Nineteenth-century Egypt reframed writing as unambiguous mechanical communication

Evidence

This perhaps explains the enormous interest in the work in nineteenth-century Egypt, where scholars faced a similar crisis, and where men like Marsafi understood the crisis very much as a crisis in the use of words, to be resolved by a teaching of a proper understanding of writing. From around the time of Marsafi, however, the entire practice of writing had begun to change. Words were to lose their power, their ability to proliferate in meaning, their tendency to echo and reverberate with other words and set in movement a play of resemblance and difference. Or at least this tendency was to be denied, circumscribed as an exception, confined by names such as poetry. Their essence was to become the mechanical process of communication. The entire problem of authority to which Ibn Khaldun addressed himself was to be overcome, by a forgetting of the problematic nature of writing in the face of the apparent certainty – the effect of an unambiguous meaning – made possible by the modern methods of representation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 480

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the contrast between pre-modern writing that ‘proliferates’ in meaning and modern writing understood as a precise system of unambiguous signs.
• XREF: Connects to Mitchell’s broader thesis in the book about representation, and to Chaucer/medieval textual culture scholarship on polyvalent writing.