LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE/CHARLES UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE

a self-contained cultural technology are found wanting (it is in this context

immaterial whether they stress the impact of writing in general, the particular

advantages of the alphabet, or the changes resulting from the diffusion of writing

skills beyond the narrow elite circles that had at first monopolized them). Rather

than on writing systems, the emphasis is on the concept of ‘writing culture’: it

relates to ‘questions about the institutions and traditions of writing, the treatment

of texts, the social embedding of writing and of texts fixed in writing’

(Assmann, 19997: 265). The above reflections on culture as the world-making

and world-disclosing level of social life apply to this domain. The quoted outline

of writing culture and its variable components refers to context-dependent

factors, embedded not only in social practices, but also in cultural perspectives.

Texts are at their most authoritative and representative when they are at the same

time most formatively involved in the cultural articulation of the world. And the

cultures of interpretation that took shape around key texts during a decisive

period were at the forefront of broader cultural shifts toward a more explicit and

therefore more conflict-prone interpretation of the world.

At this point, it seems appropriate to turn to Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on the

text as a paradigm for the human sciences. They culminate in comments on the

‘effacement of the present world in text, but the return of the world at another

level’ (Ricoeur, 1981: 148). The point is elaborated at greater length:

The eclipse of the circumstantial world by the quasi-world of texts can be so complete

that in a civilization of writing, the world itself is no longer what can be shown in

speaking but is reduced to a kind of ‘aura’ which written works unfold. Thus we speak

of the Greek world or the Byzantine world. This world can be called ‘imaginary’, in

this imaginary world is itself a creation of literature. (1981: 149)

Ricoeur’s allusions to civilizational contexts and imaginary significations underline

the relevance of his argument to our theme. The autonomous and creative

force of texts is most manifest when they embody the core significations of a

cultural world on a civilizational scale; in this way they become central to the

self-articulation of civilizations as well as to interpretation across civilizational

boundaries. It is the multi-faceted and variously modifiable relationship between

world and text that justifies the use of the textual metaphor for culture. But the

same background is also reflected in a more direct and literal privilege of texts.

The eminent status of particular texts, not always of the same kind but comparable

in terms of cultural authority, did not go unnoticed by historians interested

in the comparative study of civilizations; among civilizational theorists, Jaroslav

Krejc˘í has most explicitly included core texts and their characteristics among

the defining elements of the field, but his analyses tend to focus on single texts,

rather than construct an adequate category. The concept of the canon, as reworked

by Aleida and Jan Assmann, seems to fit this requirement of civilizational

analysis. A canonical text ‘embodies the normative and formative values of a

community, the “truth”’ (Assmann, 1997: 94). The canonizing turn represents a

‘stabilizing of the stream of tradition’ (p. 93), as well as the beginning of a new