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Index:
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Dr. Johanna Drucker is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She has been on the faculty of Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Harvard University. Dr. Drucker has authored many books including: Theorizing Modernism,The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, The Alphabetic Labyrinth, The Century of Artists' Books and Figuring the Word. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Drucker is internationally known as a book artist and experimental, visual poet. Additional bio info The following interview with Dr. Johanna Drucker was video taped in Washington D.C. on September 12, 2003. Early in our project's development we encountered her book: The Alphabetic Labyrinth, which is a great resource for understanding the evolution of the Alphabet. During our interview we found Dr. Drucker to be a rare blend of teacher, scientist, artist, technologist, and poet. Sparkling and witty, she was a delight to talk with.
* The Children of the Code logo was inspired by Dr. Drucker's use of the image of the Pergamon Disc on the cover the Alphabetic Labyrinth (which we overlaid with the fetus drawn by Leonardo Da Vinci).
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The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
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David Boulton: Perhaps you could give us a sense of yourself. How do you come to
this work? Tell us about your life story and how that leads to taking on
projects related to writing.
Personal
Background:
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: I have a couple of
anecdotes that I always tell, and I think that whether they’re mythic or
true… We had alphabet wallpaper in the room that I slept in as a little kid,
and I was completely fascinated by it. It only had majuscules, the capital
letters, and my mother told me that all the words in the English language could
be made out of those twenty-six letters. I just didn’t believe her and I would
lie there at night trying to think of words that couldn’t be spelled with
those letters. I would put myself to sleep thinking it just isn’t possible
that the infinity of language could be contained within this set of twenty-six
letters.
I
actually put my interest in the alphabet down to that early history. I also
think I was just fascinated by the visual forms. I’ve always loved the visual
shape of the letters. When I taught
at Harvard in the Art History department, and the students asked the faculty to
talk about their favorite work of art, I said - the alphabet. They thought that
was so amazing because they’d never thought about the alphabet as a visual
form. So, my interest in the letters really comes from this
experience of them as a visual form and as a set of, again, codes that seemed to
me to be just inexhaustible. So how could it be so limited? That’s how I got into it.
Then
I got into it again at a later stage because I’m a poet and a writer, and I
always wanted to make books. When I
was in art school, I started to print books using letterpress.
With letterpress, you set every single letter, letter by letter, by hand.
So I started to have the experience of holding language in my hands. Very few
people ever hold language in their hands.
When
you start to do that, you start to have a completely different relationship to
the words. What is a heavy word? What is a light word? What is a short word?
When you run out of letters in a box of type and you realize that you are not
going to be able to say something that you were about to say, and you’re just
suddenly, whoa, because there’s no more M’s, and you think, well how am I
going to say mother? Or how am I going to say, murmur?
You
have to write your way around it, or you have to substitute, and then again you
are confronted again with this amazing sense of the material, physical quality
of the letters and of the alphabet. So,
I think all of those experiences combined for me to increase my sensitivity to
the alphabet as a visual form.
David
Boulton: That’s a fantastic story.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: It’s such a funny story because it’s true.
David
Boulton: My own experience is with using page layout tools where I can’t get
what I want to say on one page and I don’t want there to be a sentence on the
second page. Then I go back and end up starting to try to rewrite things to fit
through the mechanical contrivances rather than
around the semantic intention.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right. Writing for format.
David
Boulton: It’s an analog, but not in the same physical sense that you’re
speaking of.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Yes, well I do it all the time with letterpress because you find
yourself either editing so it will fit, or writing more. You’re standing there
at the case saying, I need thirteen more words if anything is going to fit on
the page, right. It’s fun if it’s your own work.
It’s a little trickier if you’re doing somebody else’s.
David
Boulton: Excellent. I think we should go next into what interested you most
about the alphabet. In your book,
The Alphabetic Labrynth, you’ve done a really good job of covering the span of
the development, the history, of how the alphabet came about and changed. In all
of your work, could you summarize, just as a place to get started with, what you
think are the jewels.
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Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Well, I think there are two histories when we talk about the
history of the alphabet. There’s
the history of letterforms and how they came into being, and there’s a lot of
myths and misunderstandings about that history that are very common. Finding
sources that allowed me to see a broader base of that history and to have my own
misunderstandings corrected was one of the really major experiences for me of
this research.
The
other history is the history of ideas about the way we think about the alphabet,
and all of the properties that we project onto these letters, whether for
magical purposes or religious purposes or interpretive purposes.
