= one of the main points of the lecture |
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Some
Reference Points for Discussion
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Preliminary Class Business
- Copies of Califia on reserve at library
- Information meeting today on specialization in Literature
& the Culture of Information, 3:30, South Hall 2509
- My office hours today: only until 3:30
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(B) Trying
to Imagine a Truly Primary Oral Culture
- Ong's theses about primarily orality as recalled in varying
degrees in contemporary oral practices (see
last lecture)
- 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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The Transition to Literacy
- The "Book": an advanced technology
- Behind the Book: The convergent, evolving group of
technological inventions that became "writing" and
"reading":
- Scripts
- early numeracy and accounting (writing as "counting")
- early script systems
- ideographic and syllabic scripts
- the invention of alphabetic writing
- Technologies
- early writing media and writing instruments
- invention of paper
- cut-sheet paper
- oil-based ink
- invention of printing
- Literacy Practices
- early writing, reading, and printing practices with
strong "oral residue"
- composing in writing; silent reading; print design
for the visual page
- Cognitive Practices
- Beyond memory: ordering, analysis, circulation, standardization,
invention, aesthetics
- The Social and Cultural Impact of Literacy and Print
- early elite-literacy and craft-literacy
- the differential spread of literacy (e.g., difference
in the way rural and urban populations became literate)
- the impact of the "print revolution" (see
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's excellent, The
Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe)
- Example: "The fact that identical
images, maps, and diagrams could be viewed simultaneously
by scattered readers constituted a kind of communications
revolution in itself" (Eisenstein, p. 22)
- Example: "Successive generations of
sedentary scholars were less apt to be engrossed
by a single text and expend their energies in elaborating
on it. The era of the glossator and commentator
came to an end, and a new 'era of intense cross-referencing
between one book and another' began" (Eisenstein,
p. 43)
- Example: " . . . no
precedent existed for addressing a large crowd of
people who were not gathered together in one place
but were scattered in separate dwellings and who,
as solitary individuals with divergent interests,
were more receptive to intimate interchanges than
to broad-gauged rhetorical effects" (Eisenstein,
p. 58)
- Example: "Increasing familiarity with
regularly numbered pages, punctuation marks, section
breaks, running heads, indexes, and so forth helped
to reorder the thoughts of all readers. . . ."
(Eisenstein, p. 73)
- Example: "Once technical information
could be conveyed directly by unambiguous numbers,
diagrams, and maps, the esthetic experience became
increasingly autonomous." (Eisenstein, p. 88)
- Social, religious, political, and intellectual
changes: Protestantism, the scientific revolution,
etc.
- The "networking" effect of print:
"The advantages of issuing identical images
bearing identical labels to scattered observers
who could feed back information to publishers enabled
astronomers, geographers, botanists, and zoologists
to expand data pools far beyond all previous limits—even
those set by the exceptional resources of the long-lasting
Alexander Museum. . . . The closed
world of the ancients was opened; vast expanses
of space (and later time) previously associated
with divine mysteries became subject to human calculation
and exploration. The same cumulative cognitive advance
which excited cosmological speculation also led
to new concepts of knowledge. The notion of a closed
sphere or single corpus, passed down from generation
to generation, was replaced by the new idea of an
open-ended investigatory process pressing against
ever-advancing frontiers. (Eisenstein, pp. 258-59)
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Imagining the Transition to Early Literacy: The
Paradigm of the "List"
-
Jack Goody's research on early writing and lists,
The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1977):
"Particularly in the early
phases of written cultures in the first fifteen hundred years
of man's documented history, such materials are often presented
in a form which is very different from that of ordinary speech,
indeed of almost any speech. And the most characteristic form
is something that rarely occurs in oral discourse at all (though
it sometimes appears in ritual), namely, the list." (p.
80)
[catalog of the kinds of writings
found among tablets excavated since 1929 at the Syrian port
of Ugarit, Goody, p. 86]
1 Literary texts 33
2 Religious or ritual texts 31
3 Epistles 80
4 Tribute 5
5 Hippic tests 2
6 Adminstrative, statistical, business documents:
I Quotas (conscription, taxation, obligations, rations, 127
supplies, pay, etc.)
