Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word by Matthew Battles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Making a Mark in Life

Writing is a fundamentally different use of language than talking. So different that in most languages, the vocabulary, grammar, and intention of each are categorised separately. Talking is mostly dialogue; writing not. Talking is direct, personal, and literally (!) subjective; writing inserts a barrier between writer and reader so that the text appears to be talking while it refuses to respond in conversation. Talking is usually simple communication about life-events. Writing is thought embodied. Writing is what permits reason as a special kind of story-telling.

To make the gap with speech even wider, writing persists and talking does not. What has been written stays written unless it is destroyed, while talk evaporates immediately. These contrary default conditions mean that writing is as important an evolutionary phenomenon as the development of language itself. Writing might even be thought of as the primordial compulsion of language to free itself from dependence on organic life - the first leap to Artificial Intelligence.

Human memory for speech even with mnemonics has limited capacity. The astounding feats of memory among the saga-telling sages of purely verbal cultures are capable of recording only the minutest fraction of individual and group experience. And the inevitable inter-generational modifications, mistakes and political edits are impossible to distinguish from the original as they wipe out whatever was recounted before. The development of language and the accumulation of language-based skills through talk, therefore, is an evolutionary dead end.

Hence the writing, editing, redacting and selection of various sacred scriptures. Even with their often embarrassing claims and inaccurate rapportage, such writing is a far more powerful religious force than verbal myth. Writing has no genetic limit. Its memory-capacity is effectively infinite. It is a technology which generates further technology, the purpose of which is to ensure not necessarily the welfare of the language-using species, us, but of language itself. Pace Battles’s assertion that, “Writing needs us more than we need writing,” It is clear that writing needs fewer and fewer of us as it creates its own more sophisticated, faster, and more reliable technology. So the future of writing is in its hands not ours.

The anthropologist/theologian/philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, had a vision of this trajectory of language long before the concept of Artificial Intelligence had been formulated. He called this concept the Noösphere, that state of affairs in which language, that is, reason, becomes independent of those who created it. Emerging from the inert Geosphere, the Biosphere, of which we are a part, generates the Noösphere, the domain of pure mind.

What Teilhard missed was the connection among language, technology and thought, which is to be found in writing. Like Darwin before the discovery of DNA, Teilhard could identify an evolutionary process but not the mechanism which operates it. And as DNA contains the genes which direct physical development , so writing contains the memes which direct conceptual development. The technology of writing is the bridge between genes and memes, just as the chemical composition of DNA is the bridge between dead matter and life.

Teilhard calls the completion of this process of evolution the Omega Point, at which everything, according to the logic of language, is effectively spiritualized as writing writes itself. Whether one understands this as a desirable ideal or even as a completion is open to question. Desirability is an aesthetic question; completion a theological one. Battles recognises both issues:

“... a measure of writing’s power also springs from its limits. ‘A letter is a joy of Earth,’ Emily Dickinson writes; ‘It is denied the Gods’ - for omniscience would make writing unnecessary, destroying its pleasure and surprise. The gods are irretrievably beyond letter writing; for them there is no anticipation, no wondering about a letter’s (or a line’s, or a word’s) reception or interpretation. Dickinson’s brief poem concerns what might be called epistolary erotics, the pleasures of correspondence: its rhythms of composition and delivery, the intensity of expression and the swirl of anticipation.”

Battles is perceptive about the past and agnostic about the future. But the future will really be the determinant of what is considered relevant about the past. So Palimpsest is questionable as definitive history. Teilhard’s ‘end’ is optimistic so all of history is rationalised as divinely directed. This is also implied by Battles’s praise of writing. But the beauty of writing is mesmerising; its infinite potential makes it appear divine; and its subtle claim to ‘represent’ what is not-language is the source of immense suffering. The history of writing, therefore, suggests an Omega Point of Hell not Heaven, an eternal progression of writing writing to and about itself.

Battles poses a crucial question through which to consider the future though: “It’s fair to ask: what does writing want?” Because it persists, because it can be done in secret isolation, because it has never been under anyone’s control, because it has effectively addicted our species to is use, this question is far from nonsensical. According to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, what writing wants is the elimination of the species in which it has temporarily found a home. In fact it appears from the praise heaped upon the future of language-based technology that writing has manipulated many people into believing that the replacement of organic writers would be an admirable development.

Perhaps, therefore, Battles hasn’t entirely thought through the implications of Emily Dickinson’s comments. Her emotional response to writing may be as much part of a dismal cosmic ruse as Kurzweil’s breathless predictions. Battles uses the word ‘magisterium’ to describe the authority writing has over us. This is the same word that the Catholic Church uses to define its authority over its official teaching, which, of course, is in writing. So it appears as if dogmatic religion has also willingly been pulled into the black hole of writing by its irresistible gravity, a revelatory anticipation of the eschaton foreseen by Kurzweil.

In fact it seems that all the ills of modern society - ideological conflict, consumerism, racism, environmental devastation, to name only a few - have their direct source in writing. The complementary fact that writing improves the quality of life for many - in terms of health, nutrition, and mobility for example - may just be the ‘come on’ for a bait and switch strategy that is writings’ end game. Writing generates death as well as prosperity, perhaps the former on an even more massive scale than the latter. The civilisation allowed by writing could well be not a mark of human progress but a trap of increasing discontent as Freud suggested. Battles notes that “the manner in which [writing] wields its power is all but invisible to us.” So how would we know what its real intentions are?

Minimally, therefore, writing affirms the classic theorem that ‘there is no free lunch.’ Both from a literary as well as technological perspective, writing is not just our route to species domination but possibly also our path to species destruction. It’s development has been inexorable from cuneiform to Python. Writing is a correlate, if not the source, of our consciousness. It is by far the most important aspect of our lives. Yet we have no ethics or moral code of writing. To create such things we would require an ability equivalent to seeing our own eye without distortion. So as the existentialist philosophers have said so forcefully: it is at least as likely that we are the marks of language rather than the markers.

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