So that’s another entire history, and I think that the history of
literacy and the history of reading, and of spelling reform and of shorthand
notation, and of phonetic systems, and all of these various variants on the
alphabet are also a part of that history of ideas.
There
are really two parallel histories. What’s
interesting to me is how in the twentieth century those two histories have
separated.
More
and more we have specialists who look at the history of the alphabet within the
origins of writing systems in the ancient Middle East and in that place between
the Egyptian and ancient Sumerian cultures. Those are extremely specialized
scholars and archeologists. But, more and more we’ve lost the other
history, which is the history of ideas about the alphabet. We tend, in the
late twentieth and early twenty first century, to bracket out the idea that
letters have a magical power or a mystical power. I think that’s a mistake,
because I think it’s exactly at the intersection of these two things that the
alphabet functions most effectively.
If
we go back to that history of the letterforms, and I talk about the myths and
the misinformations, there are a number of really crucial points that I think of
as high points, or jewels, within this research. One of those is the misunderstanding
about the number of writing systems that have ever existed within human history.
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Dr.
Johanna Drucker: There are only two writing systems in existence today,
Chinese characters and the alphabet. People often say, well what do you mean
by that? There’s Arabic letters, there’s Indian scripts, there’s Ethiopic
letters, there’s all of these various kinds of letterforms. What do you mean
there’s only two writing systems? Most
people don’t understand that the alphabet is actually a synthesis of two early
writing systems, Egyptian hieroglyphics and various forms of cuneiform.
Once the alphabet came into existence, those other forms went out of
existence. Not causally. Not because of the alphabet, but due to various other
cultural and historical transformations. But,
all the major writing systems that we use today either descend from the
alphabet or Chinese writing.
David
Boulton: One of the things most amazes me, and maybe you can shed some light on,
is that these two systems emerge how many thousands of miles apart from one
another at roughly the same time, looking at a large scale.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right.
David
Boulton: What’s doing that?
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: It’s an unanswerable question in many ways. I’m not an
anthropologist and I don’t really know the history. I couldn’t give you, for
instance, in shorthand form, the periods of development between the late Stone
Age and the early Iron Age and so forth, but I know that as various kinds of social formations come into play, the role of writing
comes to the fore.
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The
Alphabet Comes into Being:
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Certainly
we see that in the way that the alphabet comes into being in the Mediterranean
region within the 1700 BC period. Though writing systems exist in the ancient
Middle East, in the 3000 to 2700 BC period, that’s when we see the emergence
of hieroglyphics and cuneiform systems, the alphabet itself was formed out of
trade route activity about a 1000 years later. There’s a wonderful bit of
research by a British archeologist named Flinders
Petrie, from the early twentieth century, in which he actually traced the
movement of the various symbols and signs that come to constitute the alphabet
through that region. He argues that they are simply a limited set of encoded
elements that become agreed upon because they’re relatively simple, they’re
easy to make, and they can be made in a lot of different materials. They
function well enough to be traded in between different language systems and
different cultural systems. He really sees the alphabet coming about partly
because of trade, mercantile reasons, and other functions within that particular
domain.
David
Boulton: Another theory is
acrophonics. The notion that we made the first sound in a word's pictograph the
sound value for the pictograph as a letter. There’s the articulatory
theory of Robin Allot and others where it is expressed that there seems to
be a resemblance between the shape of these letters and something going on when
you look at the profile of the human mouth as it’s articulating them.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Uh huh.
David
Boulton: Can you speak to that?
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: I think what
you’re asking about leads directly into the interpretation of the letters as
visual symbols.
Certainly
what we do know is that the letters, that the names the letters of the alphabet
have within the Hebrew naming system, aleph and beth and gimel, those are all
names of objects that are common objects within a nomadic desert culture. You
could look around the camp of Semitic tribes and you would see every item that
is named within that alphabet system. Of course it makes sense; these are common
objects. What are you going to use if you’re going to come up with a familiar
system to remember what the names of these characters are?
From
that however, retrospectively what happens is that those names like aleph the ox
come to be projected back on to the letterforms so that, and this is very much
an invention of nineteenth century historians, you start to see in the A, the
shape of the ox. Now there are no pictorial antecedents that are actually oxen
that are the origin of that A. There are schematic forms that could be called an
ox because they are some kind of circle, or have some kind of horns or that
there’s some kind of B that has a square shape so we say that could be a
house. But there’s no direct series of transformations where you can say, a
picture of an ox becomes simplified into a line drawing and then becomes a
little diagram of the shape that has horns and then turns upside down to become
an A.
