The Disincarnation Of The Word

Typographic Reason and the Epistemic Regime of the Disenchanted Page

Bible Moralisée (13th century, Paris)

Far more than being simply repositories of text, medieval manuscripts were often sensuous artifacts actively participating in what they transmitted; gold leaf catching candlelight, blue from Afghan stone adorning the Virgin’s robes, letters blooming into vines that became dragons that became marginal grotesques and scribal jokes. The materiality and sensuousness of the page were inseparable from its content; a Book of Hours was a text of prayers and devotions but also the embodiment of devotion itself, materialized in costly material and careful craftsmanship. By the time Kant publishes the first Critique, something fundamental has shifted; the page has become uniform type marching down white space, aspiring to a transparency that would allow concepts to pass unmediated into the reader’s understanding, the material substrate ideally disappearing into “pure” rational comprehension. This transformation from sensuous presence to rational transparency was a technological and epistemological revolution, a fundamental shift in what kind of knowing the page is supposed to enable and what relationship between matter and meaning, sense and intellect, beauty and truth ought to obtain. The illuminated page was a visual theology; the printed page became a rational medium of material theology, an evolution which summarizes the fate of the Logos in Western cultures. This is the story of a 600-year shift in Western epistemology, ontology, and desire.