History of European Ideas, Vol. 21, No. 6, pp.

781-784, 1995

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REVIEW

ON THE HISTORY AND POWER OF WRITING

The History and Power of Writing, Henri-Jean Martin. Translated by Lydia G.

Cochrane, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, xvi + 591 pp., £31.95/
$US45.95 cloth.

TOM CONLEY*

At the end of his preface to this exhaustive study of the graphic process of
writing, Pierre Chaunu, a historian rarely given to hyperbole, states that Henri-Jean
Martin's achievement 'is one of the greatest history books ever written' (p. xiv).
The ambitious form and style of the book confirms Chaunu's assessment. The
History and Power of Writing is a narrative encyclopaedia that studies the impact
of writing from the earliest inscriptions of symbols on stone to computer-generated
discourses of the electronic age. Between the beginning and the endpoint the author
takes up prehistoric civilization, the coming of writing in its dialogue with the
spoken word in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China; the advent of alphabetical letters
in Greece and the civilization of writing in Roman and Latin cultures; the
resurrection of scriptural activity in the early Christian and high Middle Ages; the
two medieval renascences that preceded the quattrocento and the foundation of the
modem state, the history of the making of papyrus, parchment, paper, newsprint,
photography, cinema, and computer networks; transformations wrought in
subjectivity and social process in writing before and after official secularization of
Western culture; the coordination of writing and the impact of the Industrial
Revolution; the birth and diffusion of the newspaper, serial fiction, and the novel;
the age of photography, cinema, television, and the computer.
The story that Martin tells reiterates crucial moments in the history of a relation
that ties writing to power. For Martin those who control writing own power.
Because writing is the medium that circulates knowledge, relations of hierarchy
cannot be separated from agencies that produce, control, and disseminate
information. Thus the book organizes its narrative according to significant changes
that writing undergoes in the space of time from its origins until now. Over and
over again he shows that what is known as space and time may be linked to graphic
form. When the shapes of written signs mutate so too do the configurations of the
civilizations in which they are produced. 'When customs change, writing changes'
(p. 25). The Chinese formula that Martin uses as a secret epigraph is implied to ask
if indeed the world has ever witnessed any 'progress' in its many revolutions of
writing. The inferred answer is hardly or little. At the outset he shows that, because

*Department of French, University of California at Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Avenue,

Los Angeles, CA 90024, U.S.A.

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782 Review
it is divorced from speech, writing appeals to a 'concretizing symbolic system to
transcribe abstract notions' (p. 6). In contrast to speech, it requires an active process
of decipherment, a broader range of association and interpretation, and an access to
different types of logic that encode it. Linguists (such as Emile Benveniste) have
shown that all instances of spoken discourse convey subjective utterances of
demarcation and identification. Subject-positions are obtained when a speaker
locates a receiver in the act of address through reference to a third term (a 'he,'
'she,' or 'it') being indicated. In writing deixis of this type is weakened. Writing
supposes a violent 'liberation' because speakers are eradicated, and because written
characters can be interpreted in any possible number of ways, both within and
outside of the customs that shape them. In this sense the most archaic scriptures
found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Precolumbian America determine many
of the most problematic conditions of writing and, too, what leads it to be yoked
to power. These cultures produced ideograms and hieroglyphs that coordinated a
space they plotted out with abstract concepts that may or may not have been relayed
by phonetic signs. Reading was not a process of transcribing pregiven meaning
located in speech; rather, it entailed the reinvention of polysemic relations that
elicited 'a constant temptation to seek the hidden realities of the world' (p. 26).
Since writing was appropriated for religious ends and because it was linked to
divination and administration 'in the hands of small groups of priests, soothsayers,
and scribes [...], a means to domination and to the establishment of hierarchy, it
was hence the expression of the ideology of a limited elite' (p. 27).
What Martin ascertains from the earliest types of writing bears strong
resemblance to electronic and photographic languages. Neither are they
representations of reality, but different forms of simulation that comprise the only
possible 'approach to that reality' (p-. 493). Writing does not reflect the world,
instead, it produces worlds of its own. The history of writing proves that what
seemed to have been a way of committing speech and vision to memory is really
tantamount to generating realities of an autonomous being, to mapping out abstract
equations whose process is conjoined to the overall mechanics of the universe.
Martin infers that the electronic revolution requires the historian to consider anew
the impact of the Neolithic era, the moment when language and property were first
coordinated through graphic codes. Thus the estrangement we experience with
aphonetic writing also brings forth liberation from both the delicate constraints it
imposes and 'the forms of freedom that nature grants us' (p. 505). As Martin
presumes the ways power relations prevailed in ancient Mesopotamia, we witness
today a growing rift between corporate elites that manipulate electronic codes and
exploit masses who are kept unaware of the technologies of communication.
The intervening moment between the Neolithic period and modem times is
marked by alphabetic writing, an innovation taking place when Greece took control
over Mycenaen civilization. The Grecian alphabet turned Phoenician characters into
a phonographic system. Vocalic simplification ensued when alphabets,
progressively reducing their number of characters, imposed an analytical system
that soon gave rise to geometry, geography and medicine. What was heard
prevailed over what was meant. Confirming many of Jacques Derrida's conclusions
about logocentrism, Martin notes, 'the tendency of alphabetic writing to transmit
the flow of spoken discourse was so strong that it long neglected to separate words

