How Does Writing Restructure Thought Roy Harris

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Language Communication, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 99-106, 1989. 0271-5309189 3.00 + 0.00Printed 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 thedevelopment of alphabetic literacy. It introduces the concept of autoglottic space and argues that thisaffords a better explanation of how writing restructures thought. At the same time it emphasizes thatsuch questions cannot be decontextualized from the social and political circumstances attendant upon theintroduction 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 Westernintellectual 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) andothers, writing is no longer regarded as a mere substitute for speech, or as a useful wayof preserving and transmitting knowledge, but as an active and powerful cultural agencyin its own right. What distinguishes the literate from the preliterate society is no longerseen as being the possession of a superior communications technology which has overcomethe intrinsic limitations of the spoken word and makes it possible to accumulate recordsand accounts ad infinitum. These advantages, long recognized within the traditional viewof writing, now tend to be regarded as merely incidental and external. According to themodern view, the essential innovation which writing brings is not a new mode of exchangingand storing information but a new mentality.

Propositions such as Writing restructures thought and Writing restructuresconsciousness (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 truthit is, these cliches purport to capture. Whatever truth it may be, there can be no doubtthat it is often accompanied, and perhaps obscured, by an accretion of misconceptionsand fantasies which might be called, to avoid any harsher term, romantic. These includea romantic view of the origin of writing, a romantic view of the role played by the alphabetin the history of writing, and a romantic view of the contribution made by the Greeksto alphabetic writing. To disentangle the thesis that writing restructures thought from theseand similar encumbrances is an essential preliminary step.

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

The romantic view of the origin of writing is a very ethnocentric view, and specificallya Eurocentric view. It is a view summed up with admirable concision in the eighteenthcentury 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 wantedto 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.99


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In short, writing originated as an evolutionary adaptation of pictorial representation. Thuswriting systems which retain vestiges of pictorial figures are more primitive, and thosewhich have none more advanced. This thesis, in one version or another, survived asreceived 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 theprimacy of speech. The history of writing was seen accordingly in terms of a universalprogression from pictograms to logograms to phonograms, culminating eventually in thealphabet. Given this scenario, writing systems such as Chinese, which had failed to progressto the alphabetic stage, were seen as inferior or retarded, an opinion still widely heldto this day. As Havelock reminds us, when Boswell objected to describing the Chineseas barbarians, Johnsons reply was Sir, they have not an alphabet. (One might perhapshave 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 ofthe 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 regardthe alphabet as the constitutional framework of our culture (Levin, 1987, p. 114) anyonewho appears to undervalue alphabetic writing is likely to be seen as someone who neitherappreciates nor even understands the intellectual achievement that went into it (Levin,1987, p.114). According to Levin, an acquaintance with Latin, Greek or Hebrew alphabeticwriting opens up for the sophisticated reader endless vistas of unique audio-visual aestheticpleasure, 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). Smallwonder that those accustomed to indulge in such delights have little patience with theunromantic question of whether the letters of the alphabet represent sounds at all.

The same scenario which bills Chinese writing as a system devised by barbarianspredictably reserves the noblest role for the Greeks. The romantic view of the Greekcontribution 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 somethingfar more profound. By a typical stroke of Greek analytic genius, they rethought the wholequestion of how to represent spoken language by means of visible marks and came upwith 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 undoubtedlyHavelock, 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 thehallmarks of the way the Greek mind worked (Havelock, 1982, p. 82).Furthermore, the Greeks were not the sole beneficiaries of this revolutionary insight, forthe new system could identify the phonemes of any language with accuracy. The culturalconsequences of this were far-reaching in Havelocks view.

