= one of the main points of the lecture |
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Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
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The "Psychodynamics" of Orality (Walter
Ong)
Conspicuous rhetorical, social, and psychological features of
"primary oral cultures" (selected from the fuller catalogue
in Ong's Orality and Literacy):
- Memory-Oriented
"You know what you can recall" (Ong, p. 33)
"Serious thought is intertwined with memory systems"
(Ong, p. 34)
Plato, Phaedrus:
[Thamus to Theuth]: this discovery of yours will create
forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will
not use their memories; they will trust to the external
written characters and not remember of themselves. The
specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory,
but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,
but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers
of many things and will have learned nothing; they will
appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing;
they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom
without the reality. |
- Formulaic and Patterned (cf., Milman Parry)
"In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem
of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you
have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready
oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily
rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antithesis, in
alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary
expressions, in standard thematic settings (the assembly, the
meal, the duel, the hero's 'helper', and so on), in proverbs
which are constantly heard by everyone. . . ."
(Ong, p. 34)
- "Additive rather than subordinative"; "Aggregative
rather than analytic"; Redundant or 'copious'"
(Ong, pp. 37 ff.)
- Situated and pragmatic
"Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation
which is more than verbal." (Ong, p. 101)
| Albert Borgmann,
p. 38: " . . . in an oral culture
the relative weakness of signs was balanced by more robust
intelligence, a fuller engagement of the person, and greater
intimacy of the context." |
- Interactive with the immediate audience (the original
meaning of "interactive")
"Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person
to another real, living person or real, living persons,
at a specific time in a real setting which includes always
much more than mere words." (Ong, p. 101)
- "Agonistically toned" (Ong, pp. 43 ff.)
Plato, Phaedrus:
[Socrates]: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that
writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations
of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet
if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn
silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You
would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you
want to know anything and put a question to one of
them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.
And when they have been once written down they are
tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may
not understand them, and know not to whom they should
reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or
abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they
cannot protect or defend themselves. |
- "Close to the human lifeworld" (Ong,
pp. 42-43)
"In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that
depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from
lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize
all their knowledge with more or less close reference to
the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world
to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings"
(Ong, p. 42)
- Oriented Toward Present Realities ("Homeostatic")
(Ong, pp. 46 ff.)
- "Situational rather than abstract" (Ong,
pp. 49 ff.; Ong draws on A.R. Luria's field research in
Uzbekistan in 1931-32, published as Cognitive Development:
Its Cultural and Social Foundations)
- Objective rather than subjective or introspective
- Somatically-Based (Importance of the Body) (Ong,
p. 67)
Albert Borgmann,
pp. 45-46:
"But in speech, these structural features [the
many features of language] are almost inextricably
woven into a rich bodily and contextual reality. Spoken
language is not so much a thing that a person uses
as it is a representation of the way a person is.
Speech is to the mind as skin is to the body. It is
the way a person comes to be a definite and expressive
creature." |
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(B) Trying
to Imagine a Truly Primary Oral Culture
- But we face at this point a paradox in our historical understanding
of primary orality. The very analogies to contemporary orality
we use to understand the past may conceal as much as they reveal
because orality itself has adapted to the new, dominant paradigm
of literacy (e.g., the contemporary modes of "conversation"
or the "interview" or "debate." Literacy
may have so changed our mindset, in other words, that there
is no real way to imagine for ourselves what "primary oral
culture" was like.
| "Fully literate persons
can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary
oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge
whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of writing.
Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever "looked
up" anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression
"to look up something" is an empty phrase: it
would have no conceivable meaning." (p. 31) |
- The underlying argument in Ong's appproach to the history
of oral cultures: language and information practices are not
just external tools of human consciousness; they are "interiorized"
as human consciousness:
- Primary orality was not just a set of language, social,
and bodily practices but a "psychodynamics" (a
way of thinking or "noetic" environment). Orality
was the psychodynamics for which humanity in its "lifeworld"
was originally wired (cf., Borgmann on the "ancestral
environment" of information)
- When writing was invented, Ong argues, it was "interiorized"
to form a new psychodynamics that expunged the old. People
began to read and write silently instead of with the voice;
they began to order and organize perceptions based on writing
(and later print) practices; they began to think
in literate terms.
"A deeper understanding
of pristine or primary orality enables us better to
understand the new world of writing, what it truly
is, and what functionally literate human beings really
are: beings whose thought processes do not grow out
of simply natural powers but out of these powers as
structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology
of writing. Without writing, the literate mind would
not and could not think as it does, not only when
engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing
its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single
invention, writing has transformed human consciousness."
(p. 78)
"Technologies are not mere exterior aids but
also interior transformations of consciousness, and
never more than when they affect the word." (p.
82) |
- Trying to imagine primary oral culture: two exercises
- Imagine trying to remember something you've forgotten (e.g.,
to fill in a record of your expenses last year for the IRS).
How do you do that?
- Imagine trying to remember a password you've forgotten.
How do you do that?
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