Language & Communication, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 99-106, 1989. 0271-5309189 $3.00 + 0.00 Printed in Great Britain. Pergamon Press plc

HOW DOES WRITING RESTRUCTURE THOUGHT?

ROY HARRIS

This paper challenges the ‘romantic’ view of the evolution of writing and the role of the Greeks in the development of alphabetic literacy. It introduces the concept of ‘autoglottic space’ and argues that this affords a better explanation of how writing restructures thought. At the same time it emphasizes that such questions cannot be decontextualized from the social and political circumstances attendant upon the introduction of writing into particular cultures, nor from the diverse purposes which writing may serve.

‘Writing’ is a concept which has undergone a remarkable transformation in the Western intellectual world over the past 30 years. In the wake of influential work by Derrida (1967a, b), Goody (1968), Havelock (1963, 1976, 1982), McLuhan (1962, 1964), Parry (1971) and others, writing is no longer regarded as a mere substitute for speech, or as a useful way of preserving and transmitting knowledge, but as an active and powerful cultural agency in its own right. What distinguishes the literate from the preliterate society is no longer seen as being the possession of a superior communications technology which has overcome the intrinsic limitations of the spoken word and makes it possible to accumulate records and accounts ad infinitum. These advantages, long recognized within the traditional view of writing, now tend to be regarded as merely incidental and external. According to the modern view, the essential innovation which writing brings is not a new mode of exchanging and storing information but a new mentality.

Propositions such as ‘Writing restructures thought’ and ‘Writing restructures consciousness’ (Ong, 1982) have become almost cliches in current discussions of literacy. So much so that it may now be timely to pause and consider exactly what truth, if truth it is, these cliches purport to capture. Whatever truth it may be, there can be no doubt that it is often accompanied, and perhaps obscured, by an accretion of misconceptions and fantasies which might be called, to avoid any harsher term, ‘romantic’. These include a romantic view of the origin of writing, a romantic view of the role played by the alphabet in the history of writing, and a romantic view of the contribution made by the Greeks to alphabetic writing. To disentangle the thesis that writing restructures thought from these and similar encumbrances is an essential preliminary step.

It should be-but probably is not-superfluous to insist at the outset that there are forms of writing which have nothing to do with language at all, let alone with the ‘respresentation of speech’. Those who claim that writing restructures thought, however, usually have in mind verbal as opposed to non-verbal forms of writing, and this restriction will be taken for granted in what follows.

The romantic view of the origin of writing is a very ethnocentric view, and specifically a Eurocentric view. It is a view summed up with admirable concision in the eighteenth century by Charles Davy, who described as the communis opinio of the day:

Writing, in the earliest ages of the world, was a delineation of the outlines of those things men wanted to remember, rudely graven either upon shells or stones, or marked upon the leaves or bark of trees (Davy. 1772).

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Professor R. Harris, Language & Communication,

c/o Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Hall, Oxford OX3 OBW, U.K.

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In short, writing originated as an evolutionary adaptation of pictorial representation. Thus writing systems which retain vestiges of pictorial figures are more ‘primitive’, and those which have none more ‘advanced’. This thesis, in one version or another, survived as received wisdom among twentieth-century authorities on writing (Cohen, 1958; Diringer, 1962; Fevrier, 1948; Gelb, 1963) and was taught as such to students of linguistics (Bloomfield, 1935), for it fitted in admirably with the orthodox linguistic doctrine of the ‘primacy of speech’. The history of writing was seen accordingly in terms of a universal progression from pictograms to logograms to phonograms, culminating eventually in the alphabet. Given this scenario, writing systems such as Chinese, which had failed to progress to the alphabetic stage, were seen as inferior or ‘retarded’, an opinion still widely held to this day. As Havelock reminds us, when Boswell objected to describing the Chinese as ‘barbarians’, Johnson’s reply was ‘Sir, they have not an alphabet’. (One might perhaps have expected him to add: ‘And they have no grammar, Sir, either.‘)

The romantic view of the origin of writing has not gone unchallenged (Harris, 1986). But inasmuch as challenging it leads automatically to calling in question the position of the alphabet as the crowning achievement in human attempts to devise writing systems, the challenge is likely to be met with astonished incomprehension. For those who regard the alphabet as ‘the constitutional framework of our culture’ (Levin, 1987, p. 114) anyone who appears to undervalue alphabetic writing is likely to be seen as someone who ‘neither appreciates nor even understands the intellectual achievement that went into it’ (Levin, 1987, p.114). According to Levin, an acquaintance with Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabetic writing opens up for the sophisticated reader endless vistas of unique audio-visual aesthetic pleasure, of being able ‘to drink in and relish, hour after hour, page after page, how neatly, how beautifully each of these did justice to the sounds . . .’ (Levin, 1987, p. 116). Small wonder that those accustomed to indulge in such delights have little patience with the unromantic question of whether the letters of the alphabet represent sounds at all.

