Bibliography

All writing is orderly, and that leads directly to the contemporary crisis in writing. For there is something mechanical about the ordering, the rows, and machines do this better than people do. One can leave writing, this...

Writing, this ordering of written signs into rows, can be mechanized and automated. Machines write faster than human beings. And not only that: they can vary the rules for assembling signs (the rules of orthography)...

[…] it is beneath human dignity to be concerned with matters that can be left to machines.

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...

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...

[…] 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...

All the technical requirements (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 ...

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...

 The new signs that appear on computer or television   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...

 It is fairly clear what will be lost in the transition from Gutenbergian 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...

 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 ...

 It can no longer be grasped in historical,   political, or ethical categories. Other cybernetic, computable,   functional categories must be applied to it. For this reason,  programming cannot actually be called writing. It is...

 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...

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...

[L]anguage 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...