Dyads and Dialectics - Note No. 7

Print is not inherently anti-participatory.  In the period Bordo discusses, madrigal books appear designed in such a fashion that different parts can be sung by readers sitting face to face.  The case of maps casts similar doubts on any causal link between the rise of print technology and the development of perspectival rendering.  Be it madrigals, maps or entirely verbal artefacts, reading is not necessarily a private activity.  Furthermore, the lone silent reader is as much a topos supporting a dubious dichotomy (detachment/participation) as an existential entity resisting that very dichotomy.

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