrupted by emerging images. The long discourse that was in-
haled with the first texts is now out of breath. One can speak of a
telegraphic style and in so doing discover a unique beauty, namely,
that of summary. But the staccato structure of this way of writing,
as attractive as it may seem, is still only a pretext, a testimony to
the new digital codes. The ideal of the gesture of writing is a legato,
 Scripts ✴ 137
that binding of distinct elements into lines. Scripts abandon this
ideal as unattainable. In abandoning the ideal of writing as a result
of recognizing it to be unattainable, one has abandoned writing
completely. Under the pretence that one can write in the reverse
direction, toward a staccato, namely, in the direction of calcula-
tion and computing, scripts are written anyway. That is gruesome
because only spineless things can tolerate that kind of distortion,
distortion aimed at turning discursive, critical thought back into
uncritical contemplation.
The ideal that writing set for itself is indeed unattainable. There
is no legato. No one can glide, and even more definitely not since
finding out that everything is made up of waves and droplets.
It was necessary to quantify long before the term was invented.
Scientific texts have not been alphabetic for a long time. They are
alphanumeric and are becoming more numeric and less alphabetic
all the time.
Writing equations is completely different from writing scripts.
When I write algorithms, I am at one of the alphabet’s boundaries,
trying to cross this boundary in the direction of critical thinking.
When I write scripts, I am putting critical thought into the service
of images to be contemplated uncritically. It amounts to a swindle
of discursive thought, a betrayal of the spirit of writing. Exactly
because it is impossible to avoid the superficial similarity between
mathematical codes and the new codes, the fundamental difference
in intention must be pointed out. Numeric code intentionally pro-
motes the alphabet ahead of itself; digital code intends to overthrow
the alphabet. Scripts write in the way of digital codes.
Scripts are the way writers leave the sinking ship. That should
be understood formally and existentially. One who writes scripts
is committed body and soul to the culture of images, from the
standpoint of literary culture, to the devil. Scriptwriters literally
serve this devil. They put letters at his disposal. They tear letters
from the sinking literary ship and offer them to the image devil.
They submit to it in the true sense of the word—which means
138 ✴ does writing have a future?
to accommodate and comply. It is doubtful that the philosopher
Julien Benda was referring to such submission with the phrase “the
betrayal of the intellectuals,” but it might have occurred to him,
had he seen contemporary film and television programming. No
other betrayal of writers, of intellectuals, of the spirit of history is
so clear as the one that scriptwriters commit. The results of this
betrayal can be seen everywhere.
Linear history flows, channeled through scripts, into images,
to revolve in them, according to program, in an eternal return of
the same. That is the true reason that some scripts are called Dreh-
bücher (turning books). These are books whose lines will be turned
into circles. Such turning is possible because there are apparatuses
behind the books that surround the lines, recoding them into im-
ages. In this way, history, which arose from images three thousand
years ago, flows through the capillary vessels of scripts back into
images. The unnatural thing about it is that the flow of history is
accelerated in the process. The apparatuses suck history more and
more greedily into themselves by way of scripts. They fall over one
another to get into the whirling images. Never has history advanced
so breathlessly as it has since the invention of image-making ap-
paratuses, for at last, history has a concrete goal toward which to
flow, namely, transformation into an image. All events occur with
the increasingly clear purpose of being transformed.
So scriptwriters stand at the end of history and the beginning
of apparatuses. They accelerate the output of history to provide
the apparatuses with the necessary input. They deliver history to
apparatuses and, in doing so, transmit to them the sense of every-
thing that has happened. This sense is supposedly conveyed by the
images. What they are doing is a horrible betrayal of history. The
only reason we don’t feel it daily and nightly is that in watching
television and film, we have already lost historical consciousness.
Scriptwriters, these gladiators of the media circus, catching writ-
ing in nets so as to strangle it and to themselves be strangled by it,
arouse no anger in us because we who have become unconscious
 Scripts ✴ 139
and impotent cannot even perceive them behind the images. We
aren’t aware of what the alphabet is still doing for images. In this
very crucial sense, we have already become illiterate.
While we are staring at a few images lightly illuminated by the
setting sun of the alphabet, something new is rising behind our
backs whose first beams are already touching our surroundings.
Like the slaves in Plato’s cave, we must turn around to defy this
newcomer.
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The Digital
Among the perspectives available for gaining insight into the way
things are being reordered, science holds a special position. Since
the nineteenth century at the latest, natural science has been among
the very few authorities that remain to us: we accept its conclu-
sions without being forced by any kind of executive power. From
the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been saying things
so new that we haven’t yet begun to digest them. As varied as
these new things may be, they may be grasped in two watchwords:
relativity and quanta.
The first watchword means that space, once seen as absolute,
and time, once seen as clearly elapsing, are nothing more than
relationships between observers, which is to say, subjects. And so
spacing, the interval, becomes the key issue in epistemology and,
in the near future, in perception, feeling, desire, and behavior.
The second watchword means that the world, once seen as solid,
is no more than a swarm of tiny particles whirling about at random.
And so probability and statistics have become the mathematics best
suited to this world. Causes and effects appear only as statistical
probabilities. Of course, that revolutionizes our feelings, desires,
and behavior. We cannot continue to live as we did before.
The new assertions are hardly theoretical propositions only,
to be discussed at leisure; rather they have had a practical effect.
They have begun to reshape our lives from the ground up. One
has only to recite the words atomic power station, thermonuclear
armaments, artificial intelligence, automation, and electronic infor-
mation revolution. It means that we have to grapple existentially

