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The Breakdown of Print Institutions
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10219 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
3,535 Words |
| Author
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Alvin Kernan
Alvin Kernan is senior adviser in the humanities at the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation and emeritus professor of Princeton
University. |
Shifts in the primary means of production mark the great turning points in society, and, within these larger historical movements, changes in the primary mode of communication have been especially disruptive in all areas of social life. The transition from orality to literacy in fifth-century B.C. Greece, from Homer and the dramatists to Socrates and the philosophers (as chronicled by Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato and more generally by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy), brought new ways of understanding and organizing social life that are dramatized in the Platonic dialogues and lived out in the great Mediterranean empires based on written records.
The Gutenberg revolution beginning in the midsixteenth century transformed manuscript to print society, extending the esprit de système and iconicity of the printed book into all areas of life. Elizabeth Eisenstein's Printing Press as an Agent of Change and, in a more sensational way, Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy describe the complex ways in which the essential characteristics of print invaded and shaped all areas of life and thought, as, for example, printed Bibles in the vernacular destroyed the old religious hierarchy and created religions based on communication between God and man through the medium of holy Scripture.
All modern institutions have been deeply affected by print. Imagine evangelical Protestantism without the Book? Or the law without printed statutes? But the changes wrought by the printing press are most apparent in a number of print-centered institutions that developed in modern Europe along the lines of print logic: newspapers and magazines, educational systems based on reading and writing, book publishing, libraries, and literature, by way of obvious examples.
PERSISTENCE OF MODES
Of course, no human mode of communication, once used, ever disappears entirely. Oral and handwritten communications did not disappear with the appearance of print; they may even have been enriched and expanded, as in, by way of a small but elegant example, the epistolary novel in the world of print. Or, once they began to read widely, people had more to talk about, and conversation became a highly prized social skill. No more will reading disappear in the age of TV and electronic communications. But, in a given era, one mode of communication tends to dominate epistemologically as the most authoritative form of knowledge, and, for the last five centuries, that dominant mode of communication has been the printed word. "What is printed is true," as the old saying goes.
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