Ong, Walter Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen. 1982

This is the fifth in a series of notes to eleven lectures for my class Technology and Culture.

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Writing from speaking (speaking as writing?) Overview Determining features of the "primitive" ("historically original"? A focus on art (rather than bureaucracy) The interactional potentialities of the written text Technical constraints of writing on human beings (new disabilities Is speaking a form of writing (is culture a form of text?)

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Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness. We have had to revise our understanding of human identity. (Ong, p. 1)

but...

Everything is happening as if writing, the signifier of the signifier, was beginning to overflow the boundary of language in general (whether language is understood as communication, relationship, expression, signification, constitution of sense or thought... Certain kinds of question on the sense and origin of writing precede, or at least are the same as, a certain type of question on the origin of the technology. (Derrida, Grammatology [1967])

1. Ong, literacy, and technology

   His statement is, of course,  the strongest and most principled version of the relationship between literacy as technology and what human beings can do not only materially (e.g. keep lists for tax purposes) but also cognitively and in relation to matters of "identity."  How this statement relates to Derrida's apparently reversed discussion in which "writing" is logically primary to speaking because writing/speaking are processes of limited inscription of flowing experience, is the central question not only in relation to language, but also all other human "technological" activity.

   Ong's is a discussion from the point of view of those starting with verbal art

   By using "verbal" (as against "visual" or purely "auditory" like music) I am trying not to reconstruct the distinction oral/literate which, eventually, I do not think is a substantive one.

2. The distinction oral/literate

   It was started at the end of the 20th century for the same ideological reasons that started anthropology, that is the direct confrontation with "others" that accompanied the success of European colonialism. As larger and more diverse populations came under the political sway of Europe their artistic forms had to be confronted and in various ways reinterpreted, whether negatively (as in all theories of "primitiveness") or positively (as an occasion to explore forms not explored in traditional European art, for example African masks and cubist painters).

3. Verbal art forms

   not produced under the conditions of literacy that defined verbal art as an art of "letters" that is a "literature." This interest was, and remains, couched in terms of a dichotomy

   1. Oral (the original Homerian tales, ...; rap music?)
   2. Literate (every verbal form that circulate among human beings via print)

   We have now moved from a question of the origin of print (irrigation and the needs of merchants and bureaucrats?) to a question of the structural possibilities opened by print.

4. More on this distinction

   The distinction between the two is made on differences in production and consumption of the verbal sequence. The model, as Ong summarizes it in Chapter 3, is built on a manipulation of the implications for social interaction of the parameters of communication (see Jakobson 1960) as transformed by the technology of print

   1. distance between addresser and addressee allowing and requiring different forms of setting up of the utterance and different kinds of feeback
   2. permanence of the utterance where print allows for various kinds of externalization, objectification, revision, etc., or the emphasis on logical linkages (p. 33 on translation of Genesis)
   3. size of the audience and impact of any single utterance.

   All these matters are consequences of the medium on the type of possible relationships between human beings.

   Ong presents his summary as being about psycho-dynamics but it is easy to argue that all his examples show variation in the socio-dynamics of verbal communication.

   The one significant passage when he ties his discussion to implications for cognition are in the passages (pp. 49ff) where he summarizes various experiments by Luria and later Michael Cole and his students on variability in certain kinds of tasks. Ong ties this to discussions of what had been written on the differences between "primitive" and "civilized" minds.

5. Print

   Here again Ong overemphasizes the distinction between speech and writing. While speech may be relatively easier to learn than writing, speaking is not innate and it develops in particular social contexts.

   The chapter on print emphasizes the technological reality of print as something artificial, made up, developed and having to be specifically learned.

   Print, in this technological sense, is a way of transporting language from the auditory to the visual channels. In this process various compromises have to be made that make some things more or less salient, easier or more difficult:

   1. ideographic print: independent from particular languages but long to learn because of multiplicity of characters (Chinese, icons in computer interfaces and machinery)
   2. alphabetic print: easier to learn, closer to speech, and closely tied to one particular language.

      see also the article from the Encyclopedia Britannica on writing

6. The new issues

   Eventually, one sees that the issue that emerges most strongly is a competing duality between nature (orality) vs. culture (print as technology) and less vs. more efficient (the success of the alphabet). Thus the repeated attacks on Derrida's emphasis that language is always "written"--that is the making of an artificial mark that makes certain things possible for human beings but also limit their ability to experience a world that is either unreachable (the nihilistic reading of Derrida), or not there at all (the idealistic reading of Derrida, or a mystery (a mystical reading that is allowed but not often exploited).