The visual age is the age that has followed the acoustic age -- the age in which signs are used to represent speech events, in which the asynchronous communicative media of text and images is ascendant. This is a kind of technological accouterment that is internal rather than external. It is not just, as Plato's Thamus feared, that we would shelve our texts outside of ourselves, thereby destroying our memories in writing down things we wanted to remember so that we would not have to do so.  We develop a capacity as readers of signs so that were we stripped of every external implement, we would still be literate and perceive the world through a linear, even syllogistic, consciousness. If the acoustic age was totally devoid of signs which human minds might have interpreted as meaningful, then the visual age is replete with their interpretable presence, but there is a meaning behind these signs other than their being 'readable' within a given society.

Our texts, moreover, interact with one another in a living fabric that spans time.  Through them, we are able to interpret Herodotus, for instance, to the present age. We can trace the history of Aristotle's restoration to the West through translations out of the Arabic that stepped in to preserve him, and we can trace the history of Aristotle's journey into the Church through St. Thomas Aquinas's use of him to refute Islam. That is to say, Aristotle, who died almost a thousand years before Islam, was used against it in support of Christendom, the advent of which itself did not follow until three hundred and fifty years after his death. Writers long since dead, like Dante and Shakespeare, continue to shape us today while the semiotic canon has exploded beyond them in the vast tracts of postcolonial literature that presently seeks to place in those areas long interpellated by Western hegemony the productive capacity for self-interpretation. Were history to stop with visual semiotics, we would still be long in completing its drafts. (Back)