Literate Technologies: Language, Cognition, Technicity

It is a basic contention of the present volume that only on such a basis of generalised technology can we begin to approach the phenomenon of language in its broadest sense. That is to say, of any system of sign operations in which an event of transmission or transcription can be said to take place. At the same time, it is necessary to treat this universalising aspect of ‘literacy’ as a constellation-effect bridging the entire field of discourse–from atomic and molecular structures to the transcriptive coding and decoding processes of DNA; from the evolving neural structures of the human brain to computing programmatics and artificial intelligence; from simple binary procedures to the most complex topologies–which is thus also to say, the entire textual field.
Chapters in this volume treat the work of Walter Ong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nicholas Rescher, Ernest Fenolosa, Roman Jakobson, Alan Turing, Claude Levi-Strauss, Thomas Sebeok, Juri Lotman, Sigmund Freud and Claude Shannon.