So
that’s a fictive history. On the other
hand, there are many ways that the letters of the alphabet have lent themselves
to interpretation. The articulatory system is another, and there are wonderful
diagrams of the mouth and the throat and the teeth and the tongue that will show
you that A shows a certain configuration, B is the lips pressed together, and,
again you can, schematasize almost any complex visual form into a set of stick
figures that then can have other forms projected on to them. Is there a direct
relationship? Probably not.
One
of the major movements for alphabet reform in the nineteenth century was led by Isaac
Pitman and also by
Alexander
Bell, and these were systems in which the hope was that you could create a
visual code that would almost be like an instruction set.
That if you could make a little sign that showed you where to put your lips,
your teeth, your tongue, so that you could say A properly, and where to put all
the organs of speech so that you could say B properly, that you would be able to
create a self reading alphabet. This is a great idea but, it turns out that
learning that code is extremely complicated.
David
Boulton: I noticed that you said
Alexander, talking about
Alexander
Melville Bell, not Alexander Graham Bell.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right. It’s his father or grandfather.
David
Boulton: Which makes a wonderful lateral connection about the impetus behind
Graham’s phone and where it ultimately leads us.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right.
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David
Boulton: One other thing before we leave this early origin phase, there’s
another story that really fascinates me. There seems to be a coincidence
between the location that we see as the emergence of the initial alphabet and
the biblical story of Moses. Many archeological-linguists are saying that
the first known evidence of the alphabet is found in the Sinai and dates to the
time biblical scholars attribute to Moses.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right.
David
Boulton: These two paths seem to intersect in a very coincident location and
time. Do you have anything that can shed a little light on that?
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Well,
it does seem as though around 1700 BC in the Sinai peninsula we see evidence
of what is the earliest sort of form of what comes to be the alphabet, and
that’s the Proto-Canaanite
alphabet. Some of that alphabet shows up in
turquoise mines in areas where Hebrew speaking persons and Jews who were coming
out of Egypt were working in these areas. But, it is an area of cultural mix,
and what the alphabet takes from the areas around the Tigris and Euphrates and
the whole sort of Sumerian civilization is a syllabic approach.
In
other words, the idea that what you are doing is actually representing syllables
comes out of the Sumerian use of cuneiform. Whereas the Egyptian pictographs,
the hieroglyphs, have been simplified, as we know, there are three forms of
writing within the Egyptian system. There’s the sort of very formal
hieroglyphics; there’s a script form, which is hieratic; and there’s a
demotic script. So there are three
different forms within the hieroglyphic system.
Some
of the early alphabetic signs can be traced by the relationship between the name
of the sign and the sound that it represents to the Egyptian point of origin. But, they also can be traced back to these Sumerian
points of origin. So it seems like we have a
cultural mix here. One of the most interesting things, I think, is that the
sequence of letters in the alphabet is fixed in that period in 1700 BC. Now,
it was a short alphabet at that point; it’s much shorter than our current
alphabet, but that sequence of signs, the A, the B, the C, the D (at that point
not called that, and they don’t quite resemble our contemporary letter forms),
that sequence is fixed and used for the assembly of architectural structures.
It’s
actually used the same way that we would use it in a little instruction book
that would come now, you know, with the night before Christmas when you’re
trying to put someone’s bike together and it says, part A, part B, part C.
So, as a sequencing device the alphabet has been extremely useful. It’s
by that fixed sequence that we can also trace the development and diffusion of
different offshoots of the alphabet.
David
Boulton: We were talking about images which stood for objects in the world, and
how they transitioned to represent a word that’s spoken that may not
correspond to an object in the world and that’s the precursory step to
getting...
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: The abstraction.
David
Boulton: Yes.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Exactly.
David
Boulton: Good… the Moses connection.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Oh yeah, the Moses connection. I
have a wonderful quote here, actually, about the Moses connection. I’ll just read it.
In
Exodus it says, “I will give thee tables of stone, a law and commandants which
I have written.” Who is I?
Who is speaking in that? You
know, “I will give thee tables of stone, a law and commandants which I have
written.” That’s the voice of
God. The tables were the work of
God and the writing was the writing of God.
And, there are people who say, I mean, within the various interpretive
traditions, there are those who say that, the first writing was the table of the
Ten Commandants; it was those tablets that Moses went up on Mount Sinai and
brought down.