The same scenario which bills Chinese writing as a system devised by ‘barbarians’ predictably reserves the noblest role for the Greeks. The romantic view of the Greek contribution to writing may be summarized as follows. The Greeks did not just add letters- for vowels to a borrowed Phoenician inventory of letters for consonants. They did something far more profound. By a typical stroke of Greek analytic genius, they rethought the whole question of how to represent spoken language by means of visible marks and came up with what modern phonologists later rediscovered as the phoneme principle. In other words, the Greeks converted the alphabet into a phonemic notation.

Among champions of this alleged Greek achievement the most eloquent is undoubtedly Havelock, for whom the Greeks were the first people to devise a ‘true’ alphabet.

Atomism and the alphabet alike were theoretical constructs, manifestations of a capacity for abstract analysis, an ability to translate objects of perception into mental entities, which seems to have been one of the hallmarks of the way the Greek mind worked (Havelock, 1982, p. 82).

Furthermore, the Greeks were not the sole beneficiaries of this revolutionary insight, for ‘the new system could identify the phonemes of any language with accuracy’. The cultural consequences of this were far-reaching in Havelock’s view.

Thus the possibility arose of placing two or several languages within the same type of script and so greatly accelerating the process of cross-translation between them. This is the technological secret which made possible the construction of a Roman literature upon Greek models-the first such enterprise in the history of mankind (Havelock, 1982, p. 85)

The views briefly delineated above are open to ejection on various counts. Not only do they romanticize the history of writing in conformity with the cultural biases of Western

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education, and in so doing carry conjecture far beyond the bounds of available evidence, but they make it all but impossible to come to grips with the question of how writing restructures thought. In order to correct this distortion of perspective, it is necessary to bear three points in mind.

First, it no more follows from the fact that various writing systems include what appear to be recognizably iconic characters that writing is derived from pictorial representation than it follows from the fact that various writing systems include characters recognizable as simplified geometric shapes that writing is derived from geometry. To conclude otherwise would be to confuse form with function. The question of the origin of writing must not be conflated with the question of the ancestry of particular written characters (Harris, 1986).

Second, since we cannot know exactly how the inventors of the alphabet (whoever they were) pronounced their native language, there is no basis for discussing any original correspondence between the characters and the sound system. Furthermore, any argument which depends on taking primitive forms of the alphabet as evidence for a putative sound system would be patently circular.

Third, attributing the discovery of the phonemic principle to the Greeks on the evidence afforded by Greek alphabetic writing is like crediting the inventor of the kettle with discovering the principle of the internal combustion engine. If the Greeks were unaware of the phonemic principle they could hardly have made it the basis of the Greek alphabet. Mysticism at this point comes to the rescue of the romantic hypothesis, and the Greeks are said at least to have achieved ‘an unconscious phonemic analysis’ (Robins, 1979, p. 13). But what kind of cognitive feat is an ‘unconscious phonemic analysis’? It hardly helps the romantic case to say that the Greeks hit upon the phonemic principle without realizing it. That will not do for at least two reasons. First, it contradicts the romantic story that the alphabet is a work of analytic genius. Second, the phonemic principle is not the kind of thing it is possible to hit upon without realizing it, any more than it is possible to grasp the Newtonian law of gravitation without knowing you have done so. That is precisely why we attribute a grasp of the law of gravitation to Newton, and not to his many predecessors in human history who had been hit on the head by falling apples.

If we look soberly at the historical evidence we are forced to conclude that if at any time in Graeco-Roman antiquity some unsung genius did work out a version of the phonemic principle, then either that insight died with its author, or else those to whom it was imparted as a useful principle for devising writing systems must have entirely failed to understand the message. The facts which force us to this conclusion are the following.

