Print Logic vs. Paratextual Logic

The electronic variety of legally significant events presently has five basic forms: audio, visual, audio­visual, computerized, or some combination of the four. ¹⁴⁸ For example, in the electronic era, confessions can be audio­taped, contract negotiations can be videotaped, and cases can be compiled in a computer database. More than either oral or written text the audio­visual format that we call the paratext acts imagistically and metaphorically, much as still­photographic imagery does today. ¹⁴⁹ With its strong appeal to the retina, the "visual logic" ¹⁵⁰ of paratexts deemphasizes the detached logic and abstract analysis associated with print, and emphasizes instead the contextual, concrete, and emotive. ¹⁵¹ With print logic, experience is "cognized," whereas with visual logic, experience is "re/cognized." ¹⁵² The adage "seeing is believing" is the lodestar of visual logic. ¹⁵³ As Marshall McLuhan asserted in The Gutenberg Galaxy, ¹⁵⁴ the audio­visuality of paratexts harkens back to orality, but without its live and interactive dimensions. Because paratexts are more receptive to context, they are necessarily less prone to the degree of closure that characterizes print.

In an important sense, however, paratexts resemble typography; for the first time in the evolution of communications technology, paratexts allow the storage of the audio­visual, ¹⁵⁵ much as text stores words. Both electronic and printed texts replay the past as it has been reconfigured by the particular method of enframing. Thus, even paratexts have a static quality. The closure which occurs with paratexts, however, is not as extreme as that which takes place with printed texts since more context is enframed as paratexts move beyond words to encompass pictures and sounds. Combined, the components of the paratext create a hybrid medium that is in varying degrees oral, pictographic, and typographic. The represents a new and radical force in the operation of the law.