II Inventories, miscellaneous lists and receipts 28
III Guild and occupational lists 52
IV Household statistics and census records 6
V Lists of personal and/or geographical names 59
VI Registration and grants of land 16
VII Purchases and statements of cost or value 5
VIII Loans, guarantees and human pledges 7
7 Tags, labels or indications of ownership 18
8 Other 31
"My concern here is to show that
these written forms were not simply by-products of the interaction
between writing and say, the economy, filling some hitherto
hidden 'need,' but that they represented a significant change
not only in the nature of transactions, but also in the 'modes
of thought' that accompanied them, at least if we interpret
'modes of thought' in terms of the formal, cognitive and linguistic
operations which this new technology of the intellect opened
up." (p. 81)
- Hayden White on the early "annals"
form of history-writing; The Content of the Form: Narrative
Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987)
An excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon era Annals of Saint Gall
that White considers (pp. 6-7):
709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died.
710. Hard year and deficient in crops.
711.
712. Flood everywhere.
713.
714. Pippin, mayor of the palace, died.
715. 716. 717.
718. Charles devastated the Saxon with great destruction.
719.
720. Charles fought against the Saxons.
721. Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine.
722. Great crops.
723.
724.
725. Saracens came for the first time.
726.
727.
728.
729.
730.
731. Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.
732. Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.
733.
734.
- Jack Goody's conclusions about the "list" form:
The
list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends
on physical placement, on location; it can be read in different
directions, both sideways and downwards, up and down, as well
as left and right; it has a clear-cut beginning and a precise
end, that is, a boundary, an edge, like a piece of cloth. Most
importantly it encourages the ordering of the items, by number,
by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries,
external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories,
at the same time as making them more abstract.
In all these ways lists differ
from the products or oral communication. . . .
[T]hey stand opposed to the continuity, the flux, the connectedness
of the usual speech forms, that is, conversation, oratory, etc.,
and substitute an arrangement in which concepts, verbal items,
are separated not only from the wider context in which speech
always, or almost always, takes place, but separated too from
one another, as in the inventory of an estate, that runs: cows,
5; donkeys, 14; land, 5 dunams; chairs, 8; tables, 2. (p. 81)
In this way accounting procedures can be used to develop a generalised
system of equivalences even. . . . Another process
that is greatly facilitated by lists, partly because of the
advantages of eye over ear, is the sorting of information according
to a number of parallel criteria. Moreover, once sorted, the
items can afterwards be resorted, rearranged. (pp. 88-89)
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The Psychodynamics of Literacy
-
from Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977):
The specific proposition is that
writing, and more especially alphabetic literacy, made it
possible to scrutinise discourse in a different kind of way
by giving oral communication a semi-permanent form; this scrutiny
favoured the increase in scope of critical activity, and hence
of rationality, scepticism, and logic to resurrect memories
of those questionable dichotomies. It increased the potentialities
of criticism because writing laid out discourse before one's
eyes in a different kind of way; at the same time it increased
the potentiality for cumulative knowledge, especially, knowledge
of an abstract kind, because it changed the nature of communication
beyond that of face-to-face contact as well as the system
for the storage of information; in this way a wider range
of 'thought' was made available to the reading public. No
longer did the problem of memory storage, dominate man's intellectual
life; the human mind was freed to study static 'text' (rather
than be limited by participation in the dynamic 'utterance'),
a process that enabled man to stand back from his creation
and examine it in a more abstract, generalised, and 'rational'
way. By making it possible to scan the communications of mankind
over a much wider time span, literacy encouraged, at the very
same time, criticism and commentary on the one hand and the
orthodoxy of the book on the other. (p. 37)
It is rather that the form in which the alternatives
are presented makes one aware of the differences, forces one
to consider contradiction, makes one conscious of the 'rules'
of argument, forces one to develop such 'logic.' And the form
is determined by the literary or written mode. Why? Because
when an utterance is put in writing it can be inspected in
much greater detail, in its parts as well as in its setting;
in other words, it can be subjected to a quite different type
of scrutiny and critique than is possible with purely verbal
communication. . . . Here, I suggest, lies
the answer, in part at least, to the emergence of Logic and
Philosophy. . . . Logic, in its formal sense,
is closely tied to writing: the formalisation of propositions,
abstracted from the flow of speech and given letters (or numbers),
leads to the syllogism. Symbolic logic and algebra, let alone
the calculus, are inconceivable without the prior existence
of writing. (p. 44)
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The development of analytical logic
Peter Ramus's "dialectical" method of presenting
knowledge (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515-72): (reproduced
in Goody, p. 72)
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References
- Daniel Chandler, "Technological or Media Determinism,"
The Media and Communication Studies Site, ed. Daniel Chandler,
18 Sept. 1995, accessed 15 Feb. 2001 <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html>
- Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The
Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1983) [abridged edition of 2-vol. The Printing
Press as an Agent of Change, 1979]
- Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977)
- Hayden White, The Content of
the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987)
Supplementary
links for this class on Study Materials page
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