141
142 ✴ does writing have a future?
with the new formulations daily and hourly. They have a practical
orientation and open horizons of freedom and creative potential
we had never suspected; on the other hand, they put our mental
and physical endurance at risk. The new theoretical formulations
of quantum theory are finding practical applications in technol-
ogy faster than those of relativity theory. This is not to say that we
should expect no astonishing practical effect from relativity theory.
One has only to think of space travel. But it is to say that at present,
we need to devote our full attention to problems raised by quanta.
Far from being solely practical or epistemological issues, these are
existential, political, and aesthetic ones. They should not be left to
scientists and technicians.
In the meantime, what we once called “matter” (without quite
knowing what we meant) has proven to be an affair of multiple
levels. As bodies, we inhabit one level alone: that of molecules.
Below this lie layers of atoms, nuclei, hadrons, and quarks, and
above it are galaxies and black holes. How these levels relate to
one another is an open question. Perhaps they are Russian dolls,
with each doll contained by a higher one and containing a lower
one, so that the astronomical universe is only a part of a previously
unrecognized superuniverse—and the quark contains universes
we’ve never suspected. Maybe it is about folds lying over folds,
about wrinkles in wrinkles in wrinkles. It is in any case a lost cause
to try to picture this. The crucial thing for this context is that we
have discovered the following: as bodies, we inhabit the molecular
level, but as thinking beings, we inhabit the level of the hadrons.
Although its implications are inconceivable, this discovery already
has practical applications.
Each single level has an appropriate structure. The astronomical
one is Einsteinian; the molecular one is Newtonian; matter and en-
ergy swim in the atomic one; causality comes to an end in the nuclear
one; the hadronic one requires a new mathematics and logic; with
quarks, it makes no sense to distinguish between reality and symbol.
The boundaries between the levels blur. Astronautics goes
 The Digital ✴ 143
from molecules to the stars; chemistry from molecules to atoms;
particle physics from molecules past atoms to nuclei. But so far, all
of them have started their journeys at molecules. That will change.
Once we understand the structure of our thinking better, we will
travel from the hadrons (and the leptons and gluons) to the level
of molecules. We will see the world of molecules, concrete things,
animals, houses, human bodies from “below”—know it from there
and act from there. Using a method chemistry knew nothing about
and genetics only dimly suspected, we will be able to fabricate
molecular material (living and nonliving beings).
We are in debt to neurophysiology for the knowledge that think-
ing is a process involving electrons, protons, and similar particles.
It has shown that such particles jump across intervals in the astro-
nomical numbers of nerve synapses that constitute the brain. What
we call an idea, a feeling, a wish, or a decision turns out to be a
statistical summary of quantum leaps; what we call perception turns
out to be a summarizing of quantum leaps into a representation.
In the brain, representations are formed from distinct elements,
and from these in turn spring (in quanta) ideas, desires, feelings,
and decisions. Given the nearly unbelievable complexity of the
brain, the detail of how this happens is incomprehensible, but a
simplified form of it can be simulated in thinking machines, so this
understanding of thought is pragmatically “correct.”
The level where thinking occurs is inconvenient for us in two
ways. First, it can’t be observed without the observation affecting
what is being observed, so there can be no thought of objectiv-
ity in the sense of an object without a subject. Second, this is
the realm of pure chance, which can be statistically ordered into
curves but where it makes no sense to try to predict the future
behavior of any one particle. In other words, everything that is
possible, even the most improbable things, must eventually occur
there. This slipperiness (it is impossible to grasp the object) and
unpredictability (anything at all possible will at some point become
necessary) are therefore characteristic of thinking. It can be steered,
144 ✴ does writing have a future?
to be sure. Not only uncertainty and probability but also cybernet-
ics is the appropriate discipline for thinking—which reminds us
that cybernetic control itself comes from the level of uncertainty
and statistical probability. This dizzying circle shows that we are
beginning to reflect in a disciplined way for the first time, that is,
to think about thinking.
From this incipient reflection on thinking has come, among
other things and above all of them, the informatic revolution. It is a
revolution because it turns from its point of departure to the world
and to human beings. It no longer starts from solid things (from
molecules) but rather from particles like electrons and protons,
that is, at the level of thinking. Because it comes from below, it can
change solid things, including human beings as bodies, more radi-
cally than any previous revolution—to say nothing of the changes it
brings to humans as thinking beings. Although this revolution has
only begun, it is possible to see a few of its fundamental features
already. For example, it enables us to recognize solid objects as mere
appearance, not just philosophically, but technically, inevitably
making the world of such things less interesting. It further enables
us to see particles on a screen, to compute them into images there,
inevitably making the world of these particles increasingly more
interesting. Third, it enables us to produce machines that think
and work automatically, relying on articulated leaps of particles,
demanding a reordering of all values bound up with work and
thought. And finally, it enables us to analyze and synthesize thought
processes from a new point of view, namely, that of informatics,
and so we must learn to think differently.
At least two things characterize this relearning of thought: first,
that we think images and only images, for everything we called
perceptions—whether external or internal—are nothing but images
computed in the brain; second, that thinking is not a continuous,
discursive process—thinking “quantizes.” That is an insight dia-
metrically opposed to the concept of thinking that distinguishes
Western culture. For us, thinking was, and still is, a process that
 The Digital ✴ 145
moves forward, that frees itself from images, from representations,
that criticizes them, thereby becoming increasingly conceptual.
We have the alphabet to thank for this understanding of thought
and this understanding of thought to thank for the alphabet (feed-
back). The new digital codes arose from the new understanding
of thought, and feedback is making us think in quanta and images
more clearly the more we use the new codes.
The quantum structure of the new codes will be treated here in
isolation from its image-making function, although structure and
function are obviously coordinated. The linear structure of the al-
phabet, too, can be thought independently of its function in writing
stories, although structure and function are mutually conditional.
Because of the particular construction of the apparatuses for which
they are designed and that are supposed to decode them, the new
codes are digital—and, in fact, usually binary, of the type 1–0. We
are dealing with apparatuses that—like the telegraph—either let
streams of electrons through (1) or interrupt them (0). Basically, all
the new codes are supposed to do is give this mechanical turning
on and off of the stream a meaning, to codify it (as flagging code
lends meaning to the lifting and lowering of arms).
Apparatuses incorporate the 1–0 structure because they simulate
the structure of our nervous system. There, too, we are dealing
with a mechanical (and chemical) turning on and off of streams of
electrons between the nerve synapses. From this standpoint, digital
codes are a method—the first since human beings began to codify—
of giving meaning to quantum leaps in the brain from the outside.
We are faced with a self-concealing loop. The brain is an apparatus
that lends meaning to the quantum leaps that occur in it, and now
it is about to turn this meaning-giving function over to apparatuses
of its own accord, then to reabsorb what they project. So the new
codes are digital basically because they are using simulated brains
to simulate the meaning-giving function of the brain.
This codification is an extraordinarily fast addition and sub-
traction of particulate impulses. It need not be linear, that is, in
146 ✴ does writing have a future?
the form 1 + 1 + 1. It can proceed in multiple dimensions. The
particulate impulses can be added and subtracted into surfaces,
for example, so that strange images made of particles appear. This
can be called “computing,” for the particles can be so tightly com-
pressed, com-puted, that their mosaic structure disappears from
view. Something similar happens in the brain, and the images com-
puted there are called “representations.” The apparatuses simulate
this brain function. What we see on their screens are simulated
representations, whether they are images of objects in the world
(houses, trees, people) or images of internal brain processes (equa-
tions, projections, fantasies, intentions, desires). From the images
themselves, it is impossible to determine whether they represent
external things (putative reality) or internal (putative fiction)
ones. But that cannot be determined from brain representations
either. Projecting brain function onto apparatuses raises exactly
this question, whether this ontological distinction between real
and fictional—this critique of images—is possible at all, and if it
is possible, whether it is meaningful.
Simulation is a kind of caricature: it simplifies what is being
imitated and exaggerates a few aspects of it. A lever is a simulation
of an arm in that it neglects all aspects of an arm except the lifting
function, but because it exaggerates this one function to such an
extreme, it lifts much more effectively than the arm it is simulating.
Thinking that expresses itself and makes images in digital codes
is a caricature of thinking. But it is practically a public danger to
underestimate this new way of thinking as somehow stupid or even
narrow. The lever was the first caricature of the body’s muscular
function. By way of the Industrial Revolution, it led to mechanisms
that have eliminated the muscular function of the human body
from most areas. With regard to the simulation of thinking, we are
at the high end of the lever. We are just beginning to learn, in the
sense of projecting brain processes outward, so as to be able to free
them from psychological, philosophical, and theological ideologies
and get them going to full capacity. It is not that those who hold
 The Digital ✴ 147
this new caricature of thought in ideological contempt can keep
thought from emerging from its cranial cover, but they can make
the path to free thought, laborious in itself, even more difficult.
So critics and pundits nourished on alphabetic, historic thinking
paradoxically become obstacles to the effort to free thinking from
its physiological condition.
As the alphabet originally advanced against pictograms, digital
codes today advance against letters to overtake them. As once,
thinking that depended on the alphabet actively opposed magic and
myth (pictorial thought), thinking that depends on digital codes
is today actively engaged against process-oriented, “progressive”
ideologies, replacing them with structural, systems-analytic, cyber-
netic ways of thinking. And as images defended themselves from
history, from being strangled by texts, the alphabet is setting up its
defenses at present so as not to be strangled by the new codes—only
a small consolation to all those who continue their engagement
with writing texts, for the whole thing has been accelerating. Only
in the eighteenth century, after a three-thousand-year struggle,
did texts succeed in pushing images, with their magic and myth,
into such corners as museums and the unconscious. The current
struggle won’t take so long. Digital thinking will triumph much
more quickly. It is true that the twentieth century is marked by a
reactionary revolt of images. Should we anticipate a reactionary
revolt of repressed texts against computer programs in an unpre-
dictable future?
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Recoding
We will have to relearn many things. That is difficult because
what we have to learn is hard to acquire but, above all, because
that which has once been learned is hard to forget. One advantage
of artificial intelligences is that they have no difficulty forgetting.
From them, we are learning the importance of forgetting. It is a
tremendous thing to relearn, for it demands that we rethink the
function of memory. In our tradition, memory is the seat of im-
mortality: in Judaism, for example, one of life’s goals is to remain
in memory as a blessing. We must learn that it is just as important
to be extinguished from memory. Death and immortality must be
relearned, fame and anonymity must be revalued.
First among those things we must relearn in the context of the
new as it emerges is process-oriented, progressive linear thought,
the way of thinking that is articulated in linear writing. We will
have to erase the alphabet from memory to be able to store the
new codes there.
But might it be possible to learn the new codes without eras-
ing what was stored in memory already? Isn’t the brain a memory
that is hardly used, that has a great deal of space available for new
things, and is this not even more the case for those giant artificial
memories we have begun to build? Doesn’t the dialectic say that
what has become obsolete is not lost but lifted up? Might it be that
in the future, the new codes will be grounded in the alphabet, which
they will assimilate into themselves and beyond, to new heights, so
that rather than becoming illiterate, we become superliterate?
That is unthinkable. We will not be able to store the new codes