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

The views briefly delineated above are open to ejection on various counts. Not onlydo 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 writingrestructures thought. In order to correct this distortion of perspective, it is necessary tobear three points in mind.First, it no more follows from the fact that various writing systems include what appearto be recognizably iconic characters that writing is derived from pictorial representationthan it follows from the fact that various writing systems include characters recognizableas simplified geometric shapes that writing is derived from geometry. To conclude otherwisewould be to confuse form with function. The question of the origin of writing must notbe 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 theywere) pronounced their native language, there is no basis for discussing any originalcorrespondence between the characters and the sound system. Furthermore, any argumentwhich depends on taking primitive forms of the alphabet as evidence for a putative soundsystem would be patently circular.Third, attributing the discovery of the phonemic principle to the Greeks on the evidenceafforded by Greek alphabetic writing is like crediting the inventor of the kettle withdiscovering the principle of the internal combustion engine. If the Greeks were unawareof 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 Greeksare 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 helpsthe romantic case to say that the Greeks hit upon the phonemic principle without realizingit. That will not do for at least two reasons. First, it contradicts the romantic story thatthe alphabet is a work of analytic genius. Second, the phonemic principle is not the kindof thing it is possible to hit upon without realizing it, any more than it is possible to graspthe Newtonian law of gravitation without knowing you have done so. That is preciselywhy we attribute a grasp of the law of gravitation to Newton, and not to his manypredecessors 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 anytime in Graeco-Roman antiquity some unsung genius did work out a version of the phonemicprinciple, then either that insight died with its author, or else those to whom it was impartedas a useful principle for devising writing systems must have entirely failed to understandthe 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 thanthe Greeks were not likely to have understood enough about speech production to arriveat a clear understanding of the phonemic principle. Furthermore, if the Greeks hadunderstood this principle, or even groped towards it, it is quite mysterious why they neverdiscuss it. For example, it is certainly relevant to the topics debated by Socrates in PlatosCratylus: but it is quite clear from that discussion that in Platos day the sharpest mindsin Greece, far from grasping the phonemic principle, were still floundering with the crudestnotions of sound symbolism as an explanation for the structure of human speech. Thisis a devastating piece of testimony against the romantic hypothesis. It admits only twointerpretations. Either the institution of the Greek alphabet had nothing to do with thephonemic principle; or else it had, but by the time of Socrates the connexion had alreadybeen 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 onany thesis to the effect that the Greek system of letters embodies the worlds first exampleof phonemic analysis.

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

The only way to salvage the romantic hypothesis would be to retroject the Greek discoveryof the phonemic principle back into a remote past, and postulate an ancestral dialect withexactly 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 readilyavailable. This unromantic account has been given many times; and no doubt it is ratherhumdrum compared with the attractive story about Greek analytic genius. This alternativeis simply that the Greeks found that unless they added some letters for vowels, thePhoenician 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 factthat Indo-European languages have a typically different morphological structure fromSemitic languages. One must stress here the term morphological: the crucial factor hasnothing to do with phonology at all, much less with the alleged Greek capacity forunconscious phonemic analysis.

Debunking romantic fantasies about writing would hardly be worth anyones time didthey not threaten to conceal from us a more realistic picture of how writing restructuresthought. 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 andart, and about the social functions of language and art, which are comprehensible onlyafter 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 assumesthat the zenith of human intelligence and cultural achievement is represented by and reflectedin the kind of education available to a member of the upper classes of white, Westernindustrialized countries. In other words, we are dealing with an attitude which assimilatesthe plight of the poor illiterate Westerner to the plight of the poor preliterate savage, evenwhile romanticizing it as primitive, innocent, ancestral, close to Nature, etc.

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


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HOW DOES WRITI NG RESTRUCTURE THOUGHT? 1 3

collective minds in other ways. The restructuring of thought which writing brings is basedon this supposed liberation of psychological space from the duties of storage.The clearest statement of this theory comes from Havelock, who applies it specificallyto the literate revolution in Greece; but his argument, if valid, would clearly apply farmore generally. He writes:The alphabet, making available a visualized record which was complete, in place of an acoustic one, abolishedthe need for memorization and hence for rhythm. Rhythm had hitherto placed severe limitations uponthe verbal arrangement of what might be said, or thought. More than that, the need to remember hadused up a degree of brain-power-of psychic energy-which now was no longer needed The mentalenergies thus released, by this economy of memory, have probably been extensive, contributing to an immenseexpansion of knowledge available to the human mind (Havelock, 1982, p. 87).

