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In the history of the human species, writing arrives at the moment of inequality, and serves that inequality. Before the so-called “Neolithic revolution,”⁴²⁶ the societies of First Peoples had marked differences but not marked inequalities.⁴²⁷ Inequality is a cause and consequence of a complex of conjunctions in human relations to nature and each other. Boastfully, we call these innovations civilization. Writing becomes its defining measure.

The first writings were lists of things that the poor owed to the rich. Relationships between persons became extended, depersonalized relationships of text referring to the meanings of owned objects over space. Records of ownership and debt extended demands for the distribution of resources abstractly over time.⁴²⁸

V. Gordon Childe is the great and now largely forgotten Australian theorist of the Neolithic revolution – the turning point in human affairs that was the introduction of farming, the domestication of animals, and the invention of metallurgy. Childe adds quantification to the conceptual innovations at this time. “The beginnings of writing and of mathematics and the standardization of weights and measures coincide in time with the revolution.”⁴²⁹ We include mathematics as a form of writing. This is the moment when humans find a need to separate quantity from quality, quantify qualities, and create instantiations more finely specified than “many.”^§MS1.3

Childe also adds to these marks of “civilization” new religions that privilege text. Among the first account books were listings of money owed to the temple and its priests as intermediaries, negotiating the impossible promises of the gods.^§MS0.4a A priestly class forms an alliance with a ruling class, and a class of scribes is privileged for the work it does, accounting for resources, while also brokering life against death and hope against fate.

And the origins of schooling in the origins of religion: “A large collection of tablets unearthed at Shuruppak (Fara) illustrates the development of Sumerian writing at the beginning of the historical period – alter 3000 B.C. These documents are exclusively temple accounts and sign-lists used as school-texts.”⁴³⁰

As if to uncivilize the boastfully civilized, Claude Lévi-Strauss concludes: “The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.”⁴³¹ He is writing here in an unbearably sad, wistful, semi-autobiographical book about his fieldwork in Brazil, Tristes Tropiques – a title that remains on the English edition because it is too beautiful to bear translation from the French.

A “pattern of development observed from Egypt to China,” Lévi-Strauss says of writing, “at the time when it first emerged, seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. This exploitation … made it possible to assemble thousands of workers and force them to carry out exhausting tasks.” He is referring here to the architecture of ruins, the legacies of these supposed civilizations. “My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.”⁴³²

In this light, the pyramids and other such monumental ruins of past “civilizations” might be re-seen as malicious stupidities, and most of the writings of their times trivial or misleading supports for unconscionable social systems.

Walter Benjamin:^§MS0b “a historical materialist views … ‘cultural treasures’ … with cautious detachment. For in every case these treasures have a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror … There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”⁴³³

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⁴²⁵ Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962 [1966], The Savage Mind, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 88.

⁴²⁶ V. Gordon Childe, 1925, The Dawn of European Civilization, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

⁴²⁷ Marshall Sahlins, 1972, Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine.

⁴²⁸ Jack Goody, 1977, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Jack Goody, 1986, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Jack Goody, 1987, The Interface between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

⁴²⁹ V. Gordon. 1936 Childe, Man Makes Himself, London: Watts, p. 179.

⁴³⁰ Ibid., p. 182.

⁴³¹ Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955 [1976], Tristes Tropiques, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, p. 392.

⁴³² Ibid., pp. 393–94.

⁴³³ Walter Benjamin, 1940 [1999], “On the Concept of History,” pp. 389–400 in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 391–92.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 161–163. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Jack Goody’s “Domestication of the Savage Mind” §AS1.4.7a