The Plato versus Isocrates epistemological struggle preexists media technologies and influences both how and when they are developed. Lanham holds that rhetorical approach thrived through oral, pre-print cultures, but the Platonic urge to batton down truths once and for all pushed us toward more stable texts, not resulting from but culminating in print. Definitive and unchangeable text came to us, very ironically, I think , in the Renaissance, says Lanham, although he never seems to explain why that period constitutes the line of demarcation . What followed was consent to the long, strict, unbending rule of print as a transparent window into the deeply abstract. Print, after all, is a trickery, too, not a historical inevitability.
Print represents a decision of severe abstraction and subtraction.
What follows is a kind of hierarchy in which the print author is the Platonic one who knows, and the reader becomes the obsequious student. The extraordinary fixity, slowness, and expense of the printing process, while providing copies by the myriad, cements the words on the page as worthy. Authors must indeed know. A culture springs up which not only respects but actually reveres authors and books. This religion is still with us in strength.