differently. These tours de force are further instances of the propensity
among the Romans to intensify the constraints upon writing beyond what
is needed for the communication of speech. As Julia Kristeva reminds us in
her studyLanguage: The Unknown, writing can be understood as a distinct
language, in the sense that it, too, generates meaning through differenti-
ation.^67 Its material is graphic, whereas the material of speech is phonetic.
Her observation is easy to accept in dealing with, for example, Peruvian
knot writing, or Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it is relevant to understanding
writing in the Roman world as well. Without a doubt, writing can have a
second order function as transcription of speech, but the prevalence of that
function today should not blind us to the ways in which writing exists
and operates independent of speech. Paradoxically, it was by cultivating
and intensifying this independence, through the sorts of phenomena pre-
sented here, that the Romans—and some Greek counterparts—sought to
constrain writing’s potential as a liberatory technology. We are accus-
tomed to think of writing as offering the advantage of communication
unbound to context. By turning writing into a visual game, the Romans
restrain this liberatory potential and re-embed writing in the specific and
the concrete. Whether we regard such word games as residue of a more
primitive or magical approach to script^68 or as virtuoso performance by a
hyperliterate elite, the result is the same. They constitute a vivid reminder
of the incommensurability of ancient approaches to writing with those
characteristic of other times and places. By paying attention to the em-
bodied, self-referential, and freely constrained aspects of writing in the
Roman world we gain access to features of ancient culture not carried by
language alone and we refine our understanding of the difference between
writing at Rome and writing in other contexts past and present.
Viewed historically, the spread of writing in the Roman world correl-
ates with and sustains changing configurations of property, status, and
identity. Viewed synchronically, especially in its relationship to speaking,
Roman writing helps to confer agency upon the writer, to differentiate
him or her from others, as master from slave, and to expand the literate
ego beyond the confines of the here and now of speech production. At the
same time, in separating writing from its connection with speech, using it
to defamiliarize processes of visual and auditory perception, at least some
Romans expose the materiality of the word, its groundedness in the realm
of the phenomenal. Roman writing, to be sure, is an aid to signification.
But more often than we are accustomed to acknowledge, it denies the
freedom of the signifier and limits production of meaning to direct en-
counters with the very system of inscription recognized as such.
- Kristeva 1989, esp. 23 30. Her observations on writing systems can be supplemen
ted by Morrison’s discussion of textual organization: Morrison 1987. - As intimated by Benjamin 1999 and Courtney 1990.
136 Situating Literacies