149
150 ✴ does writing have a future?
over the alphabet in memory because these codes cannot tolerate
the alphabet. They are impatiently imperialistic toward the alpha-
bet. They cannot let a thought process geared toward criticizing
images remain active behind their backs. The relationship between
digital and alphabetic codes is no dialectic contradiction between
image-producing and image-criticizing codes, capable of lifting
each other to some sort of synthesis as it runs its course. It is rather
about the formation of a new experience of space and time and so
of a new concept of space and time into which the old experiences
and concepts cannot go. This can no longer be grasped dialectically.
Kuhn’s concept of a “paradigm” works better: a sudden, previously
unthinkable leap from one level to another rather than a synthesis
from opposites. With digital codes, a new experience of time and
space is emerging. Like a paradigm, it must obliterate everything
that came before: all experiences that cannot yet be aligned under
the old concepts of “omnipresence” and “simultaneity.” Such experi-
ence cannot absorb but rather must destroy the alphabet.
Images produced with digital codes are present everywhere at
the same time (even on the opposite ends of the earth). They can
always be called into the present, even in an unthinkably distant
future. Concepts of “present,” “future,” “past,” and especially “dis-
tance” and “proximity” (i.e., “spacing”) take on new meanings. The
theory of relativity may well help us to acquire these new meanings,
but we have to make them existential. In trying to do this, we are
more impressed by the reversal of elapsing time than we are by
the images’ swallowing of space: no longer from the past toward
the future but rather from the future toward the present. Future
and possibility become synonyms, time becomes synonymous with
“becoming more likely,” and present becomes the realization of
possibilities in form of images. Future turns into multidimensional
compartments of possibilities that unravel outward toward the
impossible and inward toward an image realized in the present.
Space is just the topology of these compartments. Digital codes are
a method of making these compartmentalized possibilities into
 Recoding ✴ 151
images. Linear, historical, alphabetic thinking is incompetent for
such a critique and must be eliminated.
There have been attempts to carry alphabetic thinking over
into the digital and so to continue writing after all. There is the
following argument, for example: it is in fact correct that linear
thought, with its linear orthography (such as, say, Boolean logic
or the historical consciousness of free will), cannot be reconciled
with multidimensional and so quantized thought. But isn’t linear,
historical time, with its causality and concept of progress, one
among the many dimensions in the new experience of time and
space? When we experience the new images, don’t we experience
history, among other things? Can we not therefore say that the new
experience of time (relative, phenomenological, cybernetic, and so
on) and compression of space somehow does absorb the historical,
the alphabetical into itself? These are decidedly modest attempts
to secure a place for writing in the texture of a future culture.
They demonstrate how difficult it is to forget. For why should
anyone want to describe what is coming, as this essay has been
desperately trying to do? To want to describe it is to want to force
it into the old thinking, to show how what is coming necessarily
comes from the old, to explain it in terms of the old.
What is new about the new is its very indescribability, and
that means that what is new about the new consists exactly in the
absurdity of wanting to explain it. The Enlightenment has run its
course, and there is nothing more to explain about the new. There
is nothing obscure about it; it is as transparent as a net. There is
nothing behind it. The Enlightenment has turned a somersault in
the new. It must start to enlighten itself. The alphabet is the code
of the Enlightenment. Writing can continue only with the goal of
illuminating the alphabet, describing writing. Otherwise, there is
nothing more to explain and describe.
Such a rescue attempt is concerned with the critical capacity
of historical thought. Alphabetic thinking should not stop so that
we can encounter the new images critically. But “criticism,” too,
152 ✴ does writing have a future?
must be relearned. In the old context, it means breaking what is to
be criticized down into its elements. This is the way the alphabet
criticizes images, for example, by breaking them up into pictoremes,
then pixels, and then reordering them into lines. But the new images
don’t permit such criticism. They are synthetic, which is to say, they
are assembled from previously isolated pixels. Digital codes synthe-
size things that have already been fully criticized, fully calculated.
Criticism in the earlier sense could discover nothing more in these
images than that they were computed from electrons. If this critique
tried to go further and criticize the intentions of the synthesizer,
it would, in the final analysis, find only computed electrons there
as well. The old criticism, this dismantling of solid things, would
be lost in the gaps between intervals, in nothingness—and to no
purpose at all. For it is clear at the outset that there is nothing solid
to be criticized in the new. A completely different critical method
is required, one that is only approximately named by the concept
“systems analysis.” For this, alphabetic thinking is useless. This is not
to say that we are surrendering to the new images uncritically; on
the contrary, we will develop new methods so that we can analyze
and resynthesize them. Such methods are already being developed.
The attempt to rescue the old critical thinking may be noble, but
it is completely beside the point.
We will have to learn to write digitally, should writing still be
a suitable designation for such a means of notation, and should
anyone still be able to see it as a recoding from old into new codes.
One who regards digital codes as written codes and sees a continu-
ity between them and prealphabetic image making and alphabetic
text making could claim to need to learn to recode everything:
not only everything written but also everything still to write. We
will have to recode the whole of literature, the whole factual and
imaginary library of our culture into digital codes to be able to
feed them to artificial memories and call them down from there.
We will have to recode everything still to be written, all those un-
finished thought processes set out in texts, into digital codes. One
 Recoding ✴ 153
who sees digital code as the articulation of a radically new way of
thinking that can’t be called writing, on the other hand, could say
that we will be forced to erase the whole factual and imaginary
library from memory, with all its achievements and all its unfin-
ished beginnings, to clear a space for the new. But basically, these
two formulations amount to the same thing: we will have to learn
to rethink our entire history, backward and forward—a dizzying
assignment after all.
How dizzying it all is becomes clear when we put ourselves in the
position of a future reader. Let’s assume that the world’s literature
has already been digitally recoded, stored in artificial memories,
and its original alphabetic form erased. The future reader sits in
front of the screen to call up the stored information. This is no
longer a passive taking in (pecking) of information fragments
along a prewritten line. This is more like an active accessing of
the cross-connections among the available elements of informa-
tion. It is the reader himself who actually produces the intended
information from the stored information elements. To produce the
information, the reader has various methods of access available,
which are suggested to him by the artificial intelligence (methods
currently called “menus”), but he can also apply his own criteria.
And certainly we should expect a whole future science concerned
with criteria for and links to bits of information (so-called docu-
mentation sciences are starting to do this). What happens in such
reading can be seen more clearly in an example.
Let’s assume that the reader is interested in the history of sci-
ence, that is, in pieces of information that follow one another in
a chronological order from the standpoint of the reader’s present.
According to our current ways of reading and thinking, “Aristotle”
would, for example, come before “Newton.” To the future reader,
“Aristotle” and “Newton” are simultaneously accessible, both coded
digitally. So he can access both systems at the same time, and in
such a way that they overlap and disturb one another. In the New-
ton system, for example, “inertia” will run up against “motive” in
154 ✴ does writing have a future?
the Aristotle system, and the principle of “justice” in Aristotle’s
system will bump into the chains of causality in Newton’s system.
The reader will be able to manipulate the two overlapping systems
so that an intermediate stage emerges in which Aristotle’s system
could arise from Newton’s as well as Newton’s from Aristotle’s.
From the available data, the reader will find out that the Newtonian
system is, in fact, more recent than the Aristotelian, but he can just
as easily reverse the history.
The example was chosen to show that the future reader will
be free to access linear, historical cross-links between elements of
information among others. He will be able to read the history of
science, among other things, from his data. But the history that
comes from such a reading is precisely not what we mean by “his-
tory.” Historical consciousness—this awareness of being immersed
in a dramatic and irreversible flow of time—has vanished from the
future reader. He is above it, able to access his own flow of time. He
doesn’t read along a line but rather spins his own nets.
Recoding literature into the new codes is a dizzying assignment.
It demands that we translate our thought world into a foreign
one: from the world of spoken languages into that of ideographic im-
ages, from the world of logical rules into that of mathematical ones,
and above all, from the world of lines into that of particulate nets.
We probably will not be able to begin before we have developed
a theory and philosophy of translation. We are very far from this.
Still we can see recoding under way everywhere (although not yet,
except in fantasy, the destruction of recoded texts).
In the recoding of texts into films, records, television programs,
and computer images, what is happening to scientific texts is the
most remarkable. Here statements that rest on logical and math-
ematical thought become images, and these images are colorful
and mobile. This is the way scientific thought is translated into
the new codes with no appropriate theory of translation available.
Political and aesthetic risks, such as the filming of novels or the
 Recoding ✴ 155
transposition of poetry to the television screen, pale by comparison
to this epistemological danger.
In the matter of recoding, we face two opposing tendencies.
On one hand we have people who don’t want to learn to recode
for they don’t believe it is necessary to learn afresh. On the other
hand, we have people who approach everything written and yet
to be written with the intention of recoding it, either because
they sense an adventure or simply because they have begun to
be repulsed by all the scribbling. Between these two extremes are
some who are simultaneously aware of both the necessity and the
difficulty of recoding, that is, relearning. These are the people from
whom a theory and philosophy of translation is to be expected.
If it is achieved, the transition from the alphabetic into the new
culture will become a conscious step beyond current conditions
of thought and life. If it is not achieved, a descent into illiterate
barbarism is to be feared.
One might object that everything has always been on a knife’s
edge without having actually fallen to either of the two sides—
which leads to the conclusion that the proverbial edge is probably
exceedingly dull. But isn’t the feeling of a knife’s edge exactly what
is responsible for what we call “freedom”? Looking forward from
here is the sharp knife, backward from here, inert porridge, and
do we have to look forward? To those of us who spell things out,
the current transition from the alphabet to the new looks like a
dangerous step on a ridge between abysses. It may seem like a pleas-
ant stroll to our grandchildren, but we are not our grandchildren,
who will learn the new with ease in kindergarten. Do we have to
go back to kindergarten?
This page intentionally left blank
Subscript
We have to go back to kindergarten. We have to get back to the
level of those who have not yet learned to read and write. In this
kindergarten, we will have to play infantile games with computers,
plotters, and similar gadgets. We must use complex and refined
apparatuses, the fruit of a thousand years of intellectual develop-
ment, for childish purposes. It is a degradation to which we must
submit. Young children who share the nursery with us will surpass
us in the ease with which they handle the dumb and refined stuff.
We try to conceal this reversal of the generation hierarchy with
terminological gymnastics. While we’re about this boorish non-
sense, we don’t call ourselves Luddite idiots but rather progressive
computer artists. And we try to aggrandize ourselves, to ourselves
and to others who go on writing and thinking by the old methods,
by writing learned and lofty comments on our nonsense. But it can’t
fool anyone. What we’re doing as we sit before our Minitels, Apples,
and Commodores is so primitive that no symposia, workshops, or
seminars can cover it up. It is just a caricature of thinking.
Our tradition has a ready vindication for this, our intentional
relapse. Didn’t Jesus suggest, for example, that should we wish to
enter into the kingdom of heaven, we should become as little chil-
dren? Only a consciousness that has been laboriously achieved and
energetically defended is not quite so easy to get rid of. In Jesus’s
time, it was surely about undermining Greek art and science, Jewish
theosophy, and casuistry so as to clear a space for naive faith. The
result, as we know, was that strange mixture of the primitive, barba-
rous, and decadent we call the early Middle Ages. In hindsight, we

