From acoustic space to the global village: linearity and the Western intellectual imagination.

Abstract

<p>Linearity is a key organizing concept in modern Western thought. It is central to Saussure’s <em>Cours de linguistique générale</em> (1916), and to intellectual debates concerning the relation of writing to speech. In the background to the <em>Cours</em> an ongoing revolt against linear notions of time and space was taking place. This foregrounding of the non-linear was characteristic of modernist art and literature, as well as science, in particular mathematics and physics. The critique of linearity defined French poststructuralism of the 1960s and 1970s, and has been integral to feminist, anti-modern, anti-universalist, as well as postcolonial, interventions. Marshall McLuhan identified in writing, and in particular printing, a powerfully deterministic reductionism; more radical critics saw the introduction/imposition of writing and printing as destructive of many non-western cultural ecologies. It is proposed that non-linearity be seen as a minor universal, and linearity as a form of order created out of it.</p>