This Thursday, September 10, Dr. Thomas Farrell will be discussing of Fr. Ong and his work online. The Technologizing of the Word: The Philosophy of Walter Ong S.J. will be on the Ethics Talk program, hosted by BlogTalkRadio.com.
More details are available here.
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Corey Anton, editor-elect for Explorations in Media Ecology is now accepting manuscripts for forthcoming publication.
Explorations in Media Ecology {EME}, the journal of the Media Ecology Association, is an international journal dedicated to extending our understanding of media and media environments. EME welcomes diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of media environments, including (but not limited to) philosophical, aesthetic, literary, historical, psychological, sociological, anthropological, political, economic, and scientific investigations, as well as applied, professional, and pedagogical perspectives. In addition to scholarly articles, EME also publishes essays, commentary, and critical examinations relevant to media ecology as a field of study and practice. (more…)
The technical issues seem to have been fixed, and the blog is now publishing a RSS feed.
from Rev. of Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian. Translation and Text of Peter Ramus Rhetoricae Distinctiones in Quintilianum. Trans. Carole Newlands. Intro. James J. Murphy. Quarterly Journal of Speech (1987): 242-3:
Professor Murphy’s Introduction makes many new or otherwise important points, including the following. At the center of Ramus’s program was an attack not on Aristotle alone but rather on the three great ancient auctoritates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, whom “from the very outset Ramus viewed … as related” (7). Ramus in principle preferred Plato over Aristotle (7)–but I’m afraid that Ramus’s concept of Platonic dialectic was uncommonly shallow, even in his day and much more in ours, being interfered with by his own program for a dialectical or logical ‘method’ which was, in fact, a computer programming “tree”–Ramus had the beginnings of computer software but not computers. Ramus, Murphy notes, had two attitudes toward Cicero, complementary, not contradictory (10): he praised Cicero’s oratory but dammed Cicero’s rhetorical theory–pretty much on the same grounds as theories of Aristotle and Quintilian: they were not simple enough, not processed so as to proceed in “straight and orderly lines” (43, quoted from Ramus) through simple definitions treating first the more general and then the more specific parts of the discipline” (242).
I started tackling the unfiled material yesterday. I originally thought I’d try to integrate it into the publication and general files which were in the filing cabinets, but we’ve decided not to do that at the moment. We may decide to integrate some or all of it later, or we may decide to leave it as its own series. (more…)
In a letter to C. Jan Swearingen, dated April 12, 1985 (in the folder “On Photographic Literacy” 1985, Dec.), Ong explains that he thought the essay “Writing and the Evolution of Consciousness” would address weaknesses and problems intelligence tests “presented in writing….by literates who are unfamiliar with or even unaware of the ways in which the orally grounded intelligence works — ways which are by no means simple or unsophisticated.”
Ong makes it clear in this letter, and in other places, that while he does address his critics directly on occasion — such as in the exchange with Gee, he preferred to continue writing articles that dealt with but did not specifically identify particular critics. Unfortunately, this gave the impression, or allowed critics to claim, that he ignored their charges.
two passages from “An Exchange on American Sign Language and Deaf culture.” (Gee, James Paul and Walter J. Ong, SJ. Language and Style 16.2 (Spring 1983): 231-237) in which Ong clarifies a few misconceptions:
“I have never maintained that the spatializing tendency in language is the product of writing, only that writing gives it certain specific intensities (which print further builds up in new ways), particularly regarding the use of surface to convey all sorts of meaning” (235).
and
“A written text is fixed, presenting words permanently and all at once, not in temporal sequence. Knowing the appropriate code, how to ‘read’ the text, enables the reader to introduce the words into time, to give them temporal sequences in his or her own consciousness” (235).
from “Reading, Technology, and the Nature of Man.” The Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 132-149:
“Technology thus shows itself as something profoundly interior. The human word is at its origin on oral phenomenon and it remains, despite the grammatologies of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the twentieth century, irrevocably oral at root. All real words are spoken words. The marks on pages which we call words are of themselves verbal nothings that become real words only in the consciousness of real readers who process them, in however complexly coded fashions, through the world of sound. Yet the evolution of consciousness demands that the originally oral human world be distanced from orality, technologized, reduced to writing and print and ultimately to computers, whence it must be fed back into the oral world again.
”A dialectic is at work here in this technologizing of the word. As has been noted earlier, a primary oral culture cannot describe the features of orality or reflect on itself as a culture; the very concept of ‘culture’ is a typographically formed concept, dependent on the feel for a mass knowledge which cannot be accumulated eve with writing, but which demands print. There is no way sort of a massive descriptive circumlocution even to speak or think of ‘culture’ in classical Latin. Only those advantaged by the interiorization of writing and print, and living at the opening of the electronic age, have been able to discover what primary oral culture was or is and to reflect on it and understand it, and thereby to reflect on manuscript cultures and typographic cultures and their own electronic culture itself. Locked in a primary oral culture, consciousness has not the kind of self-knowledge and hence not the freedom which only technology can confer when consciousness makes technology its own. Like human beings themselves, as they pass through the successive phases of life and through their physical death, the oral world in a way must die, too, if it is to bear fruit; that is, must loose itself in writing and print and now in electronics and in the interaction of all these technologies, if it is to realize its promise” (148-149).