157
158 ✴ does writing have a future?
do recognize the seeds of a splendid development in this mixture.
It brought dismantled Greek thought forward as the Renaissance
and dismantled Jewish thought as the Reformation. We don’t have
sufficient distance from contemporary crudity, barbarism, and
decadence to be able to recognize seeds of splendor, however clearly
we may sense them. It is not a principle of hope that propels us
back to kindergarten but rather a principle of desperation, namely,
the common persuasion: we can’t go on like this.
So the curtain is falling on the stage where the drama of written
culture, that struggle of the spirit against the powers of obscuran-
tism, played itself out. In the course of this drama, there have been
grim scenes: when the antagonist, perhaps in the form of national
socialism, took center stage; when the protagonists themselves as,
say, Inquisitors injured themselves horrifically. Such scenes cast
doubts on any engagement with the departing culture. And still
we are unable to take any lighthearted leave of this drama. It was a
splendid show, and we are still taken by it. “I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him.”
As people first began to write in that easterly corner of the
Mediterranean more than three thousand years ago, the lifeworld
was small compared to ours and was filled with obstacles. It was
only a few human generations old, and there were people giving a
firsthand account of its beginnings. The world’s span was large, but
one could still walk around it. To move anywhere in this circle was
to bump into superhuman powers, extracting a terrible revenge
on any who did not make sacrifices and prostitute themselves.
These powers, antagonistic to human beings, surrounded people
everywhere in the form of threatening images. Only rarely and
reluctantly, then, did people leave the protective space of the vil-
lage, that human segment of an inhuman lifeworld that had been
culturally secured. Monsters lay in wait for those who left culture for
adventure. A stranger coming into the village constituted an inva-
sion of what was livable, familiar by something monstrous. People
lived out their relatively few years in thrall to such communities.
 Subscript ✴ 159
When they died, it was murder, by human or superhuman hands,
and that had to be avenged by the survivors.
Alphabetic lines broke through this narrow magical circle. They
opened sweeping vistas. The origin of the world was pushed back
far beyond the human scale, measurable only in such existentially
meaningless terms as, say, fifteen billion years. The world’s cir-
cumference expanded into the immeasurable and collapsed into
the inconceivable. To move just far enough anywhere, whether in
the enormous or the minute, is to encounter emptiness. Not only
have we seen through the superhuman powers that condition us
(and that is all four forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, “strong,”
and “weak”), we have in part enlisted them in our service. In this
world that has become vast, empty, and in part serviceable, we
move about with increasing speed and agility. As we do, we bump
only into one another. We delay death as long as we can and then
suppress or deny it. All these violent changes in the lifeworld,
completely improbable three thousand years ago, are the result of
alphabetic lines.
One might say that alphabetic lines and the thought that moves
along them illuminated the stolid darkness of the magical–mythical
lifeworld, that they cut windows in this world, letting the light of
critical thought in. But that would not give the alphabetic reorder-
ing credit for its final consequences. It did begin to open windows,
but later critical thinking also built doors people used to go out
and experience the world. Finally, it tore down the walls. Today
the clear light of critical thought floods the whole environment
from all sides. Even the individual human being is illuminated
in his innermost being with such cold X-rays. This means there
is nothing left to illuminate. There is nothing to stop the rays of
critical thinking. They run into a void.
With this, alphabetic writing and thinking have reached and
exceeded their original goal. To think further, one would have
to use new codes. But to maintain that linear consciousness has
overshot its goal and is about to lose itself in nothingness is to
160 ✴ does writing have a future?
practice historical critique and so linear thought after all, for it is
to say that history is a process that led from the narrow abundance
of prehistory to the open emptiness of posthistory.
The goal of historical consciousness is unattainable for this
peculiar reason: only historical consciousness has goals (it is lin-
ear); other levels of consciousness do not. Therefore, in setting
itself the goal of reaching a level of consciousness without goals,
historical consciousness will come to a false conclusion. Goals can
be pursued within history but not in mythology and not in the
new. Only in this sense are we justified in saying the history has
over-shot its goal: a new form of aimlessness has emerged from it.
That is to say, history can go ahead and pursue its goals (which it
can never achieve), but to the new consciousness, observing it all
from above, it doesn’t matter.
The level of consciousness that prevailed before history is ar-
ticulated pictorially, the historical alphabetically, the new digitally.
Abysses open between them. Each alphabetic attempt to bridge the
abyss in the direction of the digital will fail because it will carry its
own linear, goal-oriented structure into the digital, covering the
digital up. So the alphabetic model of consciousness just proposed
should be erased after use. The same is true of this entire alphabetic
essay to the extent that it tries to write past writing. The provisional
assistance it offers is to be applied to the new with justified mistrust
and then erased.
Inasmuch as this essay has tried to write past writing, it is to
be erased after use. Inasmuch as it has written about writing (and
obviously not written far enough), it should be read as a subscript
to writing—and this in a double sense: as confirmation of what has
been written (underwriting) and as the last written thing before
the end (signature).
The objection could be raised that writing does not need to be
confirmed. Surely it is presumptuous of a writer to except himself
from wanting to underwrite this ancient and splendid articulation
of the spirit with his own name. But is it not common today for
 Subscript ✴ 161
petitions and protests to circulate to collect thousands of signa-
tures? This essay, this subscript, wants to be read as one among
thousands, one underwriting of a petition in support of a writing
that stands accused, one signature on a protest against the threat
of secondary illiteracy, even as stifled tears. But how can the tears
be completely stifled when writing is being carried to its grave,
even if, at some level of consciousness a hair’s breadth thick, tears
seem inappropriate?
The last writing—that’s ridiculous, some will say. Certainly
more tides of writing will flow through the presses and technically
advanced reproduction apparatuses and into the environment. The
writer of this essay will, with certainty bordering on probability,
write more: he cannot do otherwise. And in light of such text infla-
tion, it does make sense, in the final analysis, to call them all last
writings. The present essay has tried to suggest this.
There are people who write because they think it still makes
sense, and there are people who no longer write but go back to
kindergarten. And then there are people who write despite knowing
that it makes no sense. This essay is actually directed at the first
two but dedicated to the third.
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Afterword to the
Second Edition

