Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

“A Thought on Poetry and Universities” is a three-page typescript, dating to 1971, which was in a folder with a number of other typescripts, all labeled “Unpublished Material: Inactive.” From now on, it will also be known as Folder 16 of Series 1.D.

The last paragraph reads:

Orientation to the future, which is not the same as futurism or even future shock, is at present an essential of human experience and apparently will be an essential from now on through history. Perhaps, surprisingly, it is not easy for poets, as I have attempted [to] show elsewhere, to be future-oriented in depth. For this, not only poets but humanists generally need to be more at home with diversified fields of knowledge, not only with our vastly expanded humanities but also with the sciences and technology, than most of us are. Humanists are often too fearful of science and technology, which are human creations if they are anything. We need a poetry that can include them and the rest of our growng awarenesses, not just carpingly but also critically, because understandingly.

ST. LOUIS — As e-mail, text messaging and blogging become increasingly part of our everyday lives, Saint Louis University is launching a new center to focus on the work of a scholar who practically predicted the age of the Internet.

Funded through a $1 million University initiative, the Walter J. Ong, S.J., Center for Language and Culture honors the work of Ong (1912-2003), an internationally renowned scholar who spent his nearly 50-year career teaching and researching at SLU.

“The founding of this new center is especially important considering Ong’s pioneering theories of change in language and human communication, which have become more relevant today than ever before,” said Sara van den Berg, Ph.D., chair of the English department and director of the center. “Technology is changing the way we communicate and relate to each other, and the center will give scholars a place to study this rapid revolution.” [Read more.]

Just so it’s clear, the Ong Center itself did not get any where near $1 million dollars from Saint Louis University, but it has been funded by SLU and by ICF Foundation. I mention this on the off chance that someone looking for a new favorite charity reads the $1 million number and thinks the Center’s rolling in money.

Going through the unfiled files (that is, the files from Fr. Ong’s desk and book shelves which were never formally filed), I’ve come across two more references to secondary visualism.¹ Unfortunately, since both are from talking points, neither go into any depth; however, in the second piece, “Notenda for Informal Response,” Ong offers a short but radical expansion of his notion of secondary orality and secondary visualism.

The first is from talking points Ong wrote for a guest lecture to Vincent Casaregola’s “Rhetorical Theory and Discourse Pedagogy” course here at Saint Louis University on 15 March 1993. In it, Ong writes:

2. Effect of electronics (first pre-elecrtronic gramophone or mechanical, non-electric phonograph or gramophone [1857, Edison 1877]; electricity in electric telegraph (1837), telephone (1876), crystal-set radio; electronics emerging around 1920s, vacuum tube). Effects multiple and endless: secondary orality (dependent on writing, but results resemble primary orality (EXPLAIN–spontaneity of ’60s). But also “secondary visualism” indefinitely enhanced visual field (graphics, &c), “virutal reality.” Digitization: timepieces commonest experiences of the digitization of the nondigitizable; Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. Musicians’ rejection of digitized music as unreal. For you deal with: hypertext (George P. Landow’s Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology), footnoting footnotes on footnotes on footnotes: everything on any subject (but what is a “subject”?). Comparable development < --- information increase and explosion: old-time history (residual orality: past=action of "heavy" figures) > les annalistes (Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood) > the “new history” > Mentalitiés/Mentalities.

The second is from a one-page, single-spaced printout titled “Notanda for Informal Response,” written for the 1995 Midwest Modern Language Association Annual Convention session “Presences of the Word: Ong Studies for the 21st Century.” In it, Ong writes:

Orality-literacy studies have always been an open field. No one can pretend ever to have said the last word. In orality-literacy studies, now is the time when, more than ever before, we should study interactions. To do this we must be aware of the characteristics of (among other things):

Primary orality.

Oral residue after writing and writing’s sequels. My PW, OL, &c.² Very helpful: Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy.

Secondary orality (orality interacting with writing, print, and electronics): not only in the electronic age (to which I first applied the term, directly to radio and television) but also in the manuscript and print ages and postmodern deconstruction. Paul, close of 2 Thess.

In addition, secondary visualism of manuscript age, and much more of print age (exactly repeatable visual statement) and of electronic communication (graphics).

Internet: basically visual (computer screen) and hence inevitably distancing (you cannot know for sure the identity of the person with whom you are communicating). Because of the at least unconsciously sensed distancing, compulsive preoccupation with intimacy (featured achievement: out of the millions who correspond on internet, two eventually marry one another–featured story proving great and pervading intimacy!) A reason for compulsive preoccupation with intimacy: rapidity of electronic interchange of thought between two persons creates an environment like–but not the same as–that voice, vocal exchange, sound, in face-to-face interaction. But virtual reality is by definition not face-to-face. Cf. Bukatman, Terminal Identity (subconscious suppressed).

