1.4: Materials - Writing as Artefact
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Essential to achieving the paradigmatic shift whereby writing is understood as wholly embedded in, and a dynamic constituent of social worlds, is the theorisation of the ‘material’ in written culture. Linked to this is the relationship of material to past embodied writers, readers and others involved in the production and consumption of written objects. A conceptual framework that we found useful in developing the volume (and conference) theme is expressed in the second part of the volume title: substance, surface and medium. 1
These are the components of a tri-partite model for material properties developed by American Psychologist James Gibson in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979: especially chapter 6). His framework is not explicitly directed to writing, but it nevertheless provides a useful guide for examining the significance of the marks of writing in relation to the material surfaces on which they occur — and importantly — their multisensory perception by humans in different environmental conditions (see also Ingold 2007).
Taking as example the inscription of a lead curse tablet from the Roman site of Uley, in Gloucestershire, England ( Figure 1 ): its particular material substance of lead, the semi-smoothness of the hammered metal surface punctuated by impressions cum incisions as formed by pressing and dragging a stylus into and across its surface, and the environmental medium of, for example, lamp or candlelight, come together to provide certain ‘affordances’ or opportunities for visual perception and other sensory and bodily interactions. Whether viewing, touching, carving, incising, applying ink and so on, writing acts are directly informed by material properties. Of course, they are also mediated to varying extents by cultural knowledge (e.g. tacit, explicit) for a given mark-making system — conventions of script production and meaning to both creator and intended/unintended audiences. The material results of specific actions — the subtractive and additive marks or other types of surface transformations encountered on a range of artefacts and surfaces — deserve documentation, study and explanation alongside palaeographical, philological, linguistic, and historical analyses. The case studies in this volume highlight the kinds of additional insight gained by investigating substance, surface and medium (albeit variously defined), and their implications for the content meaning of writing. Moreover, this focus on material properties encourages clearer articulation and reflexive consideration of the distinction between graphical evidence as a source about the past, and how an object was also constitutive of that past (Moreland 2001; 2006). Writing played an active and meaningful role in the construction of past social lives, the material constitutive nature of which is raised emphatically by Gibson’s triad. It also makes imperative setting materials in relation to human perception. Perception of material surfaces is thus an embodied process which unfolds in time and space; practice is implicated at its very core. Given that material substances and their surfaces can only be put to use as writing spaces through bodily action, and can only be identified as writing through sensory perception, it is clear that the concepts of practice must be central to a material approach to written evidence.
The term ‘material’ is conceptualised in variable ways in the volume’s chapters, but overall it refers to the stuff on which writing appears, and for additive techniques that which physically constitutes written marks. The term ‘materiality’ can be unhelpful if it is simply used as a substitute for ‘material’ (see Ingold 2007). However, we suggest it can be useful for distinguishing between a necessarily passive notion of ‘material’ (substance) that precedes analysis and interpretation, and a more active concept involving material as incorporated subsequently into a narrative of socially situated marking practices. ‘Materiality’ can thus refer in a general way to the material aspects of artefacts, while also, and importantly, prompting their situation in relation to mutually-informing sets of practices. This enables material to be described as more than a mere ‘support’ for writing. It becomes active in the construction of meanings, from the preliminary work of manufacturing artefact ‘blanks’ on which marks are made, and the techniques of surface transformation which give rise to written marks, to the ways in which these physical objects were incorporated into subsequent activities, from reading / viewing (where intended) and display, to discard, deposition or loss. In addition to seeing writing as meaningful through the materiality of its expression, the papers in this volume also advocate study of the way the written is bound up in individual and group interactions and perceived cultural norms, and how these are reproduced or renegotiated.
Figure 1:
a) Incised lead tablet bearing a curse written in the Roman Imperial period. From the Uley Shrines, West Hill, Gloucestershire (Woodward and Leach 1993: 118, No. 1). WH77.1180, British Museum;
b) Detail derives from Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) visualisation using the ‘specular enhancement’ rendering mode to clarify ductus and surface transformations made by the writer’s stylus and other surface morphology. Photograph and RTI detail Kathryn E. Piquette, Courtesy Roger Tomlin and Trustees of the British Museum.
1 Contributors to this volume use these terms slightly different ways.