New editions should really consider the old ones, and the new
considerations should supplement the old. This supplemental
text will not need to be so concerned with bringing things up to
date because the text is an essay. An essay is an attempt to stimu-
late others to reconsider, to move them to provide supplements.
That is the reason this text is also to be published as a disk: it is
intended to be a snowball, the initial presentation increasingly
covered over by subsequent additions. A series of branching new
editions should unfold, with new considerations overlapping the
earlier ones. Publishing an essay is not about proving or disproving
something (as in an experiment) but about constantly rethinking
everything dialogically. That there is a new edition proves that
we’re still concerned with writing and not with what comes after
writing. It is just not so easy to break out of writing and into after-
thoughts. The essay’s lack of success in this respect is to be taken
into consideration.
The text suggests that there are fundamentally just two ways
out of writing: back to images or forward to numbers; back to the
imagination or forward into calculation. In the course of these
considerations, it turned out that these two directions could sur-
reptitiously merge: numbers may be computed into images. One
could try to break out of textual, writing-based thought into intuitive
calculations. If this were to succeed, it would lift both calculating
and imaginative thinking into the textual. Writers would then have

163
164 ✴ afterword
swallowed mathematicians and image makers, digested them, and
in so doing raised themselves to a new level. It didn’t work here.
Regrettably, the explanation is simple: the one making the at-
tempt was a writer whose mathematical competence is inadequate.
One might think one could have known that beforehand. But in
fact, those whose mathematical competence is sufficient don’t try to
break out of writing, for they have already set it aside in contempt.
So the attempt must be made despite being aware of one’s own
incompetence (of inevitable failure). That is just what is dramatic
about essayistic thinking: it knows its own incompetence and turns
to those with greater competence to continue to try.
Knowing one’s own incompetence is not necessarily a disad-
vantage. It is possible to laugh at oneself in the process to keep the
effort moving forward. So not ridendo castigat mores but ridendo
castigat se ipsum. And this was perhaps not a complete failure after
all, for it could lead to the second edition we have before us now.