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Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Now there are other traditions, even within the Jewish and
Hebrew scriptures that say that, no, it’s Adam who invents the letters of the
alphabet and Adam who actually also has the system of naming that brings all of
the names of the creatures into being. We also know that naming is a magical
power, that by naming you bring the world into being. But, to put that power to
Adam seems to me to be heretical. You want to say that, in fact, the letters
come from God and that that the word is God’s word.
That’s a very strong tradition within Western culture.
David
Boulton: Is there a reference in the bible to somebody writing before the Ten
Commandants?
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Well, I guess the question is, when are those texts written and
who writes them? There’s a tradition of Enoch inventing the letters. There are wonderful traditions within Hebrew and then later, Arabic
scholarship about angel alphabets, which are some of my favorite. These are
angels that appear to Adam within the Garden of Eden and give him the letters.
There are angels who appear to David and give him different letters. So there
are various forms of angel alphabets that appear, and some of these look like
Chaldean letters and some of them look like variants of ancient scripts. Some of
them have flames on them and others of them have different pictorial attributes
to emphasize the fact that these are divine gifts.
There
are wonderful images and there are tales. One of the projects I really want to
do some day is to look at the history of angel alphabets and the history of
ideas about angel alphabets because I think it’s really fascinating.
But,
the sense that Moses is the law giver, that Moses is the source of bringing the
tablets down from Sinai, is something that carries with it the conviction that
this is the gift of writing as well as the gift of the law.
David
Boulton: And it’s the beginning of the tradition of reading 'God’s words'.
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The
Book of Nature and the Systemization of all Knowledge:
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right. Yes, and as I said before, the cultural authority of
the word, the sense that the word is law, and it comes from God. We see that
extend in the Middle Ages to the idea of the book of nature; that the world is
God’s work and that therefore everything within it has a place and an order.
And, if we as mere mortals could only learn to read that book of nature, that
then we would be able to understand God’s work.
So,
there are all kinds of ways that those metaphors pass back and forth. One of the
great projects at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the
Renaissance is the attempt to systematize all knowledge into a legible system
that can be translated into another code. If you know the work of Bishop
John Wilkins, the fascinating British cleric and polymath, he comes up with
a whole system of writing that he thinks will, again, teach the reader about the
structure of the world, the structure of the cosmos, all of learning, by
understanding the way the writing system is constructed.
So,
you can imagine this as a wonderful code that says, ‘Here’s a line, and if
some dot appears above the line it means that it’s part of the organic world
and if it appears below the line it’s part of the inanimate world. So no
matter what you’re learning, if it’s below that line, it’s inanimate. If
it’s above the line, it’s animate. If it looks like an upright form, it’s
a mammal. If it’s a form that tilts, it’s a bird. If it’s a form that goes
like this, it’s a reptile.’
So,
he thought he could come up with a code system that would be so compact that
just by looking at these glyphs you would be able to understand all knowledge.
Now this goes right back to our story about the hieroglyphics, because where is
somebody like John Wilkins in the seventeenth century coming up with this notion
of a pictorial script and a pictorial code?
Well,
he’s coming to it through Renaissance encounters with hieroglyphics. The
fascination that hieroglyphics asserted on the European imagination in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is amazing. There’s this sense that
somehow hieroglyphics are both a secret language and a natural language. By
natural language we mean the sign looks like the thing it represents; it
explains itself; it’s natural. We know that all
of these codes are far from natural - or they’d be easier to learn.
David
Boulton: Excellent.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: The thing that’s so amazing to me is
that without the alphabet and writing, the university wouldn’t exist,
but nobody in the university studies the history of writing. It’s just
appalling to me. When I first started studying that stuff at Berkeley, it was
just like someone had opened up this universe of amazing things. When I went
back to the book this week and prepped for coming to talk to you folks I
thought, why have I strayed from this path? I must get back to writing about the
history of writing. It is the thing I care about most in the world. I got into
this just luminous state this week. It was like…I’m back to writing about
writing. Anyway, so silliness
aside. Let’s go back to the
serious business.
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Back
to the Beginning 3000 BC:
David
Boulton: As you were saying, there’s this inexplicable coincidence thousands
of miles apart of the two writing systems that precede all writing systems on
the planet today, that come into existence at roughly the same time. One of
those stories coincides with this fantastic story that’s at the center of the
Western biblical tradition.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right. The Western biblical tradition, after all, is still very
much with us in terms of our secular lives. Are these not the weeks in which the
Ten Commandment tablets are being contested within a place of public justice in
the United States? And
the question of the division of church and state and what is the legacy of the
Ten Commandments to our codes of law? We
forget the code of Hammurabi, which is another one of the great codes within the
Judeo-Christian Western tradition, as one of the things that underlies a lot of
the law codes that we come to use in contemporary culture.