History of European Ideas

Review 783

and sentences. Finally, it never proved capable of expressing anything more than
language, so that it was ill-suited to the task when it was called on to break out of
the framework of language. This limitation is particularly noticeable in our century'
(p. 36). The efficiency of the alphabet convened to Alexandrian projects of
conquest. Its precision and its tendency toward simplification led it to be set in
place without resistance. Greece, Rome, and Christianity thus employed
phonographic systems to conquer the Mediterranean by means of self-
authentification, in which the imposition of the alphabet was accomplished through
graphic convention. Writing was seen as law and tended to 'generate law in the face
of custom' (p. 42).
In much of the book Martin argues that within the alphabetical age crucial
ideological shifts can be detected in the ways that writing is shaped. The scribe
creates a text spatially, drawing characters according to constraints imposed by the
surface area of the papyrus, parchment, paper, or computer program. The ductus,
the order of the marks that compose a letter, changes over time and circumstance.
It is especially transformed in :he age of Diocletian (284-305 A.D.). When
'common' script invents a primitive minuscule, a graphic mode is set in place that
will hold firm up to the fourteenth century. At that time the hitherto 'fragmented
execution of each letter' (p. 66) gives way to increased cursivity. Until 1300 the act
and art of tracing yield in the scribe 'a muscular memory' of words spoken and an
'aural memory' of words heard. In the Carolingian Age political universality was
projected through the simulation of a 'graphic unity' and clarity of the Latin past,
obtained by use of the Roman minuscule, that extended throughout the kingdom (p.
129).
A great shift occurs in the Gothic Age when Romanesque letters, formerly
'treated as separate entities inserted into a whole,' give way to a new writing, the
lettre bdtarde, in which the breaks and ligatures, like the detail of a cathedral armed
with flying buttresses, reflects the entire 'skeleton of the word' (p. 142). Along with
a pecia system of reference, new cursive practices divided the page into zones with
letters placed at strategic points in its body and along its margins. As of the
fourteenth century the text became something that was less to be heard than gazed
upon. Born was a haptic reading that scanned the page, seeking on the flat surface
pertinent marks or spatial points of reference that could determine meaning. Thus
'any reasoned argument was as if detached from the realms of God and men and
took on an objective existence. The written text became immoral because it was
detached from the writing, process and no longer demanded that the reader take on
responsibility for it by reading it aloud' (p. 153). At this point motivated relations
between words and things are called in question, and so also is the reality of ideas.
Similarly, in print-culture of the 1530s, when typographers replaced the lettre
bfttarde with Roman characters, they invested conservative and authoritarian values
into writing: Roman type, newly invested with the art of Albertian perspective,
became regulated, nationalized, and aligned with state policy.
Every major shift in the history of writing reveals a different facet of the
complex relations of writing and space. With demographic explosions in the
Neolithic Age (500(02500 B.C.) urbanization and political centralization begin. At
that point writing inaugurates and reflects spatial relations that include new
divisions of labor and social hierarchies. Writing did not respond to utilitarian

Volume 21, No. 6, November, 1995

784 Review
needs, 'as has naively been thought by projecting back to its origins the use that
was subsequently made of it' (Jean-Marie Durand, cited on p. 12), but became
'discourses for others' that engaged measurement and exchange of land sales. It
moved to schematize the redistribution of human activity in space and hence gave
rise to new forms of logic. Space is underscored because, from its origins, writing
has tended to fix subjects in their social milieus. In this sense it is related to
cartography and all of the relations of power that devolve upon the mapping of
human activity.
In his chapters on the modem era Martin shows that with the advent of
democracy and capitalism writing is associated with speed and circulation.
Acceleration of the production and passage of information earmarks the modem
condition in which we are witnessing global compressions of the experience of time
and space. The conclusions ratify David Harvey's and J. Brian Harley's studies of
economic geography and cartographical history. Both have argued that the last
three centuries have seen how the invention of printing, embedding the word in
space, has inspired repressive practices that expand into world markets.
International capitalism, reducing social barriers by means of the technology of
print and media cultures, rationalizes spatial organization in the terms that it
arrogates as its own.
Following Harvey and Harley, we cannot fail to recognize that writing is a
technology harnessed to exploitation, to be sure, but when it is seen in all of the
expanse of the history that Henri-Jean Martin puts before us in such meticulous and
succinct form, writing also gives us the privilege of experiencing an untold
immensity of traditions that extend beyond our time and ken. The great spectrum
of the forms of writing fascinates the author, it mobilizes his epic history, and it
gives to his narrative an urgent political force. The reader of this study, that Lydia
Davis has so elegantly translated into a clear and pellucid English, quickly
discovers that Martin's history of the power of writing allows us to rethink and
reevaluate all phenomena pertaining to categories of time, space, and movement.
This book materializes their history and their practices, it reactivates their analytical
virtue, and it yields a sensuous and delicate treatment of a total social fact. The
book is a major and enduring event in historiography.

Tom Conley
University of California-Los Angeles

History of European Ideas