Torn from the World by John Gibler

Author:John Gibler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

WRITING AND VIOLENCE

ALPHABETIC WRITING THRIVED FOR CENTURIES through the exercise of violence against the spoken word, against song, against other forms of writing, and above all, against those who so spoke, sang, or wrote. This was not the doing of the written word. This was not an inevitable outcome of alphabets, printing technology, ink, or paper. Alphabetic writing and printed books were forced by their early entrepreneurs to become killers.

Notice the difference between an agreement and a contract, between a custom and a law, between generational experience and a property title, between the tales of elders and the National Archive. Power rides with the written word. States structure themselves through texts: constitutions, legislation, codes and laws, newspapers and books, archives and libraries. And the governing classes of those states publicly worship these texts as if they were immortal, until they become inconvenient, in which case the governing classes ignore or rewrite them: Texts do not pull triggers or lock jail cells by themselves. Those who so celebrate such texts generate more texts; they debate, build careers, charge by the hour or by the word, and write an ongoing series of new texts, and then later more texts about the newer generations of texts. Power resides in the domain of the written word and the control over its production.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in her book Decolonizing Methodologies:

Writing or literacy, in a very traditional sense of the word, has been used to determine the breaks between the past and the present, the beginning of history and the development of theory. Writing has been viewed as the mark of a superior civilization and other societies have been judged, by this view, to be incapable of thinking critically and objectively, or having distance from ideas and emotions.1

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