This thesis about the limitations of memory has significant affinities with commonnineteenth-century views of linguistic impoverishment: for instance, the view that primitivelanguages have impoverished vocabularies, the view that the uneducated farm labourerhas an impoverished mastery of the vocabulary of English by comparison with the squiresson, and the view that dialects are impoverished versions of a hypothesized standardlanguage. The common factor uniting all these views is that literacy broadens the mindand widens the intellectual horizons; because the human memory is finite, and those ofus who cannot relieve the memory by recourse to writing or by having access to writtenrecords 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 culturalburden of constant oral repetition.Whatever plausibility this theory has begins to sag as soon as the contention that literacybroadens the mind is called into question. Like all new technologies, writing was a mixedblessing in human history. In many respects, literacy can narrow the mind just as easilyas broaden it. Furthermore, as Socrates was aware, it can be argued that the effect ofreliance 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 ones lettersis 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 analphabet is superior to a syllabary because it reduces the number of symbols. On thecontrary, substitution of an alphabet for a syllabary may well increase memory load. Ifreduction of the basic number of symbols were a criterion of efficiency, then clearly thebinary system would be the optimum system of numerals. Significantly, only computersfind this to be the case. Human beings dont.)

Nor does the theory that literacy makes possible a release of psychic energy provideany specific answer to the question of exactly how thought is restructured by writing. Ifit is true that writing restructures thought, that is merely a particular case of the moregeneral truth that all new intellectual tools restructure thought. The abacus restructuredhuman thought much more profoundly than the alphabet. The camera restructured humanthought much more profoundly than the calculus. The question with every new intellectualtool is always: how does this innovation make possible or foster forms of thought whichwere previously difficult or impossible?The key to understanding how writing restructures thought lies in seeing how writingfacilitates a variety of forms of autoglottic inquiry. The actual development of these facilitiesthen depends on other factors in the cultural equation as it obtains in a particular historicalcontext. Nevertheless, this does not make it impossible to formulate certain generalizationsabout the process itself.


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Inevitably, the introduction of writing reshapes the whole framework of communicationalconcepts available to a community. It does so simply by destroying the equation of languagewith speech. But to describe the revolution in these terms is already to describe itretrospectively from the vantage point of literacy. Less misleadingly, we might say thatit 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 tookaccount of the various ways in which the distinction between language and speech maybe 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 asfollows. The restructuring of thought which writing introduces depends on prising opena conceptual gap between sentence and utterance. This is the locus for the creation ofautoglottic space; and it is into this autoglottic space that the syllogism is inserted in theWestern tradition. Without that space, no formalization of the kind we now call logicwould be possible. (Exactly how this and cognate formalizations develop depends, as notedabove, on other factors in the cultural equation. One can see this by comparing differentcultures. In Europe the advent of writing led to the formalizat.ion of logic before theformalization of grammar. In India it was the other way around: first the formalizationof grammar and only then the formalization of logic. This is an example of the kind ofintercultural difference which the romantic view of writing obscures.)

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

It is sometimes argued (Ong, 1982, pp. 78ff.) that preliterate cultures have available analternative model of unsponsored language in the form of proverbs, songs, etc. (wherethese are traditional, i.e. essentially authorless). But this is to overlook a number ofimportant differences. For instance, proverbs acquire vicarious sponsorship by being citedappropriately by parents, elders and others noted for wise speech. Songs likewise are theresponsibility of those who sing them. In short, there is no pragmatic divorce in these casesbetween a linguistic object and an episode of discourse. More importantly, however,proverbs, songs, etc. offer no general model of unsponsored language; precisely becauseit is not the case than any utterance fulfils the requirements of a proverb, song, etc. Whereaswriting affords exactly that dimension of generalization: in principle, any utterance willhave a written counterpart in a culture which has an adequately developed script. Thecreation of autoglottic space depends not merely on the fact that written words have aphysical existence which is independent of their authors existence, but also, and morecrucially, on the fact that writing offers a form of unsponsored language which is not limitedto particular categories of speech act or verbal practice.

