Tooling up for Complexity - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 5

by initial sound, by category, etc. And the
existence of boundaries, external and internal,
brings greater visibility in categories, at the same
time as making them more abstract.

[GOO 77, p.81]

Anne-Marie Christin takes Jack Goody's notion of
“graphic reason” one step further into the analysis of the
relationship between text and image. For her, writing should
not be defined primarily as a means of merely registering
speech as it is often portrayed. Christin claims that writing
has its origins in image and in the spatial disposition of
elements [CHR 95]. She also goes further than
Leroi-Gourhan: in Le geste et la parole [LER 64], the latter
acknowledges the contribution of mythography as a way of
encouraging the development of writing. Similarly, she
questions the arche-writing project by Jacques Derrida
[DER 67] which leaves little space, she claims, to the spatial
origins of writing.

Christin recognizes Jack Goody's emphasis on the role
played by graphic reason in the history of writing
[CHR 95, p.28]. However, she reproaches him for minimizing
the overlap of graphic reason and writing, and the
classification possibilities it opens. Christin even argues that
the image came before writing:

The written language could only have been
produced by the spoken language as litter, a
parasite. The spoken language only creates in
relation to itself or in its close dependence. The
image, on the contrary, shows a new
characteristic of writing in that it was born from
the image's overturn, its internal revolution, in
the same way as the Greek alphabet will be born
from the overturn of writing. [CHR 95, p.21]