Excerpts from “Reading, Technology, and the Nature of Man.” The Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 132-149:
One of the common but mistaken critiques of Ong is that he’s reductive, wanting to claim that the medium governs all, which just isn’t the case. He always claimed a relationist position, one which recognized no one overriding force that shaped all culture or all consciousness. He did, however, believe the word played a important role:
“All technologies (the processing of wood and metal, textile work, bridge building, automobile manufacture, chemical industries, and so on) affect man’s interior sense of his lifeworld, his sense of himself in relation to the universe, and thus enter into human consciousness to change its structure. But nowhere does technology enter into the structures of consciousness in man’s interior life so intimately as when its used to transform the word itself by means of writing, print, and electronics. For the word comes from the interior; to touch it is to touch consciousness directly” (144).
On Derrida and the historical (or lack of historical) perspective:
“However, for all its excellences and the wide perspectives it opens, Derrida’s account, like almost all phenomenological or structuralist or psychoanalytic-structuralist accounts of reading and writing, fails to take into consideration in historical or psychological depth where writing came from. The tradition that Derrida represents derives much of its theory from Husserlian and Heideggerian sources, which have little if any contact with work in diachronic noetics and which consequently lack certain historical and psychological dimensions. It works from analysis of literary texts, most recent, post-Gutenberg: Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a favorite. That is to say, the tradition does not attend in depth to the thought processes of primary oral cultures, out of which writing finally emerged, and consequently suffers from an unconscious chirographic and typographic bias. Most theorists in the tradition show minimal knowledge, if any at all, of the psychodynamics of oral though processes and of primary oral societies and institutions which have been worked out at great depth and in meticulous and exciting detail by American scholars, notably the late Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord and Eric A. Havelock as well as the many younger scholars associated with them and their work. The psychodynamics of primary oral thought-processes form the historical writing and print, because they lie at the root of thinking itself, even now” (145).
Knowing as I do the New Critical debate that took place over the “unity” of such medieval texts as Beowulf, and the New Critical assumptions that such works need must be “unified” to be worth literary study, I love the following:
“Failure to take into account these same depth structures or oral noetics and the subsequent technological transformations of the word by writing, print, and electronics can result in blind spots also in the most sophisticated literary criticism today. Few critics today even advert to certain facts that are salient: the developments of the tight linear standard plot is the product of writing; before writing, the episodic plot is the universal rule for lengthy narrative. The Greek drama and kind of plot and characterization it features are the result of writing; the Greek drama and subsequent drama in the same tradition depend on memorization of a text, a composition in writing, which is specially devised to allow for reconversion into oral utterance that is seemingly more or less spontaneous. Tight linear or standard plot does not develop in lengthy prose narrative anywhere in the world, so far as I know, until print has been interiorized in the psyche, some three centuries after its invention. The fully ’round’ character of the sort E.M. Forster discusses develops only in a print economy. The noetic processes encouraged by the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth century and later depend on print. And so on.” (147).
Some interesting observations of medium dynamics from an article on EAD (Electronic Archival Description).
DeRose, Stephen J. “Navigation, Access, and Control Using Structured Information.” The American Archivist 60.3 (Summer 1997): 298-309:
On reproducing form vs. making structure of content explicit (paraphrased rather than quoted):
A “page” is a unit of structure that has meaning in typographic contexts — we can publish any number of books with the same exact pagination. If we change the size or width of a page, however, pagination will likely be off. Therefore pages are not a structural unit of literature but of typography (302).
And now a quote from the above article:
“Many proposals have been made to utilize only the notion of pages in the electronic world. The most naive form my be ‘Just scan everything in LC [Library of Congress] and drop it on the net.’ A few years ago one heard the same theory, but suggesting optical disk jukeboxes, and before that, microfilm. Such approaches, even ignoring obvious feasibility problems, would not truly achieve the benefits expected of a new medium. Unstructured data forms such as the bitmap are merely new kinds of papyrus on which to make copies: highly useful but purely a quantitative, incremental change. This path can never lead to the new world of navigable, accessible information space that we hope to attain. It carries over most weaknesses of the paper medium, while failing to retain paper’s compensating strengths”
”This is because a scanned image does not contain explicit structural information that can be used to support computer processing that could add value. For example, one could build an ‘electronic catalog’ by simply scanning three by five cards and then saving the bitmaps. Such a catalog could be ‘on-line’ and would have the advantage of being easily copied, backed up, and transported. But image using it!” (302-303).