First, phonetics was manifestly the weakest branch of Greek linguistics (Robins, 1979, p. 24). People who were no better informed about the mechanisms of articulation than the Greeks were not likely to have understood enough about speech production to arrive at a clear understanding of the phonemic principle. Furthermore, if the Greeks had understood this principle, or even groped towards it, it is quite mysterious why they never discuss it. For example, it is certainly relevant to the topics debated by Socrates in Plato’s Cratylus: but it is quite clear from that discussion that in Plato’s day the sharpest minds in Greece, far from grasping the phonemic principle, were still floundering with the crudest notions of sound symbolism as an explanation for the structure of human speech. This is a devastating piece of testimony against the romantic hypothesis. It admits only two interpretations. Either the institution of the Greek alphabet had nothing to do with the phonemic principle; or else it had, but by the time of Socrates the connexion had already been forgotten. Either way, it is clear that from Plato onwards the phonemic principle

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simply is not grasped in Greek discussions of language. This must cast serious doubts on any thesis to the effect that the Greek system of letters embodies the world’s first example of phonemic analysis.

No less devastating is the internal evidence afforded by comparison of the two major applications of alphabetic writing in Graeco-Roman antiquity: namely, to record the classical Greek and Latin texts that survived as the basis for Western education. Inspection of the Greek case in isolation might possibly lead one to view it as an example of phonemic notation, if one were prepared to overlook certain inconsistencies, including the muddle it makes of aspirate consonants. What gives the game away is the Latin case, which fails to cope with the phonemic structure of the Latin vowel system altogether. Latin spelling treats the long and short vowels as allophonic variants, which they are not. Now if the Greeks had understood the phonemic principle, it is inconceivable that the Romans did not, especially those Romans most thoroughly versed in Greek culture, and who wrote specifically on linguistic topics (for example, Varro and Quintilian). Quintilian, who knew everything the Greek grammarians had written, actually raises the question of the adequacy of the alphabet; but it is quite clear that he had no conception of interpreting the alphabet in terms of the phonemic principle.

The only way to salvage the romantic hypothesis would be to retroject the Greek discovery of the phonemic principle back into a remote past, and postulate an ancestral dialect with exactly the inventory of phonemes to match the postulated inventory of original letters. But this postulation is entirely gratuitous, for a more plausible account of events is readily available. This ‘unromantic’ account has been given many times; and no doubt it is rather humdrum compared with the attractive story about Greek analytic genius. This alternative is simply that the Greeks found that unless they added some letters for vowels, the Phoenician alphabet of consonants could not be used for Greek in any satisfactory way. The reason for this does not take much genius to discover. It is a reflection of the fact that Indo-European languages have a typically different morphological structure from Semitic languages. One must stress here the term morphological: the crucial factor has nothing to do with phonology at all, much less with the alleged Greek capacity for ‘unconscious phonemic analysis’.

Debunking romantic fantasies about writing would hardly be worth anyone’s time did they not threaten to conceal from us a more realistic picture of how writing restructures thought. The threat arises in a number of ways, of which the following are two. First, there is the inculcation of anachronistic views about the relationship between language and art, and about the social functions of language and art, which are comprehensible only after the advent of writing. Second, there is the perpetuation, in an extremely subtle form, of the ‘cultural chauvinism’ (Ong, 1982, p. 18) of the nineteenth century, which assumes that the zenith of human intelligence and cultural achievement is represented by and reflected in the kind of education available to a member of the upper classes of white, Western industrialized countries. In other words, we are dealing with an attitude which assimilates the plight of the poor illiterate Westerner to the plight of the poor preliterate savage, even while romanticizing it as ‘primitive’, ‘innocent’, ‘ancestral’, ‘close to Nature’, etc.

This comes out in the form of insisting that the mental difference between literacy and non-literacy has to do with memory. Allegedly, oral cultures are obsessed with the problem of handing down in oral formulaic capsules pearls of communal wisdom which would otherwise be forgotten. By contrast, literate cultures do not have to impose this mnemonic burden on themselves, because they can just write it all down. So they are free to use their

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collective minds in other ways. The restructuring of thought which writing brings is based on this supposed liberation of psychological space from the duties of storage.

