Lecture 10: Print, Space and Closure
February 1st, 2023
From Orality to Literacy
The shift from oral to written speech is a shift from sound to visual space.
● “This focus brings out not only the relationship between print and writing, but also the
relationship of print to the orality still residual in writing and early print culture.
● Orality still exists – it did not end.
The Revolution of Alphabetic Printing
The crucial development in the global history of printing was the invention of alphabetic
letterpress print in fifteenth-century Europe.
● Alphabetic writing broke the word up into spatial equivalents of phonemic units.
● The letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur.
● With alphabetic letterpress print it is otherwise. Words are made out of units (types)
which pre-exist as units before the words which they form.
● Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did.
The First Assembly Line
Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type,
marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order.
● Embedded the word itself in the manufacturing process, commodifying it.
● The first assembly line: a technique of manufacture which, in a series of set steps,
produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which
produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book.
Auditory Processing
After printing was developed, auditory processing continued for some time to dominate the
visible, printed text, though it was eroded away by print.
● Auditory dominance can be seen in early printed title pages, which seem to us crazily
erratic in their inattention to visual word units.
● Sixteenth-century title pages commonly divide major words, including the author’s name,
with hyphens, presenting the first part of a word in one line in large type and the latter
part in smaller type.
Why does the original, presumably more ‘natural’ procedure seem wrong to us?
● Because we feel the printed words before us as visual units.
● The sixteenth century concentrated less on the sight of the word and more on the sound
of the word than we do now.
February 1st, 2023
From Orality to Literacy
The shift from oral to written speech is a shift from sound to visual space.
● “This focus brings out not only the relationship between print and writing, but also the
relationship of print to the orality still residual in writing and early print culture.
● Orality still exists – it did not end.
The Revolution of Alphabetic Printing
The crucial development in the global history of printing was the invention of alphabetic
letterpress print in fifteenth-century Europe.
● Alphabetic writing broke the word up into spatial equivalents of phonemic units.
● The letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur.
● With alphabetic letterpress print it is otherwise. Words are made out of units (types)
which pre-exist as units before the words which they form.
● Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did.
The First Assembly Line
Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type,
marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order.
● Embedded the word itself in the manufacturing process, commodifying it.
● The first assembly line: a technique of manufacture which, in a series of set steps,
produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which
produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book.
Auditory Processing
After printing was developed, auditory processing continued for some time to dominate the
visible, printed text, though it was eroded away by print.
● Auditory dominance can be seen in early printed title pages, which seem to us crazily
erratic in their inattention to visual word units.
● Sixteenth-century title pages commonly divide major words, including the author’s name,
with hyphens, presenting the first part of a word in one line in large type and the latter
part in smaller type.
Why does the original, presumably more ‘natural’ procedure seem wrong to us?
● Because we feel the printed words before us as visual units.
● The sixteenth century concentrated less on the sight of the word and more on the sound
of the word than we do now.