1. For other references to secondary visualism and secondary literacy, see both my post “Ong on Secondary Orality and Secondary Literacy” and Ong’s unpublished lecture “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” [back]
2. The Presence of the Word and Orality and Literacy. [back]

We’ve updated the Walter J. Ong Collection web site and added a number of items, including

• A section on Ong’s unfinished book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization, which includes material from and related to the book;
• 13 articles and essays published in Saint Louis University publications between 1939-1979;
• 16 reviews published in Saint Louis University publications between 1940-1984, including Ong’s reviews of Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato and Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy;
• 2 letters in which Ong explains the development of his interest in orality-literacy studies and Marshall McLuhan’s influence on his work;
• 6 new lectures, including “The End of the Age of Literacy,” “The Sound-Sight Split in Latin,” “Worship at the End of the Age of Literacy,” and “Orality, Textuality, and Electronics Unlimited”;
• 6 new images, including two drawings by Ong and a picture of his typewriter; and
• 17 unpublished articles, notes, and fragments, including a working outline for Orality and Literacy, four fragments removed from The Presence of the Word, and a number of lecture notes from the Language as Hermeneutic course files.

Earlier today we talked about scanning and posting Ong’s annotations to his Ramus and Talon Inventory. I’m not sure when he stopped updating his revising copy of the book, but he kept updating the book for years. It turns out that Harvard UP let the copyright expire and Ong renewed the copyright in his own name in 1986. I’m not 100% certain yet, but the plan is to scan the entire book and add it to the Walter J. Ong Collection online.

From the BBC World News:

Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought.

State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country. [Read more.]

Breaking News:

Saint Louis University has established a new center of excellence with the creation of theWalter J. Ong, SJ, Center for Language and Culture. The Ong Center honors the work of Walter J. Ong, SJ (1912–2003), an internationally renowned scholar who spent his career in teaching and research at Saint Louis University, where he was Professor of English and of Humanities in Psychiatry, and later University Professor.  [Read more.]

Computers and Writing 2007 ends my series of conference sessions marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Orality and Literacy. Here’s the program information, slightly edited, for Orality and Literacy 2.0 (session 8.2):

Orality and Literacy 2.0

Saturday, May 19, 3:45 - 5:00 PM, Room B

Read the rest of this entry »

Computers and Writing 2007 ends my series of conference sessions marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Orality and Literacy. Here’s the program information, slightly edited, for Orality and Literacy: The Next 25 Years (session 7.7):

Orality and Literacy: The Next 25 Years

Saturday, May 19: 2:15 - 3:30 PM, Room M

Read the rest of this entry »

In a letter written on 27 January 1988, Walter Ong described his essay “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” as “one of the most important short pieces I have ever got up, with some totally new things in the second half.”¹ That Ong believed writing to be a technology that restructures thought is not a surprise to anyone who has read Orality and Literacy, but this essay, published in a collection of the 1985 Wolfson College Lectures, develops this central tenet of Ong’s thought in new ways.² Of the importance of the essay Baumann writes in the introduction to the book:

To focus the study of literacy on points of transition, and to anchor it in detailed specialist scholarship, may help us the better to assess the importance of the contemporary transitions from typographic to electronic media. It may further help us to minimize the dangers of hypostasizing literacy, that is, to treat it as an agent in itself, rather than as a technology that is practiced, used, and given purposes by human beings according to their specific social objectives and cultural outlooks. None the less, such a plan of study risks fragmentation and the aimless pursuit of detail if it is not unified by shared reference to a theoretical proposition.

Such a proposition is offered by Professor Ong, and the chapters that follow can be read as a series of detailed disputations addressed to it. Professor Ong’s proposition argues that writing is a technology that restructures thought. Writing is not merely an exterior tool, but a practice that alters human consciousness to the degree which it is, as Walter Ong says, ‘interiorized.’ Writing is ‘interiorized’ psychologically as the subject’s experience is mediated to a significant degree by literate forms of discourse. One might perhaps also think of it as socially interiorized as literate practices come to form a basis of social institutions. Writing, proposes Walter Ong, takes language out of the evanescent act of speaking and fixes oral utterance, an event in time, to written signs, objects in space. It thus removes language, and with it, thought, from an immediate personal, social, and cultural contingency. Such ‘diaeresis’ makes [page break] possible a progressive separation of knowledge from interpretation, of logic from rhetoric, of past record from present-day reconstruction, and of cumulative factual learning from the judgment and wisdom acquired by experience. Such a restructuring of thought is embedded, as Walter Ong has stressed, through his work, in ‘the actual history of writing, its growth out of orality’ and all the social and ’sociopsychologial complexities that history presents us with’. (3-4)³

It’s the failure to understand Ong as Baumann does, the failure to understand the psychological interiorization of writing, that is one of the great misunderstandings of Ong’s work.

1. The letter is in the publication file of that essay. [back]
2. Ong, Walter J. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50. [back]
3. Baumann, Gerd. Introduction. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 1-22. [back]