V. F., June 1989

Translator’s Afterword
and Acknowledgments
Nancy Ann Roth

Vilém Flusser, like Walter Benjamin, understood translation as

an engagement with language as such, resonating far beyond the
fortunes of any particular text. But where Benjamin’s thought
seemed to move toward a convergence among languages, a point
where “the original and the translation [become] recognizable as
fragments of a greater language,”1 Flusser was keenly conscious of
moments and spaces between codes, leaps between standpoints. He
speaks of intractable antagonisms between certain kinds of codes,
notably between images and linear texts, or more exactly, between
the magical and historical consciousnesses they respectively sup-
port. He describes codes locked in combat as the historical subjects
of triumph or defeat.
Flusser spoke five languages, wrote for publication in four
of them, and knew enough of several more to draw on them for
quotations and etymological evidence. But as he made clear in
an essay called “The Gesture of Writing,” he did not experience
the languages stored in his memory as equal in the sense that all
would cover the same ground or all be simultaneously available
to express a particular thought. In a passage in the present book,
in fact, he differentiates among the spoken languages he knows by
their various ways of resisting his effort to force them into lines of
writing: “Each language defends itself according to its character,”

165
166 ✴ translator’s afterword
he writes. “German is slippery, English brittle, French deceptive,
Portuguese sly.”
In “The Gesture of Writing,” Flusser describes what must be a
unique pattern of translating his own texts into other languages
and, sometimes, back again into the original. That particular essay
exists in seven different versions in four different languages.2 Nor
is it coincidence that the most comprehensive study of Flusser’s
work to date, Rainer Guldin’s 2005 Philosophieren zwischen den
Sprachen (Philosophizing between Languages),3 is organized around
the concept of translation.
This is not, could not, be a “true” translation by Flusser’s stan-
dards (“I believe that the only true translation is the one attempted
by the author of the text to be translated”).4 And yet perhaps exactly
because he was so conscious of distinctions, frictions among codes,
he was also sensitive to a limit, to the possibility of a gap too wide
to jump, of codes so different that no translation is possible. In the
afterword to the second edition, he quite explicitly confesses to
having himself failed to achieve a true translation of the kind most
urgently needed now, namely, a recoding from alphanumeric texts
into algorithmic code—into technical images. He shares his sense
of despair, first at his own incapacity to be the author of such a
translation, and then at the failure of his book to have finally tran-
scended its own status as a book, to attract the kinds of translators
who might have recoded it for an emerging consciousness.
This book remains a book, addressed to readers, and not an
algorithm for sound and image. And because it is a book and because
we are still readers, it bears witness to the currency of his thought.
I can say, now, in English, “I wrote it nevertheless.”
I’ll always be grateful to Anke Finger for her instant enthusiasm
when I first told her I wanted to translate Flusser’s work into English.
She, as well as Andreas Ströhl and Rainer Guldin, have been reliably
generous with their support at all points. I am grateful to Lambert
Wiesing, a philosopher with both a high professional regard and an
infectious enthusiasm for Flusser’s work, who offered his general
 translator’s afterword ✴ 167
encouragement and specific advice about an English translation.
Marcel Marburger kindly shared both his knowledge of pertinent
materials in the Flusser-Archiv in Berlin and my concern about
English equivalents for a few crucial words with unique resonances
in German. For all of us, Edith Flusser continues to be an inspira-
tion, a person of enormous warmth and energy, always eager to
foster creative dialogue about her husband’s work.
I’d like to thank Doug Armato, Adam Brunner, and Danielle
Kasprzak at the University of Minnesota Press, for their kindness
to me and their commitment to making more of Flusser’s work
available in English, and Andreas Müller-Pohle, this book’s first
publisher, for his support of this English edition. It is, finally,
most fortunate that my husband, Michael Whetman, is an artist
who reads voraciously and likes to talk about words. Beyond this,
however, he is essential to creating an immediate reality in which
I am able to translate books.
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Translator’s Notes

Superscript
1 The German chapter title is “Überschrift,” meaning either “above”
or “about” writing and also having the sense of a title or head-
ing.

Letters of the Alphabet

1 Buchstaben is an archaic way of forming the plural.

Poetry
1 Communicology (Kommunikologie) is Flusser’s term for his own
field of study, the study of communication.

Books
1 The publisher and translator of this book did want an index.

Letters
1 PTT (Postes, télégraphes et téléphones) administrated postal
services and telecommunications in France from 1921 until 1991,
when it was split into La Poste and France Télécom.

Translator’s Afterword
1 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations
(New York: Schocken, 1969), 78.
2 Rainer Guldin, Philosophieren zwischen den Sprachen: Vilém
Flussers Werk (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005), 280.
3 Ibid.
4 Vilém Flusser, “The Gesture of Writing,” unpublished typescript
in original English, p. 11.

169
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Index

algorithm: at the alphabet’s Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and

boundary, 137; not Guattari), xxi
recognized by art critics, apparatuses: advantages over
24–25; as picture, 24 human beings, 58–59; binary
alphabet: as antidote to pictorial code for, 145; decision-
thinking, 31, 32, 147; as making in the service of,
auxiliary code for making 115; future replacement of
images, 135; deferred to by publishers by, 42; turning
numeric code, 137; digital history into images, 138;
code’s incompatibility with as writers of history, 21;
the, 137, 149–50; as dominant poetry in the context of,
code, 63; effect on spoken 71–72, 74; programmed to
language, 33–34, 63–64, 67; simulate brain function, 146;
as expression of Western programming as writing for,
thought, 53; future loss of 55, 56
the, 30, 31, 35, 42, 75, 77, 139, art: concept that blocks
159, 160; invention of, 30, 34– access to new images,
35; in relation to numbers, 28–29; computer, 60, 109;
31; link between poetry convergence with science,
and the, 71–72, 74–76; as 29, 83; decline in, 105;
obstruction to digital codes, inadequacy of term in
147, 149–51, 160; perceived relation to computer images,
need for more than one, 50; 28
in relation to binary code,
55–56; rendered superfluous Bacon, Francis, x
through informatics, 53, 63; Baudrillard, Jean, xi
as signs for sound, 24, 31; Benda, Julian, 138
survival of, 151–52 Benjamin, Walter, 28
alphanumeric code. See code, Betrayal of the Intellectuals
alphanumeric (Benda), 138

