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AI image Introduction: The New Hieroglyphs of Politics The digital landscape has shifted. A decade ago, the brief, aphoristic tweet reigned as the dominant form of online discourse — a remnant of the phonetic, linear tradition of writing. Today, however, the meme has overtaken it, establishing an aesthetic regime where images, captions, and icons define the rhythms of collective meaning. In the United States, political culture itself has become deeply visual: politicians appear in memes wearing Mexican hats, wielding maracas, or reimagined in pop-cultural tableaux. What once belonged to the margins — the comic, the pictorial, the non-discursive — now sets the tone of public debate. This inversion, seemingly trivial, recalls a deeper philosophical tension that Jacques Derrida traced in Of Grammatology (1967): the hierarchical opposition between phonetic and nonphonetic writing, between the linear voice and the graphic trace. The meme’s ascendancy thus signals not merely a shift in ...

Introduction André Martinet’s article The Word challenges the conventional understanding of words as fixed linguistic units. Across languages, the concept of a "word" varies significantly, yet writing has reinforced the perception of words as stable entities. Mechanical translation further contributed to this illusion by treating words as discrete units with direct one-to-one correspondences across languages. However, modern AI-based language models, which process language in more nuanced ways, lend support to his functionalist perspective. This article explores Martinet’s argument by tracing the evolution of how language is conceptualized—from early scriptio continua, to machine translation, to the contemporary role of AI in text processing. By doing so, we uncover how recent technological advancements reaffirm his claim that linguistic units must be analyzed beyond the apparent boundaries of words. The Concept of "Word" Across Languages One of Martinet’s ...