Writing

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Writing, as a technology, required premeditation and special art. Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does. “Language in fact bears the same relationship to the concept of mind that legislation bears to the concept of parliament,” says Jonathan Miller: “it is a competence forever bodying itself in a series of concrete performances.” Much the same might be said of writing – it is concrete performance – but when the word is instantiated in paper or stone, it takes on a separate existence as artifice. It is a product of tools, and it is a tool. And like many technologies that followed, it thereby inspired immediate detractors.

One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the non-writer Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment:

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”

‘External characters which are no part of themselves’ – this was the trouble. The written word seemed insincere. Ersatz scratchings on papyrus or clay were far abstracted from the real, the free-flowing sound of language, intimately bound up with thought so as to seem coterminous with it. Writing appeared to draw knowledge away from the person, to place their memories in storage. It also separated the speaker from the listener, by so many miles or years. The deepest consequences of writing, for the individual and for the culture, could hardly have been foreseen, but even Plato could see some of the power of this disconnection. The one speaks to multitude. The dead speak to the living, the living to the unborn. As McLuhan said, “Two thousand years of manuscript culture lay ahead of the Western world when Plato made this observation”. The power of this first artificial memory was incalculable: to restructure thought, to engender history. It is still incalculable, though one statistic gives a hint: whereas the total vocabulary of any oral language measures in few thousand words, a single language that has been written most widely, English, has documented vocabulary of well over a million words, a corpus that grows by thousands of words a year. These words do not exist only in the present. Each word has a province and a history that melts into its present life.

With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for other to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne’s thread. Now people leave paper trails. Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rate phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic. “This miraculous rebounding of the voice, the Greeks have a pretty name for and call it Echo,” wrote Pliny. “The spoken symbol,” as Samuel Butler observed, “perishes instantly without material trace, and if it lives at all does so only in the minds of those who heard it.” Butler was able to formulate this truth just as it was being falsified for the first time, at the end of the nineteenth century, by the arrival of the electric technologies for capturing speech. It was precisely because it was no longer completely true that it could be clearly seen. Butler completed the distinction: “The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another, it gives the writer’s mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body.”

But the new channel does more than extend the previous channel. It enables reuse and “re-collection” - new modes. It permits whole new architectures of information. Among them are history, law, business, mathematics, and logic. Apart from their content, these categories represent new techniques. The power lies not just in the knowledge, preserved and passed forward, valuable as it is, but in the methodology: encoded visual indications, the act of transference, substituting signs for things. And then, later, signs for signs. ~ Pages 30 -32