Communication in Orality and the Advent of Writing

The communication of ideas took on somewhat greater possibilities when humankind moved into the graphic age in the Upper Paleolithic, with the elaboration of cave art and the use of signs, such as the palms of hands and what have been called "traces" by Jacques Derrida, though under this rubric he includes not only graphic marks but also the memory traces of speech. However, these were not "writing" in the full sense since they did not systematically represent the spoken word externally, but they did mean that visual signs with restricted meanings, as in the North American wampum belts, could be communicated to others at a distant destination. Obviously there had to be some community of understanding, for example, that an arrow meant danger, but a full linguistic code came only with the invention of writing in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East around 3000 B.C.E. Then a whole sentence or conversation could be transferred over space and over time with greater speed and accuracy given that it was preserved in a relatively permanent form, on tablets or on papyrus, as "visible language." As a result, ideas could be transmitted from the past, from earlier civilizations (in the strict sense of that word) without any human intermediaries. The works of Aristotle might be forgotten, lost for a while, by Europeans and then brought back into circulation by way of Arabic translations some thousand years later. So his ideas never disappeared in the way they did in oral cultures of which the Senegalese author Amadou Hampaté Bâ wrote that "when an old man dies, a whole library is burnt." With writing, the previous generation is no longer the only or main source of cultural ideas. They can now be bypassed by reference to books that form a quite independent source of knowledge. One is no longer limited to folk wisdom, to the sayings of the elders; one can refer to the works of Plato, of Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), of Mencius, or of Indian philosophers, which one's teacher, either in the family or outside, may have never read or possibly even heard of. Intellectually and in other ways, the relationship with one's family is dramatically changed. The death of an old man is of less account since his ideas are already recorded or irrelevant. The educational process takes on a totally different character.

Turning speech into a visual, material object also makes possible the communication of ideas and information at a distance. An individual can send a message far away without being involved face-to-face. That has had disadvantages as well as advantages. The former mean that verbal messages became divorced from the wider context of speech, so that one misses the accompanying gestures and tonality and moves to a great decontextualization of language and a certain depersonalization of the process of communication. But the great advantage lay not only in giving linguistic communication a permanent frame but at the same time in making it more "abstract." It did not, of course, introduce abstraction but it did increase the resort to more abstract notions; nouns were often preferred to verbs; what had been implicit speech became more explicit in the written register. The latter, being visible, enabled a more detailed examination of linguistic expressions by the eye, which could range back and forth over the page, reappraising and reviewing the ideas that had been formulated there. Once again such a considered approach to what was being said was not impossible in oral intercourse, but it was not easy and inevitable as it became with the written word, which then saw the virtual birth of activities that were later to be named "philosophy" or "theology." Both the "sophia" and the "logos" were stimulated by the use of writing, subsequently giving birth to a whole range of topics that had remained only implicit in purely oral cultures. It is true that then one can speak of ethno-sciences such as ethnogeography or ethnobotany. All societies have concepts of space and time, and all resort to some classification of the animals and plants that surround them. But those fields of enquiry are significantly advanced by the use of written lists that impose a beginning and an end on particular sequences and hence give rise to explicit questions of inclusion and exclusion that probe the nature of categories.

In some written languages, the category is even shown in the way a word is constructed. In Mesopotamian cuneiform, for example, a certain suffix may indicate whether one is referring to a god or a town to which the god is attached. That is one of the advantages of nonphonetic scripts; they can point to the range of phenomena or ideas in which one can search whereas phonetic scripts such as alphabets are necessarily limited to the information contained in the oral forms.

This attempt to classify ideas and information was promoted by the development of schools, which were necessary to teach the techniques of reading and writing, so that the system could be passed down from one generation to the next. Unlike other innovations, that transfer could not be achieved within the family. It was now useful for pupils to be segregated from the family and to have lists of plants and animals as exercises, a process that led to the consolidation of lists in encyclopedias, such as the Onomastica of Egypt, as well as to the emergence of distinct fields of enquiry, such as zoology, and to the development of more integrated, more precise, more "scientific" sets of ideas, which became more readily communicated to those who had studied a particular field than to the public in general. As such sets of ideas developed, they were more readily communicated to a specialist audience, except in a watered-down, "popular" form. Since some ideas became more difficult to communicate unless to an "educated" audience, the relative unity of knowledge in oral cultures with memory storage became shattered into particular spheres with writing.