171
172 ✴ index
Bergson, Henri, xviii counting device, 26; replacing
Bible, 39, 63, 107 human intellectual functions,
binary code. See code, digital 26
black box, 106, 128 computer art, 28
book: not read in linear fashion, computer artist, 157
xii; spoken, 68; three computing: as basis for play with
movements characterizing numbers, 27; as simulation of
human interaction with, brain function, 146
97–101 control society, xxiv
bookworms, 95, 102 creativity: linguistic, 68; in
brush (writing implement), 17 relation to authorship, xvii
Buridan’s donkey (philosophical culturemes, 29
paradox), 101
Burroughs, William, xxii Deleuze, Gilles, xxi, xxii, xxiv
Butor, Michael, xii Derrida, Jacques, xiii, xviii
différence (Derrida), xiii, xviii
calendars, 122–23 Difference and Repetition
cave paintings, xvii (Deleuze), xxiv
Champollion, Jean-Francois, 88 digital code. See code, digital
cipher, 87 Discipline and Punish (Foucault),
code: alphabetic, 30, 45, 88, xix
135 (see also alphabet); discourse: circular form of
alphanumeric, 23–24, before writing, 32; increasing
88, 106, 116, 120; for abstraction of, 31; interruption
apparatuses, 21, 71; of, by images, 136; letters
denotative and connotative, concerned with constructing,
66; digital (binary), 27, 55, 24; shaped by alphabet, 32, 34;
61, 61, 145–59; etymology texts as, 43–44
of word, 88; gestural, 69;
hieroglyphic, 88; language Echographies (Stiegler), xviii
as, 66, 67, 69, 76; letters as Einstein, Albert, 126
ciphers of a, 88; mathematical engraving, 13
compared to digital, 137; entropy, 12, 13, 106
numbers as, 87, 88; old and
new, 3; quantum structure fantasia essata (Leonardo), 83
of digital, 145; visual, 15, 63, feedback, between images and
150; writing as linear, xiv, 15 receivers, 145; between
composition, as synonym for technology and its users,
computation, 29 17; between writers and
computer: capacity of, to make historical consciousness, 8
abstract concrete, 28; as Foucault, Michel, xiii, xix
 index ✴ 173
freedom: binary of, and Husserl, Edmund, xviii, 52
determinism, xi; as capacity hypotheses non fingo (Newton),
to choose, 100, 101; 82–83
dialogue with publishers
as measure of, 41; internal “I think,” as contextless, xvii–
contradiction in historical xviii
concept of, 122; new concept iconoclasm, writing as, 14,
of, 123, 142; potentially 30–31
resulting from automation, ideograms as signs for ideas, 30
58–61; threatened by fascistic images: coming of audible, 29;
communication structure, convey concrete experience,
116–17 21; distinction between
print and, xii; as goal of
games, new visionary capacity scripts, 135–39; ideograms
needed for, 27–28 as, seen with the inner eye,
gesture of writing, 7, 12, 19, 95 30; language looking down
globalization, media as key to, x on, 31; mimetic function
Gödel, Kurt, 25 of, diminishing, 71, 146; as
graphein (Greek), 11, 47 models of experience, 60;
Guattari, Félix, xxi nonlinear reading of, xvi;
Gutenberg Galaxy, The numbers as, 24; prehistoric,
(McLuhan), xii xvi, xvii, 100; recoding from
Gutenberg, Johannes, 48 spoken languages to, 154;
resistance of, to criticism,
handwriting, 122 152; speaking, 64, 74, 134;
Hansen, Mark, xviii supplanting writing, xvi,
Hardt, Michael, xxiii, xxiv xvii, 68; as surfaces, xvii, 15,
heat death, 13, 14. See also 146; temporality of, 150–51;
entropy totalitarianism of, 91; writing
Heidegger, Martin, 63 associated with resistance to,
historical consciousness, xiii, xiii, 14–15, 30
7, 35 improbable, synonym for
history: acceleration of, 8, informative, 12, 34, 43
138; dynamic of, 8; end of, index, as point of entry into a
59; as function of writing, book, 99n
8; made more effectively illustrations, as point of entry
by apparatuses, 21; as into a book, 99, 100
progress 21; as progressive informatic revolution, source in
understanding, 15 hadronic level of matter, 144
History of Sexuality (Foucault), information: drawn out of
xix language through writing, 34;
174 ✴ index
genetic, 120; loss of, through religious character of, 104–8;
entropy, 12, 34; machines, rituals associated with, 104–
x–xii; poet as designer of, 5; as texts not intended for
75; produced by reader public view, 103, 108
of technical images, 153; letters (of alphabet): as ciphers
production of, as society’s of a code, 88; storage of, in
function, xvii; quantity of brain, 120
inversely related to efficiency logic: impossibility of reducing
of transmission, 39; as to mathematics, 25; as “rules
reverse of entropy, 12; site of words,” 63
of production of, as center literary criticism, 33, 38
of power, 115; theory, 33, literature: accelerating flow of,
88, 120; transmitted more 18; division into models of
effectively by means other behavior, 60, 89; grave of,
than writing, 3 136; recoding of, 152–54; as
inscription, difference from universe of texts, 37
notation, 18; as monumental,
18 magic, as circular thinking, 15
matter, levels of, 142–43
Kierkegaard, Søren, 106 maktub (Arabic), 15
kindergarten, 155, 157 McLuhan, Marshall, xi
Kittler, Friedrich, xii media: neglect of in cultural
Kuhn, Thomas, 150 theory xi, xix–xix; as
prostheses (Stiegler), xviii; as
Lacan, Jacques, xx technologies of power, xxiv
language: determining patterns media culture, 131
of thought (universes), media ecology, x
64–65; elite entrusted media specificity, xiii, xviii, xxiv
with care of, 68–69; lost memory: alphanumeric, loss of,
musical dimension of, 68; 119; artificial, 96, 97, 112;
potential for development collective, stored in language,
of, 66; potential loss of, 66; erasure of alphabet
67; resistance of, to being from, 153; human, 120–21,
written, 33; as store of 149; material forms of, xiii;
collective memory, 66–67 materials (bronze, marble)
letter-writing: decline of, 105; in the service of, 13; seat of
replacement of, by computer immortality, 149
art, 109 Mesopotamia, 11
letters (correspondence): loss Minitel, 103
of reason to write, 108–9; music, potential visibility of, 29
 index ✴ 175
myth, of creation and the Plato’s cave, 139
invention of writing, 11–15 poesis, distinguished from
mythagogues, 67–68 mimesis, 71
poet: old and new, 76; oral
newspaper: between library (mythagogue) 67–68, 75
and wastebasket, 113; poetry: alphabetic, compared
transformation from with calculating, 75–77;
ephemeral to “lasting,” 112– bound to alphabetic writing,
13; as survivor of informatic 71–72, 75; contrasted
revolution, 111 to mimicry (poesis and
newsprint, 111 mimesis), 71; festive character
notation, compared to of, 105; as force shaping
inscription, 18; as perception and experience,
documentary, 18; 72–74; as game with strategy
intermittent flow, “stuttering” to enlarge the universe of
of, 20 language, 71; lyric, as instance
notebooks, 122 of expressionistic text, 38;
numerical thought, violation of oral, 68–69; transposition
by literal thought, 23 of, to television screen, 155;
numbers: codes as rules writing of compared to
governing relationships writing letters, 105
between, 87; change postal system, archaic nature of,
character in digital form, 27; 106–7; global sphere of the,
as containers, 87–88; freeing 106; philosophy of, 104
themselves from letters, 26; “Postscript on Control Societies”
signs for ideas, 24 (Deleuze), xxi
power: empty desk as sign
objects: as archival sources, xv; of, 125; media as new
maliciousness of, 13, 14 technologies of, xxiv; poetic,
Occam’s razor, 42, 43, 44 of technical images, 71;
orthography, 8 political, 115; realized only
Ouroboros, 92, 93 through resistance, 125;
signified by not writing,
panopticon, xxii–xxiii 129; undermined by any
paper, 95, 96 examination of its own
paradigm (Kuhn), 150 means, 128; visual, of
pens, 121 numbers, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29
photographs, indexicality of, xvii power of the pen, 126, 128–30
pictograms, 30 prehistory, difference from
pictorial code. See code, visual history, xiv, 8
176 ✴ index
press (fourth estate), power of, recoding. See translation
as anachronism, 115–16; as revolution: historical, contrasted
basis for existential freedom, to informatic, 74; Industrial,
117 print as model and core of,
Principia Mathematica (Russell 51–52; informatic, exhausts
and Whitehead), 63 potentialities of writing,
print: distinction from images, 47; informatic, gives eye
xii; end of xii; as model and precedence over ear, 26,
core of Industrial Revolution, informatic, political and
51 cultural character of, 119;
programming: breaking informatic, preserves forests,
down and recalculating 96; informatic, radical
behaviour, 58; contrast character of, 144; informatic,
with alphanumeric renders print superfluous,
writing, 63; fear of, 59–61; 52–53; informatic, threatens
as instructions, 56–58; to turn people into robots,
liberating potential of, 72; 77; possible only in historical
meaning as intention of, 59; universe, 99, 101; potential of
rendering writing obsolete, library walls for, 97, 98–99;
58–61; scripts, between as “turning around,” 98, 100;
writing and, 133; as writing programming as, 56
directed toward apparatuses,
55–56 science, as fiction, 83
PTT (Postes, télégraphes, scribere (Latin), 11
téléphones), 103n1 scientific texts: aesthetic
publisher: dialogue between text criteria for, 25; as bridging
and, 41; as filtering grid, 40; disjunction between eye
as transmitter of texts, 40 and ear, 26; authority of,
90; denotative character of,
quanta: and probability 141; 38; numeric and alphabetic
thinking in, 144–45 character of, 137; translate
quill, 17–18 logical thought into new
quotation marks, 6 visual codes, 154
scripts: between drama and
reading: as conferring meaning, apparatus, 133; as pretexts,
85; critical, compared 135–36; for radio, 134–35
with puzzle-solving scriptwriter, at the end of
(calculating) type of, 79–85; history and the beginning
as deciphering, 87–89; three of apparatuses, 138;
types of, 88–92 between playwright and
 index ✴ 177
word processor, 133 basis for, 147; critical,
score, alphabetic text as, 24 struggle of, against images,
Serre, Michel, 130 136, 137, 147, 159; historical,
simulation, as caricature of what madness of, 35; imaginative,
is simulated, 146–47 30, 163; literal and pictorial,
speech: as acoustic 25, 31, 34; mythical
phenomenon, 65; compared to logical, 6, 15,
deterioration of, 64; effect 30; political, in categories
of alphabet on, 64; inherent of power, 130; quantum
tendency toward writing in, character of, 144; revolution
32 in, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151;
Stiegler, Bernard, xviii rules of, logic, 63; rules
stylus, 11, 14, 17 of, sentence construction,
subject: boundaries of, 120–21; 66; science as “value free,”
constituted differently 57; simulation of, 147;
by different media, xviii; typographic, 47, 50, 52, 56
constitution of as “node” Thousand Plateaus, A, (Deleuze
(Foucault) xix–xx; Decartes’s and Guattari) xxi, xxiii
understanding of, x; of desire time: Heraclitean, 20; linear, as
(Lacan), xx; intention of, existentially untenable, 20;
to resist entropy, 13–14; as linear versus cyclical, xv
observer of time, 141; as topoi (Greek), 5, 47
superpanopticon (Hardt), xxiv translation: from alphanumeric
to digitally coded text, 60;
technological determinism, x as means of generating new
Technics and Time (Stiegler), information, 65–66; from
xviii old to new codes, 152–54;
telephone, 103 theory of, 154–55; from
texts: criteria for, 44; denotative two dimensions to one
and expressionistic 38–39; as dimension, 15
media (bridges), 38; seeking transcoding. See translation
readers, 37, 39, 40. See also truth, as standard of
scientific texts measurement, 82
textual inflation, 42 types, consciousness of:
thinking: alphabetic, 33, 151, alphabets as resistance to, 50;
152; calculable, 26; critical, in print as confirmation of, 50
contrast to pictorial, magical, typewriter: as applied
30; critical, definition of, information theory, 120;
20–12; critical, as resistant arranges signs into lines, 23;
to overcoming physiological disappearance of, 119
178 ✴ index
typography: as pleonasm, 48; as Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61
way of writing and thinking, writer: as intellectual of a
47 particular historical period,
79; in struggle against
universals, medieval dispute language, 33, 38
over, 48–50
utopia, 29, 95 zero, 82, 87
Žižek, Slavoj, xx
Vergès, François, xxii–xxiii
Vico, Giambattista, xiii
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Electronic Mediations series
(continued from page ii)

