Ancient Literacies

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

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.



  1. Kristeva 1989, esp. 23 30. Her observations on writing systems can be supplemen
    ted by Morrison’s discussion of textual organization: Morrison 1987.

  2. As intimated by Benjamin 1999 and Courtney 1990.


136 Situating Literacies

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