Writing’s spread made symbolic communication media historically necessary

Evidence

The invention and spread of writing seem historically to have been the especial cause of the development of symbolic communication media. Writing greatly widened the potential for communication in society beyond the interaction of people immediately present and thus removed it from control by concrete interaction systems. Without writing it is impossible to create complex power chains in political and administrative bureaucracies, let alone democratic control over political power. Ostracism requires writing. The same applies to the discursive development and perpetuation of more complex elaborations of truth statements. The classifying function of a logically schematized truth-code is needed only when a body of thought formulated in writing is available. But even the moral generalization of a special code for friendship/love (philía, amicitia) in the Greek polis is a reaction to the written culture of the city, a compensation for a density of interaction among neighbours (philói) which can no longer be assumed. Above all, this dependence on writing is evident in the money-code. It is only through the second coding of language through writing that the societal communication process is released from the bonds of social situations and unproblematical assumptions to the extent that, in order to motivate the acceptance of communications, special codes have to be created which, at the same time, also condition what can successfully be maintained and assumed. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 590

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Giddens’s ‘disembedding’ of social systems — writing as the historical disembedding mechanism that later media (money, expert systems) extend.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Luhmann’s claim that ostracism requires writing hold against the oral Greek practice of ostracism, which was famously a written ballot? The premise seems to be contradicted by the actual historical practice.