The Beneventan Memory

John Hudson

This week, I published a new/old article that has been almost twenty years in the making: The Beneventan Memory, a meditation on the way technological change filters our memories of past practices, including ways of writing, and reflections on a workshop in which MATD students adapted a neglected historical script to new typographic styles.




With thanks to the workshop participants: Dominic Stanley, Hidetaka Yamasaki, Kevin King, Kimmy Kirkwood, Lee Yuen-Rapati, Sérgio Martins, and Tamara Pilz.

John Savard

Your article was interesting and educational.

But a part of me feels a sneaking sympathy with any rude naysayer who might claim your efforts are a waste of time.

Because I do feel the article does have a flaw.

Yes, forgotten styles of writing are worth studying and appreciating.

But it's not a "bad thing" that texts from the many languages using the Latin alphabet are at least legible to speakers of many other languages.

Thoth's legendary contrarian take on the invention of writing... is, to put it bluntly, just plain wrong. Yes, having writing to resort to may make people lazy, leading to them not training their memories as well as they did before there was writing. But this price is trivial in comparison to the mass of information that can be preserved beyond the reach of weak human memories that never could be before.

To take the most trivial of examples to make this obvious: without writing, one could not have a ten-figure table of logarithms.

Without the technology that the vast accumulation of knowledge that writing made possible, most of us could never survive.

Yes, we should take note of what we have lost. But any attempt to discard the perspective of how much we have gained seems misleading to me.

EDIT: Of course, you have an obvious counterargument available.

We are so surrounded by all this glittering technology, with which so many of us are in love, that there's no need of presenting the other side of the question, because it's one that people are all too familiar with.

Well, I do have a riposte to that. Statements, however much truth they may have in them, which seem, in relation to their readers' lived experience to be obviously false... will be dismissed without being given a proper hearing.

Although I really don't want to drag politics into it, this reminds me of some essays I've read about why the Democratic Party failed to connect with so many people who made what seems to us to be the obvious mistake of voting for Trump.

So if the merits of the spoken word over the written, or of the written word over the printed, need to be more appreciated... then attention is needed to make the case for that a persuasive one.

John Hudson

Nowhere in the article did I make any of the arguments to which you feel obliged to respond. Indeed, I don’t think I made any arguments at all, only observations.

John Savard

As, after you quoted Socrates about Thoth, you went on to talk about the other effects of writing and printing, I took these observations as... evidence for an argument. But, yes, you certainly didn't explicitly advocate we junk all our printing presses, or abandon writing and go back to orality.

I apologize for being careless in letting myself lapse into a confrontational tone, given that you weren't really engaging in the advocacy I perceived.

But I hope you do see that presenting a detailed description of what we've lost as a result of progress can be perceived as opposition to that kind of "progress".

John Hudson

The reason I advanced no arguments is that I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. The ‘evidence’ is that humans have long had ambivalent ideas about the relationship of writing and memory, and about the transition from orality to writing, and that technological change acts as a filter on what is preserved and, hence, remembered or forgotten. As I said, I think these constitute observations, not arguments, and historically they suffer more from being ignored than from counter-evidence.

I avoided referring to progress within the article, except in the adjectival form ‘progressive’—along with ‘sophisticated’ and ‘modern’ in reference to how we tend to think about technological change. The observation in that section is that technological sophistication can produce cultural simplification. If I were to make an argument of that observation, it might be applied to AI.