The clearest statement of this theory comes from Havelock, who applies it specifically to the ‘literate revolution’ in Greece; but his argument, if valid, would clearly apply far more generally. He writes:

The alphabet, making available a visualized record which was complete, in place of an acoustic one, abolished the need for memorization and hence for rhythm. Rhythm had hitherto placed severe limitations upon the verbal arrangement of what might be said, or thought. More than that, the need to remember had used up a degree of brain-power-of psychic energy-which now was no longer needed . . . The mental energies thus released, by this economy of memory, have probably been extensive, contributing to an immense expansion of knowledge available to the human mind (Havelock, 1982, p. 87).

This thesis about the limitations of memory has significant affinities with common nineteenth-century views of ‘linguistic impoverishment’: for instance, the view that primitive languages have impoverished vocabularies, the view that the uneducated farm labourer has an impoverished mastery of the vocabulary of English by comparison with the squire’s son, and the view that dialects are impoverished versions of a hypothesized standard language. The common factor uniting all these views is that literacy broadens the mind and widens the intellectual horizons; because the human memory is finite, and those of us who cannot relieve the memory by recourse to writing or by having access to written records are condemned to trying to remember what would otherwise be forgotten. Writing, in brief, was the technology by which the human mind was at last freed from the cultural burden of constant oral repetition.

Whatever plausibility this theory has begins to sag as soon as the contention that literacy broadens the mind is called into question. Like all new technologies, writing was a mixed blessing in human history. In many respects, literacy can narrow the mind just as easily as broaden it. Furthermore, as Socrates was aware, it can be argued that the effect of reliance on writing is not to liberate ‘psychological space’ but merely to weaken the memory. In addition, writing itself imposes ‘storage requirements’ on the mind. Learning one’s letters is not a simple matter of familiarizing oneself with a couple of dozen arbitrary shapes. (This is the simplistic notion which seems to underlie the common contention that an alphabet is superior to a syllabary because it reduces the number of symbols. On the contrary, substitution of an alphabet for a syllabary may well increase memory load. If reduction of the basic number of symbols were a criterion of efficiency, then clearly the binary system would be the optimum system of numerals. Significantly, only computers find this to be the case. Human beings don’t.)

Nor does the theory that literacy makes possible a release of ‘psychic energy’ provide any specific answer to the question of exactly how thought is restructured by writing. If it is true that writing restructures thought, that is merely a particular case of the more general truth that all new intellectual tools restructure thought. The abacus restructured human thought much more profoundly than the alphabet. The camera restructured human thought much more profoundly than the calculus. The question with every new intellectual tool is always: how does this innovation make possible or foster forms of thought which were previously difficult or impossible?

The key to understanding how writing restructures thought lies in seeing how writing facilitates a variety of forms of autoglottic inquiry. The actual development of these facilities then depends on other factors in the cultural equation as it obtains in a particular historical context. Nevertheless, this does not make it impossible to formulate certain generalizations about the process itself.

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Inevitably, the introduction of writing reshapes the whole framework of communicational concepts available to a community. It does so simply by destroying the equation of language with speech. But to describe the revolution in these terms is already to describe it retrospectively from the vantage point of literacy. Less misleadingly, we might say that ‘it was the invention of writing that made speech speech and language language’ (Harris, 1983, p. 15), although any endorsement of that formula would be vacuous unless it took account of the various ways in which the distinction between language and speech may be drawn in literate societies. [For a discussion of this distinction see Harris (1983).]

The same point may be put in slightly different although no less retrospective terms as follows. The restructuring of thought which writing introduces depends on prising open a conceptual gap between sentence and utterance. This is the locus for the creation of ‘autoglottic’ space; and it is into this autoglottic space that the syllogism is inserted in the Western tradition. Without that space, no formalization of the kind we now call ‘logic’ would be possible. (Exactly how this and cognate formalizations develop depends, as noted above, on other factors in the cultural equation. One can see this by comparing different cultures. In Europe the advent of writing led to the formalizat.ion of logic before the formalization of grammar. In India it was the other way around: first the formalization of grammar and only then the formalization of logic. This is an example of the kind of intercultural difference which the romantic view of writing obscures.)

Writing is crucial here because autoglottic inquiry presupposes the validity of unsponsored language. Utterances are automatically sponsored by those who utter them, even if they merely repeat what has been said before. Sentences, by contrast, have no sponsors: they are autoglottic abstractions. The Artistotelian syllogism, like the Buddhist Panchakdruni, presupposes writing.