22 . Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools Byron Hawk, David

M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors

21 . The Exploit: A Theory of Networks Alexander R. Galloway

and Eugene Thacker

20 . Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow

Victoria Vesna, Editor

19 . Cyberspaces of Everyday Life Mark Nunes

18 . Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture Alexander R.

Galloway

17 . Avatars of Story Marie-Laure Ryan

16 . Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi Timothy C. Campbell

15 . Electronic Monuments Gregory L. Ulmer

14. Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

13 . The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory

Thomas Foster

12 . Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory Peter Krapp

11. Biomedia Eugene Thacker

10. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism Ann Weinstone

9 . Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society
Steven Shaviro

8 . Cognitive Fictions Joseph Tabbi

7 . Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet Diana

Saco

6 . Writings Vilém Flusser

5. Bodies in Technology Don Ihde

4 . Cyberculture Pierre Lévy

3. What’s the Matter with the Internet? Mark Poster

2 . High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic

to the Posthuman R. L. Rutsky

1. Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in

Virtual Reality Ken Hillis
This page intentionally left blank
Vilém Flusser (1920–91) was born in Prague; emigrated to Brazil,
where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column
in São Paulo; and later moved to France. He wrote several books
in Portuguese and German. In addition to the University of Min-
nesota Press’s Writings volume (2004) and Into the Universe of
Technical Images (Minnesota, 2011), The Shape of Things, Toward
a Philosophy of Photography, and The Freedom of the Migrant have
been translated into English.

Mark Poster is professor of history at the University of California,

Irvine. His books include What’s the Matter with the Internet? (Min-
nesota, 2001), The Second Media Age, The Mode of Information,
and Cultural History and Postmodernity.

Nancy Ann Roth is a writer and critic based in the United King-
dom. She was the translations editor for German Expressionism:
Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of
National Socialism, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long.