Gregory Ulmer:
Literacy is an "apparatus," which is not a neologism but a common term given specialized meaning in media studies.
I borrowed it from media studies to name the matrix of a language machine, partly social and partly technological, that operates in a given epoch. An apparatus is not only a technology (e.g. the alphabet, paper, ink etc) but also an institution and its practices developed along with the technology (Plato founded the Academy, the first school, and invented "method" -- the PHAEDRUS is the first discourse on method in the Western tradition -- and pedagogy -- the dialogue form -- and of course the categorical system of "concept.").
One of Plato's inventions was to take the verb "to be" which served only as a copula at the time (helping verb to link subject and predicate: "Achilles is angry"), and add to it the function of ontology: asking after the "being" of a thing ("What IS justice?"). Aristotle gave the title METAPHYSICS (a neologism) to the book he wrote after his PHYSICS, in which he developed further this practice of defining entities in terms of their properties.
Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -
