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Catastrophe Writings 305 Writings Displayed Armando Petrucci’s work on formal or monumental writing in Italian cities from the eleventh to the twentieth century formed a turning point for researchers whose work and reflection focus on urban writing. Not only does Petrucci, a historian and paleographer, provide rare, new knowledge on writings in cities, but he also acquaints us with his methodological choices and his unique manner of studying writing —one that combines the careful analysis of graphic forms and texts with the reconstitution of the political and cultural contexts in which the inscriptions were commissioned, executed, and published. The description at the beginning of La Scrittura: Ideologia e rappresentazione (Writing: Ideology and Representation) is striking.1 The reader sees how, hundreds of years after abandoning the finest epigraphic practices —those used in Roman inscriptions—eleventh-century Italy returned , in Salerno and Pisa, to the practice of displayed writing. The authoritarian model is dominant in Salerno, with the literate archbishop and the conquering prince joining forces to revive monumental writing in reference to antiquity; this is seen in the pediment of the cathedral , in which the new lord of the city had his titles inscribed in large capitals. By contrast, in Pisa, a powerful trading city, the writing displayed is freed from the church; it appears on the Golden Door and in open public spaces and, without hesitation, celebrates the military triumphs of the Pisans. The new writing, in which the whole population of the two cities could recognize itself, accompanied the rise of a new social group, the mercatores (merchants). Petrucci goes well beyond his own discipline to preach for a sociology of the world of writing anchored in the observation of competing ranked graphic standards that show the dominant position held by certain social groups over others. He thus convinces us to accept his theory that the power of writing cannot be dissociated from power over writing.2 The author’s discreet but constant theoretical ambition leads him to bring epigraphy—which, for too long, has been limited to serving philology—out of its erudite confidentiality. The notion of displayed writings in particular seems to be a Béatrice Fraenkel CATASTROPHE WRITINGS In the Wake of September 11 starting point for numerous contemporary epigraphic studies because it encompasses a set of inscriptions such as political slogans, tags, obscene or romantic graffiti, and the advertising posters that furnish our cities and coexist with the most solemn graphic material. These are definitively forms of displayed writing that meet three criteria.3 Legibility “enable[s] reading by several people and from a distance .”4 Visibility means that the writing displayed “is open to the view of all.”5 Publicness implies that the writings are present in “the most varied places in urban space and its natural extensions.”6 Because the features of present-day inscription practices and the possibility of observing them directly lead researchers to adapt the notion of displayed writings to contemporary terrains, I suggest adding a fourth criterion—namely, the specific performativity of these writings . In this essay I will examine how this last element is connected to the other three.7 Display As a Means of Action: The Events of Writing The idea that displayed writings have an effect, beyond the messages that they carry, by the simple fact of being displayed is not new but deserves to be stated clearly, qualified, and discussed. This action can be understood in many ways: the choice of a place of display can give the writing itself additional force. For instance, Romanists have noted that many inscriptions are on temple walls and that the dignity of the monument enhances the writing and increases its value. One can also reverse this viewpoint and consider that the presence of certain writings in public places changes these places. Marcel Detienne shows how the posting of laws in Greek cities from the sixth century b.c.e. gave urban space a new status.8 Such display shows everyone that it is the laws that govern, not a tyrant. The city thus makes the inhabitant a new political subject, a potential reader of laws, and it contributes to his training as a citizen. In short, displayed writing has an ecological impact: it changes the quality of a place by giving it cognitive resources with great symbolic value and changes the possible interactions between the persona and his environment. Here, the notion of context is fully developed, and the...

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