Illegibility: Reading and Insecurity in History, Law and Government

Abstract

The idea of ‘illegibility’ is familiar in literary theory through terms such as erasure, undecidability and the resistance of language or writing to interpretation, and in historical studies as a metaphor explicitly or implicitly shadowing the state’s attempts to render its citizens ‘legible’. But these are not the only ways to use its explanatory capacity. In this article I explore how we might return these insights to the more concrete and quotidian case of illegible writing: writing that literally cannot be read, and undecidable forms of handwriting that elude secure fixation and interpretation. ‘Writing’ has certainly not lacked its theorists and historians, and such fields as paleography, the history of alphabets, the graphic arts and literacy all treat of the subject. But the history of handwriting as a specific cultural and official practice has received surprisingly little attention in itself. Yet as the volume of handwritten communication expanded from the seventeenth century onwards handwriting became an object of considerable cultural and legal significance, whether in terms of penmanship, forgery or interpretable meaning. This essay considers exemplary cases of handwriting’s illegibility or resistance to reading, in a bid to work through its legal status and test some of its cultural implications.