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


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HOW DOES WRITING RESTRUCTURE THOUGHT? 1 5

If this is correct, then the role of literacy in the evolution of Greek thought is quitedifferent from the role assigned to it within the romantic perspective. The pivotalmovement in the intellectual development of ancient Greece is not accounted for simplyby pointing to the introduction of writing, or to its interiorization (whatever that maymean), and even less by anachronistic construals of the Greek alphabet as a phonemicnotation. The contrast between Homeric patterns of thought and Socratic strategies ofinquiry is striking but inexplicable, until and unless we introduce a different factor intothe picture. This factor is political. It has to do on the one hand with the advent ofdemocracy, and on the other hand with the emergence of the Sophists. The pivotal balanceis swayed by the assimilation of all forms of intellectual inquiry to political debate. Theparadox of Classical Greek culture lies precisely in that assimilation. At the very momentwhen, according to the romantic view, a new and powerful restructuring of thought becameavailable, Greece renounced it and apparently reverted to an essentially oral strategy foracquiring knowledge. Socrates, according to the adulatory account which Plato has leftus of his activities, is the supreme apostle of what in the Indian tradition would be calledthe Sabdapramana. Plato, although in many respects Socrates faithful disciple, ultimatelyreached a different view.

As Julius Tomin demonstrates in a recent paper (Tomin, 1988), it can be argued thatthe conflicting attitudes towards writing to be found in Platos works are explicablechronologically by reference to the failure of the philosophers 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 beset 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 mustabide 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 whichlaws are to be justified in effect treat laws as examples of unsponsored language: that isto say, laws are precepts having virtues or demerits which are to be evaluated independentlyof their sponsors or their sponsors intentions. Without the autoglottic space afforded bywriting in a society which can survey, as Plato says, not only the writings and writtenspeeches 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 whatthe law-giver says. That surveyability, which places tyrants and poets on a par by substitutingtexts for both, is the contribution which writing makes to the structuring of conceptualspace in a literate culture.

REFERENCESBLOOMFIELD, L. 1935 Language, London.COHEN, M. 1958 La grande invention de I Pcritur e et son kvoluti on, Paris.DAVY, C. 1772 Conjectural Observations on the Origin and Progress of Alphabetic Wri ting, LondonDERRIDA, J. 1967a L Ecriture et la diffkr ence, Paris.DERRIDA, J. 1967b De la grammatologie, Paris.DIRINGER, D. 1962 Writing, London.


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FEVRIER, .I. G. 1948 Histoire de Ikriture Paris.GELB, I. J. 1963 A Study of Writing 2nd edn. Chicago.GOODY, J. (Ed.) 1968 Literacy in Traditional Societies Cambridge.HARRIS, R. 1983 Language and Speech. In Harris, R. (Ed.) Approaches to Language Oxford.HARRIS, R. 1986 The Origin of Writing London.HAVELOCK, E. A. 1963 Preface to Plato Cambridge, MA.HAVELOCK, E. A. 1976 Origins of Western Literacy Toronto.HAVELOCK, E. A. 1982 The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences PrincetonLEVIN, S. 1987 Review of Harris 1986, General Linguistics 27 113-117.McLUHAN, M. 1962 The Gutenburg Galaxy Toronto.McLUHAN, M. 1964 Understanding Media New York.ONG, W. J. 1982 Orality and Literacy London/New York.PARRY, M. 1971 The Making of Homeric Verse Oxford.ROBINS, R. H. 1979 A Short History of Linguistics 2nd edn. London.TOMIN, J. 1988 With the Phaedrus on his mind. Unpublished paper.

How Does Writing Restructure Thought Roy Harris

Documents

origin of writing

theintroduction of writing

history of writing

evolution of writing

greeksto alphabetic

nonverbal forms of writing

traditional viewof writing

includea romantic view