It is sometimes argued (Ong, 1982, pp. 78ff.) that preliterate cultures have available an alternative model of unsponsored language in the form of proverbs, songs, etc. (where these are traditional, i.e. essentially ‘authorless’). But this is to overlook a number of important differences. For instance, proverbs acquire vicarious sponsorship by being cited appropriately by parents, elders and others noted for wise speech. Songs likewise are the responsibility of those who sing them. In short, there is no pragmatic divorce in these cases between a linguistic object and an episode of discourse. More importantly, however, proverbs, songs, etc. offer no general model of unsponsored language; precisely because it is not the case than any utterance fulfils the requirements of a proverb, song, etc. Whereas writing affords exactly that dimension of generalization: in principle, any utterance will have a written counterpart in a culture which has an adequately developed script. The creation of autoglottic space depends not merely on the fact that written words have a physical existence which is independent of their author’s existence, but also, and more crucially, on the fact that writing offers a form of unsponsored language which is not limited to particular categories of speech act or verbal practice.

Thus in a literate culture it is relatively less difficult than in a primary oral culture to distinguish consistently what is said and what is meant from the person who said it and the occasion on which it was said. In a primary oral culture there are no genuinely autological forms of verbal knowledge because there is no technology by means of which words and their relationships can be decontextualized at will. Writing constitutes such a technology: it thereby introduces a level of verbal conceptualization which detaches words from their human sponsors. It is the availability of this level of conceptualization which makes it possible for Socrates to ask questions like ‘What is justice?‘.

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If this is correct, then the role of literacy in the evolution of Greek thought is quite different from the role assigned to it within the ‘romantic’ perspective. The pivotal movement in the intellectual development of ancient Greece is not accounted for simply by pointing to the introduction of writing, or to its ‘interiorization’ (whatever that may mean), and even less by anachronistic construals of the Greek alphabet as a phonemic notation. The contrast between Homeric patterns of thought and Socratic strategies of inquiry is striking but inexplicable, until and unless we introduce a different factor into the picture. This factor is political. It has to do on the one hand with the advent of democracy, and on the other hand with the emergence of the Sophists. The pivotal balance is swayed by the assimilation of all forms of intellectual inquiry to political debate. The paradox of Classical Greek culture lies precisely in that assimilation. At the very moment when, according to the romantic view, a new and powerful restructuring of thought became available, Greece renounced it and apparently reverted to an essentially oral strategy for acquiring knowledge. Socrates, according to the adulatory account which Plato has left us of his activities, is the supreme apostle of what in the Indian tradition would be called the Sabdapramana. Plato, although in many respects Socrates’ faithful disciple, ultimately

reached a different view. As Julius Tomin demonstrates in a recent paper (Tomin, 1988), it can be argued that

the conflicting attitudes towards writing to be found in Plato’s works are explicable chronologically by reference to the failure of the philosopher’s political experiment in Sicily. Having begun his career as a Socratic sceptic about writing (as witnessed in the Phaedrus), Plato eventually ends up in the Laws as a convert to the new technology. Laws must be set down in writing:

the lawgiver must not only write down the laws, but in addition to the laws, and combined with them, he must write down his decisions as to what things are good and what bad; and the perfect citizen must abide by these decisions no less than by the rules enforced by legal penalties (Laws, 823A).

One might take the argument a stage further by pointing out that although Plato treats laws as requiring sponsors in practice (i.e. legislators, kings, etc.), the criteria by which laws are to be justified in effect treat laws as examples of unsponsored language: that is to say, laws are precepts having virtues or demerits which are to be evaluated independently of their sponsors or their sponsors’ intentions. Without the autoglottic space afforded by writing in a society which can survey, as Plato says, ‘not only the writings and written speeches of many other people, but also the writings and speeches of the lawgiver’ (Laws, SSSC), it would be difficult indeed to evaluate what ‘the law’ says as distinct from what the law-giver says. That surveyability, which places tyrants and poets on a par by substituting texts for both, is the contribution which writing makes to the structuring of conceptual space in a literate culture.

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DERRIDA, J. 1967a L’Ecriture et la diffkrence, Paris.

DERRIDA, J. 1967b De la grammatologie, Paris.

DIRINGER, D. 1962 Writing, London.

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