7. A Global Phonographic Revolution: Trans-Eurasian Resonances of Writing in Early Modern France and China

This chapter argues for a simultaneous Phonographic Revolution in both early modern France and early China, understood as a reconceptualization of writing as recordings of the singing-speaking voice. To make this claim, the chapter juxtaposes two mid-eighteenth-century Parisian quarrels—the operatic ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ and the Orientalist debate on ancient Egypt and China—with contemporary Chinese philology, which drew, in turn, on folksong and opera cultures. Parallelisms and connections between the two scholarly cultures show that both moved simultaneously towards a theory that all writing systems are fundamentally phonographic. These concurrent remappings of writing vis-à-vis the voice offer a new heuristic of modernity oblique to the teleology of Western industrial and scientific progress.