But
yes, the coincidence of the development of writing systems within that
particular period is really interesting.
We don’t have evidence
of writing systems that are much older than 3000 BC.
There are signs; there are marks, the
famous Mas
d'Azil stones, rock carvings and other forms of inscription. It
seems clear that one of the fundamental activities of human beings is to
represent themselves to themselves through mark making; that we
understand the world through representation. We want to present all of our
experience in some symbolic form and we see a magic and potency in that
representation system.
David
Boulton: My sense of the research is that there is a general consensus that the
earliest forms of these marks and notations tend to, other than the cave art,
seem to be instrumental: records, receipts, things having to do with
memorializing various kinds of transactions. And, that there is a suggestion
that we went from this, originally inspired by a greater population density
having more complex interactions, to this hieroglyphic, simpler representation
that is still a big step over just this instrumental use and then from there
into representing speech. It’s kind of like three steps. Could we go all
the way back to what was the functional purpose of writing initially and how it
evolved in terms of its functional purposes?
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Well
again, different writing systems do have different functional purposes as they
come into being. It’s interesting
that the Chinese, the first Chinese characters that are invented are the
characters of the I Ching. And, so those have, again, an oracular power.
They’re used for divination, and they’re used for the study and encoding of
knowledge. And by knowledge is meant a moral knowledge, a spiritual knowledge,
as much as a practical knowledge. So the I Ching characters are the oldest of
the Chinese characters.
Within
the cuneiform tradition we know that the oldest forms that we have, at least,
are ones that were used for business transactions. We’re pragmatic creatures.
Now, the hieroglyphics, however, are not really so much instrumental in the
business sense, they’re instrumental in the sense of public language:
monumental language, prayers, invocations, memorials, tributes, records
of historical events.
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Dr.
Johanna Drucker: The point at which the sign systems start to be able to be used
for other purposes is a huge question.
What it does to spoken language
to have written language capable of abstraction is something that I think we
will never fully understand because we can’t recover that history. By
definition, history is the point at which we have written record. So there’s a
paradox in trying to discover what it means for the written record to come about
and what it does to speech.
I
think that one of the points that we would want to clarify, or I would want to
clarify, is the assumption that writing is always the representation of speech.
There are many aspects of hieroglyphic writing that are not, in a sense,
pronounceable, or meant to be pronounced. It’s not a script for speech; it’s
its own written code the way that pictorial representations are their own code.
We
don’t look at a picture and imagine that we’re supposed to speak it out
loud. We receive that information visually.
I
think one of the confusions that comes with the alphabet, one of the great
potentials of the alphabet that is in many ways ignored through the literacy
training that we have, is the idea that its only purpose is to give us a speech
transcription rather than to appreciate its visual properties, and the
expressive properties of visual forms.
In
the Asian traditions of calligraphy, expressive qualities of written forms are
taken as a given. You wouldn’t imagine doing a calligraphic work without
attending to the visual composition and to the way in which that inflects the
message that you are trying to put into that written form. Whereas in the West,
we tend to think that any old typewritten version of a speech is sufficient. Why
would you want to typewrite a speech by an inspiring preacher? Is it sufficient
to the words of a fabulous actor or actress to be able to render them in some
kind of Times New Roman? Do you really want to transform everything to this
bland uniform presentation? Or
should we now, especially with computers, emphasize the capabilities to use the
expressive qualities of different letter forms…to actually make speech a
visual poetry?
David
Boulton: My understanding was that
the latter stage in the emergence of writing systems was to have writing systems
that could transcribe speech. That none of the earliest forms, certainly the
earliest form of hieroglyphics.....
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right.
David
Boulton: Didn’t have that potential at all.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: No.
David
Boulton: It was almost like, okay, we’re now symbolizing this thing and this
thing and this thing. Now we want
to take the pharaoh’s words…
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right.
David
Boulton: Now we want to take what the priests have to say and actually capture
what they said and put that out, which is entirely different.
So there’s this evolution from instrumental
counting, recording of transactions, to being able to represent ideas or objects
in relationships, to being able to represent speech.
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Dr.
