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Writing Sound: Stenography, Writing Technology, and National Modernity in China, 1890s
Author(s) -
Hou Dongchen
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12244
Subject(s) - ideology , modernity , negotiation , politics , power (physics) , sociology , china , indexicality , legitimacy , embodied cognition , aesthetics , internationalization , transcription (linguistics) , media studies , linguistics , political science , social science , law , epistemology , art , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , economics , microeconomics
Writing practices are often subsumed under the authenticity of speech (Derrida 1976). This grammatological understanding of writing is especially conspicuous in transcription from speech to writing in institutional settings. However, transcription is not simply a “veridical record of speech” (Linell 2005) but imbued with power dynamics at the interface between writing subjects, technology, and institutions. Drawing on archival material and stenographic works from 1890s China, this article examines human‐technology interactions in Chinese stenography. The emergence of stenography coincided with the ideology of linguistic modernity, the coming of internationalization, and the political agenda of national strength, boiled down to the sensorial shift of authenticity from eye to ear in writing practices. Stenographers were seen as “transparent” mediators between speech and texts. However, the embodied labor of stenographers precludes the perfect and complete representation of sound‐in‐texts. The indexical tie between speech events and “faithful” transcripts is thus broken, complicated by negotiations between the institutional power of political‐technological rationality and executive subjects, stenographers. The legitimacy within texts, therefore, needs to be reexamined by looking into writing practices happening between stenographers and networks of institutional and technological ideologies.