0.7 Homer multitext project—a response  (Page 3/5)

The parallel existence of different modes of memorializing the human condition carries us on to the larger questions: what are they for, and when did they emerge? Recent archaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic peoples laid flowers on the graves of the dead (Rudgely 1999). We do not know why; but we can hazard a guess. Such speculative questions trouble developmental psychologists and philosophers and are not easily answered, but we can learn from their debates and discussions. The fact that children who cannot read and barely draw can reproduce the diplomatic form of a letter may well tell us, as my colleague Katie Lowe has argued, something about the ways in which members of a non-literate society might view and even recognise a text that they cannot understand (Lowe 2010). Such recognition may also help us address the larger question of whether verbal and nonverbal communication emerge synchronously or asynchronously. James Campbell, the Oxford scholar of Anglo-Saxon Britain, has recently posited, half in fun I suspect, the possibility of a Neolithic revolution (long before Homer was supposed to have lived), which witnessed the earliest examples of writing, pointing to the evidence of the survival of a bronze calendar from the period (Campbell 2009). He suggests that a great deal of early writings on tree bark and wax tablets (referred to in the Iliad ) may have simply disappeared because, with a few rare exceptions, soil conditions do not permit preservation. He cites as exceptions the bundles of bark documents found at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s wall See Vindolanda Tablets On-Line , (External Link) . The Mellon Foundation supports “Script, Image and the Culture of Writing in the Ancient World” project from 2001-2004, which included the Vindolanda documents, http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/Mellon/. and the wooden tablets at Novgorod Veliky in Russia that have revolutionized the understanding of early Russian. The majority of these finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, are administrative records. It is self-evident that it is difficult to run large empires or enterprises without some form of “writing,” particularly once concepts of private property emerge. It is hard to imagine Cicero’s letters without the vast paraphernalia of bureaucracy and its attendant documentation, of which little survives. What is intriguing is when and why it was felt necessary to stabilize epics such as the Iliad or Biblical Old Testament stories or, today, family histories in written text and how a canonical version came to be accepted as somehow the “authentic” version. In other words, why does textuality in all its guises come to be privileged over the oral?

The stability of a text is certainly not confined to the classical world or pre-history. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s plays will be well aware of the alternative versions, sometimes radically different, which were stabilized by the work of Edmund Malone and James Boswell, the younger, in the very early nineteenth century. Even now their performance is problematic, dependent on the producer’s choice of what to cut, the set, the costume, the cast and so on. The performance of ontical objects in the digital order raises important analogous questions that I will return to. What concerns us here is the reified notion of “authenticity,” which trades in absolutes when the reverse is often the case. As I and my colleagues James Currall and Susan Stuart have argued, endowing an object with the aura of authenticity is a retrospective action that depends upon an array of tokens or, as we suggest, “bindings” (Currall et al. 2008). We favor this approach as it moves away from the rigidity of much “diplomatic” theory and allows differing levels of binding dependent on how much the creator of an object wished it to be accepted as authentic by the intended recipient. We can observe this in our own practices. We want the deeds to our property to be incontrovertible and the bindings to be tight, usually confirmed by legal processes and sometimes registration that date back hundreds if not thousands of years and are themselves performative. We are less fussed about letters to our wives and lovers even if we unconsciously use forms that have their roots in antiquity.