Week 5

The Graphic World

From Poe's introduction to "Homo Loquens" last week, it is important to situate his ideas that relate to orality on its way to literacy. In contrast to Poe's emphasis on the material of sound, Ong focuses on the effects of speech on mental life. In the introduction to his now seminal text, Orality and Literacy (1982), Walter Ong drew attention to to problem of trying to study orality as a primary feature of certain past and present cultures. For humans, speech is the primary mode of communication, but because it has been supplemented with other media (writing, print, and electronic communication), it is difficult to imagine how a primarily oral culture organizes itself. Scholars'—historians, literary critics, ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociologists—use of the term “oral-literature” to describe the oral artworks of these “pre-literate” and “pre-historical” people reveals their own media bias. By drawing attention to this media bias, Ong wanted to emphasize “orality as a way to describe a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print.” He calls this “primary orality” (10), which is contrast to “secondary orality” of contemporary high-tech cultures that mechanize, electrify, and amplify sound through the telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices.

Ong shows that even Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the father of modern linguistics, had called attention to the primacy of oral speech, which underpins all verbal communication, as well as to the persistent tendency, even among scholars, to think of writing as the basic form of language. However, Saussure’s linguistics is based in a graphic culture that cannot explain the effects of orality on mental, social, political, religious, and artistic life. This problem of trying to imagine the impossible (what were cultures of primary orality like?) that led Ong to alternate approaches to the study of oral speech and its effects. His study then focuses on the body—the senses of touch, taste, smell, and especially sight, as well as hearing—and how orality affects one’ embodied experience.

Here is a list of some comparisons between orality and literacy from Ong’s Orality and Literacy (33-100):

• In order to study orality, we have to focus on sound, not on sound recorded as visual or electrical signals. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence: it is temporary and evanescent. This gave words a “magical” quality with some power to bring things into existence. In contrast, graphism separates words from context. We can study either/or, or both.
• Since speech disappears quickly, memory is stored in the body through ritual and in the world through names. Writing stores words externally, thus shifting the role of ritual.
• Oral speech is formulaic: rhythm, rhyme, aphorism, and maxims. These patterns are a way of stabilizing the world, but they are also a form of patterning one’s thought. One experienced the world through these aphorisms as if that is how the world was. Written speech employs technology (pen, ink, paper), thus distancing one from thought. Writing has artificial rules and can be disciplined, ordered, and sequenced. This in turn effects speech (recursion) and one's representation of the world.
• People in oral cultures learn through proximity such as apprenticeships, or by listening and repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them. Writing separates people into special groups as well as allows travel (proximity is no longer important). The network of oral cultures is thus fragmented and extended.
• Oral speech works through addition rather than coordination of parts. This means simply adding through chronicles and catalogues. There is no artificial chronological time into which one situates history: one family is simply added to another. One cannot coordinate past, present, and future as mental categories: everything is mentally present at once. Since writing creates graphic units (written words), the can be coordinated on the page. This coordination of signs on the page leads to coordination of the natural world: time and space become important.
• Speech is redundant, repetitive as part of a ritual. That which is necessary is repeated, while that which is accidental is forgotten. Writing shifts narrative to the accidental since nothing will be forgotten. Whereas early written works are structured like a body (a book has a header, footer, chapter/head, spine), later writing emphasizes the accidental to make up for the lack of context.
• Oral cultures are conservative in the sense of being unable to add diversity to their mental tool box. Experiments are avoided because most of the time is spent repeating that which is essential so as not to loose it to oblivion. In turn, graphic cultures become more experimental since "memory" will not be lost if an experiment fails.
• Speech is embodied in human experience: there is no way to separate speech and knowledge from the “lived” moment. Writing is distant: the author and reader do not have to "know" one another. This leads to an alternate style of writing to fill in the lost context. Now the lost context is imagined rather than experienced.
• Oral cultures and oral speech is agonistic: there are no neutral facts. Proverbs and riddles are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: utterance of one proverb or riddle challenges hearers to top it with a more apposite or a contradictory one. Graphic signs on a page are neutral, which means competition is between the signs rather than between people.
• Oral cultures are empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced. Every word is full of emotion that one lives. There is no distant point of view by which to observe “facts:” every utterance is a statement of living or dying. Graphism requires the creation of a point of view from which an author can imagine a reader and a reader can imagine an author.
• Oral cultures are “verbo-motor,” which implies a connection of the body in relation to speech. One moves with speech and speech causes movement. Speech is not isolated in writing, separate from the body: it is communal, agonistic. Graphic communication separates speech from movement as well as the author and reader from social rituals.
• Sound is experienced as interior, by which one incorporates sound (and that which sound represents, the world) into one’s psychic life. Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness, which creates a sympathy of all with all (we are all connected, and by “we” is meant the “tribe.”). This interiority is essentially the individual body where the interior world of the mind matches the exterior world of sense. Writing separates thought from its representation, thus distancing mental life from the world it represents.

For your reading

As you read the magic spells from Mersburg and Ingil's proverbs, pay attention to the central concepts for the week: Technology, Memory, Representation. Here are some questions to help you in your reading.

• How does writing represent differently than speech?
• What happens when the spoken word becomes "technologized," as Ong describes?
• Can Ong's study of the effects of writing help you reread Genesis from last week (or another ancient or medieval literary work) ? In what way?
• In the same way, can Poe's list of media attributes be applied to graphic cultures?
• What is the role of memory when signs can be stored outside of the body? How does this shift change society and culture?
• Pay attention that Inglis is writing her manuscript at the beginning of the typographic revolution (17th century). What might her graphism say about the problem of remediation during a time of mechanical writing? What role does recursion play in the form and content of her calligraphy (Cali = beautiful + graph= writing)?