Early Western Writing, Sensory Modalities, and Modern Alphabetic Literacy: On the Origins of Representational Theorizing

This article interrogates the so-called “crisis in representation” as a symptom of forgotten alphabetic literacy. My analysis launches its critique by attending to John Stewart’s recent writings on “the symbol model” and advances through two main sections. The first reviews historical developments in alphabetic technologies, identifying both basic differences and early impacts. The second section addresses phenomenological differences between hearing and vision and attempts to document how alphabetic writing enables speech to be heard as it could be seen if it were written. In summary, I try to demonstrate how literacy, the modern condition of logos, inseparably fuses with “oral/aural articulate contact.”