Johanna Drucker: There’s a really big difference between representing
things, as you said, and representing speech, and representing thought. I think
that the distinctions among these different things are real important to keep
clear. You can come up with a set of visual symbols that represent things and
those symbols can have visual properties that look like the things. I can have a
picture of a cow to represent a cow and then I can put three cows on there to
represent three cows. But I can
also come up with something that’s an abstract numeral, like the Arabic
numeral, three and that represents the concept, three. That’s a huge leap because,
I’m not showing three-ness, but showing three things. I am saying, there is an
idea of three and I’m going to be able to represent it with a sign, and the
sign stays stable whether I am representing three cows, three balls, three
creatures, three flights of fancy, three yesterdays.
So
that’s a really huge leap. So the concrete presentation of information in
a sign is something that even animals are almost capable of. It’s a big
argument; I’m sure you know the debates about whether or not there are real
forms of language among animals. The basic state of that research as I
understand it, but I’ll be interested to know if you’ve heard otherwise, and
certainly Coco raises some questions here, the wonderful Coco, but the
understanding is that animals,
especially primates, have the capacity to represent in analogous form; that is
the sign of something, a concrete or literal understanding of things in the
world. But they have a great deal
of difficulty making the leap to representing something in an abstract, symbolic
way, that is absent or that is an abstract concept.
Again,
some of the abstract concepts that we think about are so fundamental, all of the
things that are represented in prepositional phrases, between-ness, from-ness,
towards-ness, these are abstractions, and to represent those in a sign is
extremely difficult. You can represent
entities and quantities very readily in a sign, and essences, and properties. I
can show a tall man. I can show a tall man and a short man by showing them next
to each other. But to show a man of melancholic longing who has high principles,
and who has been imbued with a spirit of meanness - that’s very difficult to
show in a pictorial form unless you’re a really skilled artist.
So
abstractions represent a completely different stage of development in the
function of writing and in the capability of writing. It’s
that universality of abstraction that makes writing so powerful.
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Dr.
Johanna Drucker: We say that speech, language and writing are the only code in
which we can represent everything else. Now that’s a big claim. I would argue
that it’s an untrue claim, for there are many things that can’t be
represented in writing. It’s an argument I have with many of my poet friends
who believe that all of experience can be presented in language. I would say
there are many aspects of visual experience, just to take a very fundamental
realm, that are very, very difficult to describe in language, let alone other
aspects of the human....
David
Boulton: Language is a serial, one at a
time flow that’s radically different than the all at once-ness that we
experience in another way.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Exactly. There’s the temporal unfolding of language, that linear experience of
it, even though we know that we experience it really like a symphony.
You might hear the signs one after another but we know that we’re
creating a multi-dimensional field of meaning.
David
Boulton: Yes, but it still has an unfolding order.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right, exactly.
David
Boulton: It’s different than an all at once-ness.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Exactly. You can’t look at a picture and know exactly the
sequence in which you’re supposed to read its elements, or constituent
elements. But that sequential order has also given rise to various kinds of
misunderstandings. One of the major themes in the history of alphabet
interpretation has been the idea that maybe the letters of the alphabet actually
function as constituent elements of knowledge, language and human understanding.
So,
maybe if we could really read the code we’d know that, well, if there were
three A’s in a sentence and two E’s and three M’s that, that meant it was
sort of like adding up three cups of flour, two pieces of thyme and one load of
sugar, therefore it equals X; this idea that the letters have a constituent
essence to them, and that we could actually read the letters.
David
Boulton: They seem to have this kind of almost semantic vector of energy to them
that seems to correspond with some of the chanting traditions. It does seem
letters are more than the complete abstract, no inherent meaning, arbitrary
symbols we typically attribute to them.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Uh huh.
David
Boulton: There are a couple of things I want to do before we move on. How does the alphabet work? Where did it come from? What did
it do? What did it change, not only about oral language, but what did it change
about the way that we think? What powers did it enable us with collectively, in
terms of civilization? There’s a lot connected to this story.
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More
Than Technological Determinism:
David
Boulton: Before we do that I want to rewind and I want to touch one more
time, on this coincidence between these two language systems. We’ve got
this system in the East that has this, as you said, oracular origin, and we have
this system in the West that seems to have this mystical, religious, biblical,
genesis as well. These two profound ignition points happen at roughly the same
time, and not simply due to technological perfections of a common instrument,
but having some other dimension to it. Just put those together whatever way you
can that speaks to all of those issues at once.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Well, I’m glad that you object to the notion of technological
determinism. I think what we want to think about more is cultural receptivity
and the cultural conditions within which any human invention comes to have an
efficacy or a purpose. I also think we want to pull apart for a moment the
periods in which these writing systems come into being and think about it
perhaps in a slightly more refined sense.
