Literate Technologies

...it has long been argued that it was only through the advent of a purely alphanumeric system that writing acquired what we might call its “autonomy” from what it is otherwise supposed (in the form of pictograms or ideograms) to represent, instead describing an arbitrary referentiality…

In a previous blog I talk about the relationship between spoken and written language, and how certain words or phrases in the vocabulary of our native language can actually influence thinking (such as seeing blue as two different colours or seeing pink and red as one colour, depending on the language’s vocabulary for colours). Armand quotes Walter Ong with a similar idea: “In oral culture, restriction of words to sound determines not only modes of expression but also thought processes.”
However, one of the first things you learn in Stage One Linguistics is that language is arbitrary. There is no relationship between a half-circle, a circle with a half circle on top, a vertical line with a horizontal line running through the middle (written), or the sound /kat/ (spoken), and the concept of a small household feline which likes to chew your shoelaces.
The way Armand phrases it, with writing having “autonomy” from what it is supposed to represent, is an interesting way of putting it. Neither spoken language nor written language is greater of lesser than the other, they are simply two autonomous ways of representing concepts.
But how “autonomous” are spoken and written language? Certainly in languages which use ideographic writing systems, there is for at least some words more than an arbitrary link between the written symbol and what it represents.

But Armand is referring there not to ideographic writing systems but to alphanumeric writing systems.
Because we have grown up with reading and writing and listening and speaking and thinking all being so closely intertwined, it is interesting to attempt to think of those things as autonomous. Realise there is no relation between the concept of a cat, the sound /kat/, and the written form ‘cat’, until someone tells you so.