ABSTRACT
Almost as soon, in the West, as thoughts began to be written down and made public, there were reservations. Written works, Plato remarked (Phaedrus 275c–276a), leave questions unanswered, cannot be finely tuned to an audience, and allow dialogue to be circumvented. They may, it is true, help memory, especially in old age (276d). But they can also do much to degrade it. Jack Goody would be the first to say (Goody, 2000, pp. 1–25) that the triumphs of oral recall can be overrated. Plato himself may have done so. Goody would also say, of course, that much of what we take to be distinctive about more modern societies would not have been possible if thoughts and much else had not been written down. Our precepts would not have been so elaborate, and our practices so successful, if we had had to continue to rely on generation after generation transmitting everything by word of mouth. There would have been interruptions, in which much would have been lost. And if the number of generations alive at any one time would have nevertheless continued to increase, and there had not been writing, change, one can imagine, would also have been slowed. Yet the history whose recovery Goody has done so much to stimulate is the history of the consequences of what Roland Barthes (1976, pp. 22–23) called texts to be reread rather than consumed. Barthes' was a distinction for littérateurs. Texts to be reread are those to be pondered and criticized; texts to be consumed are those for the naive reader, unreflective, uninterested in memory, and not easy, perhaps, to remember. But it is a distinction that is important also for politics. For here, naivete matters.