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The
Emergence of Writing in the West and East:
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: In other words, 3000 to 2700 BC we see Egyptian hieroglyphics
come into being. One of the interesting things about that is we see no
precursors. They come into being almost fully formed. What does that mean?
That’s an amazing thing and it’s a difficult thing to explain. Around the
same period, 3000, 3100 to 2700 BC, we see cuneiform writings come into being.
And those, again, separated the area of the ancient Middle East where also we
know the most advanced civilizations are really going through rapid
transformation in terms of the cultural institutions, the emergence of civic
forms of government, whether it’s monarchical or legalistic, or whatever.
The
administration of public affairs as well as the administration of private
affairs is something that’s well served by writing systems, whether you need
transactions for records or whether you need the law as a point of public record
against which deviation, difference, transgression can be measured.
So, I think we shouldn’t
underestimate the necessity for law, whether it’s created within a sacred or a
secular realm.
We
also have the need for memory, for cultural memory. I think, again, the
transformation to a history sensitive, record-keeping culture is significant in
this period as well. It’s one of the things that scripture provides, a sense
of human cultural memory and myths and tales. The tales of Gilgamesh, other
writings from the ancient Middle East, the Book of the Dead from Egypt, these
are ancient scripts that, again, are preserved through writing, and passed on.
So that’s quite early. It’s 1700
B.C. when we begin to see the alphabet come into being.
The
point of origin for the Chinese writing system is somewhat debated, but I looked
it up this week in advance of coming to see you, and 1200 B.C. seems to be about
the earliest date that anyone is willing to put onto the I Ching.
You could stretch it back a little
bit, but when you think about it, it is a little bit later. I think a good
historian of Stone Age, Paleolithic, and Iron Age cultures would be able to
describe the conditions of technological capability as well as the sort of state
of the culture that would allow the writing system to be able to come into
being, come into circulation.
I
think that, in fact, if you look at it at a micro level, the range of periods of
which these writing systems come into being stretches over almost 2000 years -
which is not trivial when you think about it.
I
think it’s actually more broadly separated, perhaps, than we realize. What we
do know is that there really wasn’t any direct cultural transmission.
There
were in the Renaissance, many scholars who tried to trace a common origin for
Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Again, there was some profound
conviction that these two things must be connected and that they must have a
common origin.
There
are a couple of other points that I think are important to make. One is that
there were other starts, aborted starts, for writing; and there are several of
them.
There’s
a script that comes into being in the Indus valley, and that’s also around
2700 BC. There’s an indigenous
Easter Island script that comes about but doesn’t go anywhere.
In the ancient New World we have Mayan script coming into being, and
again, without any kind of contact. I
think it’s an argument for the idea that symbol making and written forms of
mark making are things that do come about through human cultural evolution for
whatever reason to serve certain kinds of purposes. It’s not something
that has one point of origin and diffuses. So, I think that’s also really
interesting to think about. It argues for a cultural purpose. What that cultural
purpose is, is again, hotly debated. Those
arguments really map very well onto different moments in history.
For
instance, we think about what happens in the early eighteenth century with
someone like Voltaire or someone like Rousseau. Rousseau is a better example.
Rousseau imagines that the invention of language comes about through the
need for humans to express their passions. Then you have Besserat
in the twentieth century saying, ‘Guess what, folks, all of these cuneiform
tablets that you thought were mystical, magical and so forth? They’re filled
with transaction reports and these messages from husbands and wives who are
split over distance communicating about the business, and meanwhile passing on
family news’.
The
cuneiform tablets actually contain messages that say things like, when you open
this be sure that whoever brought it to you also brought you three cows, two
goats, seven sacks of grain, and by the way, the kids are doing fine except that
they’re quarrelsome, as usual; and the barnyard has been overrun by hens this
year.
Again,
it turns out that the nature of human communication is much more universal
across five millennia than not. Therefore, we see that writing systems, even as
early as 2000 B.C., are being used to communicate the same kinds of things that
go in email today.
