Mark Walker
English 701
Reflections on the readings for 9/6
English 701 Reflections on the 9/6 readings:
“Writing is a technology that restructures thought” by Walter Ong, from his work Orality and Literacy and “On beyond Ong: the bases of a revised theory of orality and literacy” by Janet Coleman’s Public reading and the Reading Public.
The two articles intersect in the discussion of what Ong sees as the primacy of literacy. Indeed, Father Ong starts by insisting that “Literacy is imperious” (18). I take this to mean that literacy will tolerate no rival. Ong’s statement is consistent with Coleman’s assertion that Ong uses as a theory a Darwinian model (Coleman 16) for a “Great Divide” theory (16). Basically there is, according to the theorists, an unbridgeable gap between Orality and Literacy (5) As I understand the theory, first, oral traditions emerged, and then a transition in which the oral tradition is disappearing in favor of the emerging literacy, and finally, at the top of the evolutionary progress, is literacy alone (19), or as Coleman interprets it, “orality—the less efficient solution,--will drop away, just as nature selects the more favorable biological adaptation (18). Coleman attacks the argument by showing that in literate cultures there are still strong examples of orality (19-20). According to her, the Great Divide theorists counter by saying that this is still transition time, and that eventually orality will disappear (21). Ong appears to defend this view by writing “Once wise sayings are written down, oral culture is weakening, though its demise may take many hundreds of years” (Ong 31)
Coleman argues that these traditions had been in place for at least a thousand years, with no sign of demise.
I would lean on the side of Coleman, but I would add what appears to be missing from both of the great researchers, that a desire in humanity for an oral tradition, is possibly why it persists. There have been attempts to revive oral tradition, be it the griots in Africa, or the bards reciting verses in Anglo-Saxon, or more locally, the fisherman describing the massive fish which escaped his grasp.
I have another remark concerning something Coleman had said. Middle Ages are not completely Barbaric, although the warfare would compare favorably with the violence of street gangs, but there was time of great innovations. The Cistercian monks developed gears. Someone invented a plough vastly superior to the mediocre Roman one; there was the invention of monophonic music, the concept of hotels in monasteries, the making of god beer and wine in monasteries, and the development of universities from monasteries
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
You have provided some interesting insights to the intersection of these two articles. I'm intrigued by your idea that the oral still persists because there is basically something innate in that format that humanity is attached to. I think you're right, but I wonder why?
Actually, that is something Father ONG should be asking! Why humans do what they do is a metaphysical conundrum, and that is in his realm as a priest. Otherwise, we are social creatures, and must talk. I related a chilling science fiction story to my group, in which societal conversation was reduced to a watch-like device neurally attached to the hands of each citizen. To converse, one had to press buttons revealing a 3-D display. No voices allowed. One naval officer, weary of this, ripped the device off his captain's hand, with captain screaming, and the younger officer shouting actual words to show that orality still had some life in it. I see that in order for Ong's Utopia to exist, humans must change not just in behavior, but also in fundamental ways. The story shows that this change has not occured, and may never do so.
I hope I'm not intruding here. I'm responding at length because you're raising really good issues in your posts and you're running up against the problem so many of us hit when we first engage Ong (and, unfortunately, far too many people never realize is a problem).
In short, Coleman gets Ong wrong in her book. You might see, for example, Ong's 15 August 1997 letter to the Times Literary Supplement (page 17), in which he directly refutes claims Coleman attributes to him. Among other things, Ong writes "I have never stated that orality is 'inferior'" and that writing "never eliminated orality or made orality 'primitive' or inoperable." (The full citation for that letter is "Oral Practices." Letter. TLS (15 August 1997): 17.
Coleman gets Ong wrong because, it's clear to me, she never really read Ong's work except in passing. Even in Orality and Literacy, which was written as a introductory textbook to the subject, it's clear that Ong believed orality co-exists with literacy, that orality can exist in writing (the later he calls "oral residue" and "residual orality"), and that we had entered a new age of orality which he refered to as "secondary orality" (the orality of television and radio). Both subjects are only discussed briefly in Orality and Literacy, but those discussions refer to his earlier, more detailed discussions of those terms. (In Orality and Literacy, see the section "The Tenaciousness of Orality" in Ch. 4 for his discussion of residual orality (which refers back to The Presence of the Word), and see the section "Post-Typography: Electronics" in Ch. 5 (which refers back to Ong's 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology).
The question Kathie raises about the orality being innate to humans is an excellent one and Ong does have much to say about this, especially as a priest. He regularly referred people to his 1967 book The Presence of the Word as a good place to start.
Finally, on the issue of literacy being imperious, let me suggest that Ong is not claiming that literacy will tolerate no rival. What Ong means here is that literacy restructures thought so that we no longer have *primary orality*. While we still have access to forms and habits of mind of primary orality (proverbs, stock phrases, agonistic discourse, etc.), what we now have is a mixture of orality and literacy. Ong argued that the transition from a primary oral culture to a primarily textual culture (a culture that has fully interiorized literacy rather than a culture that has stopped using oral communication) was a long one full overlappings and complications (again, see The Presence of the Word. And, eventually, we've moved into the secondary orality of the electronic world, an orality which is fully dependent upon literacy for its existence.
So, to get back to the statement "literacy is imperious," what Ong means is that literacy changes the way we understand and relate to the world. The analogy I often use: if your significant other tells you they've had an affair (or some other deep, dark, horrible secret), no matter how you handle it, whether you forgive and accept or you go your separate ways or you struggle through in some in-between option, what you can't do is go back to the pre-revelationary existence.
In the same way, once literacy enters into the cognitive equation (both on the level of the individual and cultural noetics), you know there are other ways of organizing, understanding, and relating to the world. That is the start of how writing restructures thought, and that is the way literacy is imperious.
Post a Comment