Technological advances in literacy carry with them corresponding losses. It’s a well-known fact that a Gothic cathedral is in part the Bible “written” for illiterates: a complex formulation of space, light, colour, symbol, and representation. The advent of the printing press and moveable type ushered in an unprecedented dissemination in reading material, a rapid transposition of vocalized into silent reading, and a radical shift from public declaration to private meditation. But it also occasioned a critical loss of the image-word interlacement so crucial to the complexity of medieval reading. Language and text became isolated and sovereign. To claim that print killed the margins is an apposite slogan. Prior to Gutenberg’s invention, a vibrant tradition of decoration and commentary existed in the margins; and the consequent effect of the printing press is clearly stated by Michael Camille. “Language [after the invention of print] is now in a separate realm, written in discrete boxes or in fields hanging in the picture space” (158). In his Poetria the medieval poet John of Garland meditated on the figure of the idiota mentioned in Acts 4 and Corinthians 1. The idiota is the unlearned man, the rustic, the illiterate, whose illiteracy Brian Stock connects to the notion of “a `saintly simplicity’ that allows intuitive understanding of the Scriptures” (qtd. in Leupin: 6).

Another urgent area of address is literacy’s own illiteracies, those cannot read. After a couple of decades of focusing on the politics of identity we now find ourselves dealing with a less tractable phenomenon: the mobility of identities. Framed today within the complexities and shifts of cosmopolitan citizenship, literacy finds itself thrust into a new mode of illiteracy rapidly emerging in the form of les gens sans papiers. These “people without papers” read and speak but cannot be read; they escape the parameters that a power through literacy erects; they remain undocumented, unprotected, unrepresented, and unrepresentable.

As humans we suffer language, suffer through and suffer in the signifier. The call of Language is a call into Language for the profit of Language. Language can’t escape this primal personification as the computer of Capital among whose several outcomes is the irreversible expansion of pestilential literacy. Jean Luc Nancy remarks on the nakedness of our information technology and its evasion of the issue of the meaning of Being.