David
Boulton: One more thing before we leave this particular period. I appreciate
your apt distinction of the particular dating of the alphabet and the I Ching
origins of the Chinese characters. That’s the first I’ve heard of those
dates since your book, and a couple of others said they were 1600 or 1800 BC or
both within a few hundred years of each other and now you’re suggesting on
more recent evidence that they are more like 500 years or more years apart.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right, that there’s a greater historical distance.
David
Boulton: But 500 years may have let
some cross-fertilization happen that may have been the inspiration and lessens
the coincidence. So let’s drop that.
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David
Boulton: There was also an evolutionary path of writing at a technological
level. It appears as if initially there were token-like objects, like dice,
markers where the people made agreements by putting these objects into buckets
or pots that represented so many sheep and/or other commodities, and that these
pots were basically put on a shelf. After a while, having these objects
represent things, quantities of things, stuck in a bucket with somebody’s
signature, signet ring, or other kind of impression on it to show who the
transaction was for or about, these token/icon objects began being impressed in
the still hardening clay, rather than putting them inside of them.
So the pots went from containers to flattening out to be surfaces…
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Tablets.
David
Boulton: Right, tablets, and from there
‘I don’t need to press these images into tablets, I can inscribe them
in the clay with a little stick’.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Uh huh.
David
Boulton: So there’s a mechanical, technological evolution of the process of
writing that we haven’t touched on.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: I think the process you’re talking about is also a process of
abstraction. Again, it’s the difference between using a token to represent
something and using a sign that can be multi-purpose or represent any number of
things. I think that that’s, again, a huge leap, so that rather than thinking
that in every instance a token has to be made that conforms to the thing itself,
or stands in for the thing, that you might come up with a more universal system;
is something, again, that takes time to evolve.
I
mean, it’s clear that that idea doesn’t spring spontaneously into being.
The
other aspect of that history, of course, is the available means of technology in
any given region. So we do see that the shapes of letters conform to the
properties of whatever the writing materials are. So that when you’re carving
on a stone wall, and you’re doing hieroglyphics, you’re going to get certain
kinds of linear forms, they’re not going to have elaborate shading to them,
and they’re not going to have certain kinds of nuances to them. If you’re
going to be stamping something into clay, what you have is the shape of the
reed, and that just so happens to look like a little arrow, and there are
comments on this in the literature as well. So you have those particular forms
because they’re relatively easy to make. When you start writing with a reed on
papyrus, you’re going to get another set of adaptations of the letterforms.
That
also goes back to explain that point that we touched on before about the
transformation from hieroglyphic forms, which are, again, monumental, public
forms, that can also be drawn. But if you’re going to do speed writing
and you’re going to transcribe someone’s speech, you’re not going to want
to sit there and draw a picture for every utterance. You’re going to want to
be able to have some more streamlined way to represent what it is that they’re
saying. So I think that the mechanical means that are used to produce a
regular, systematic set of letterforms also depends very much on the available
technology in any region.
But
that point, systematic, repeatable, is also really crucial here because if you
are going to have anything function beyond a use for an individual in a private
and idiosyncratic sense, it has to be learnable. It has to be something that you
can teach.
It has to be something that can be encoded in a stable system and passed on.
We
know that one of the reasons that literacy, and high literacy, within a Chinese
culture is so limited is because of the number of signs that have to be learned.
We also know that print technology evolved very
differently in Chinese culture because of the number of signs that were
necessary, the number of characters that were necessary to print the text.
Even if you say that the bulk of Chinese language can be represented with 5000
characters, 5000 characters is still an awful lot of characters to have in a
print case as opposed to twenty-six or sixty, as we use for the letters in their
lower case, upper case, and the punctuation forms.
So
the challenges to literacy are also implicated, I think, in the way in which the
technology of production allows standardization to take place so that the system
can be disseminated fairly widely and learned fairly easily.
This
is great stuff. The alphabet is incredible.
David
Boulton: It is. It’s a story that goes from the ancient history to the
micro-time processing of the human brain.
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: I know, and the problem is that along the way there are so many
really interesting stories, all the stories of origins. I have a wonderful quote
I can read it at some point about origins that’s really terrific, from Otto
Egge.
David
Boulton: I want to make sure that we leave the last ten minutes or so for
reading some quotes and making sure that you
get a chance to speak to anything we have left out that you think is important.
Let’s
go back for a moment, we were talking about a number of cultural pressures,
cultural environments, spiritual, instrumental, record keeping. All these
unfolding innovations: ‘Let’s
stop using pots and use tablets and let’s stop impressing here we can move
faster….’
Dr.
Johanna Drucker: Right
