Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

Just in time for the Media Ecology Association’s tenth annual convention here at SLU, Pius Library has launched a new and improved website to showcase the Walter J. Ong papers in our collection.  The site, which will be known as the Walter J. Ong Archives at Saint Louis University, is available at the following URL:

http://libraries.slu.edu/special/digital/ong/index.php

The new website features an improved design and a copy of the archival finding guide to Fr. Ong’s papers.  In addition, there are digitized materials from the collection, including papers, photos, and audio recordings.  More material will be added soon, so please check back or subscribe to our RSS feed for regular updates.

Drew Kupsky
Digital Resources Librarian
Pius XII Memorial Library
Saint Louis University

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.

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

(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: The Next 25 Years (session 7.7):

Orality and Literacy: The Next 25 Years

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

(more…)

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]

The title of this post is a question posed to Fr. Ong during his presentation “Communications and the Rise of Individualism,” given May 9, 1983 in the Vatican Film Library of Saint Louis University.¹ Ong’s response:

I do not think there is the slightest chance of that. It will change the way one writes, but not stop the writing. Let me give an example. A man from Boston asked to interview me for a book, The New Jesuits, and we made arrangements to meet for taping. The interview took place, the tape was transcribed and edited. He edited it massively. I edited his version. We talked further about it on the phone, during which time he taped about a half hour interview. He edited that tape into the re-re-edited transcript and sent that back to me. I edited it some more, sent it back. Then there was an exchange of calls and post cards, and finally the thing came out. What have you got? Something nobody ever wrote and nobody ever said. We do not have a conceptual apparatus to handle this. What am I? Am I the author? Is he the impresario? The master of ceremonies? Is it “Walter Ong presented by George Riemer”? Why all this hanky-panky? To make it sound informal. Why does it have to sound informal? Because we’re literate, and literate people believe that conversations are informal. Oral people don’t believe this at all. For oral people conversations are quite normally formal. Because we believe that oral exchange should be informal, we fake it. But the printed text is not really orality. People read it. Nobody is ever going to say it. The whole thing is completely unreal, but it is very good. There is a much better text here. One learns a great deal more than if they had not done it this way. One time during the interview the interviewer said, “Look, we’re not talking like a couple of old friends.” I said, “Of course not. You’re asking questions that you are going to put this in a book that you hope will be read by thousands of people and I am answering on the same basis.” Now he even worked that conversation into the book, after he edited it to make it sound natural.

No oral culture, no writing, no print culture, could have produced this book or anything like it. There are thousands of books that are produced and published because of the electronic media that would never have been produced before. The electronic media are not killing off books, they are making more books. But they change the style. The style is different by being an informal printed book. This informal style would not be found in the nineteenth century.

1. Published in Views on Individualism: Presentations by Israel M. Kirzner, Walter J. Ong, Mancur Olson, and Kurt Baier. Ed. Donna Card Charron. St. Louis: St. Louis Humanities Forum, 1986. 29-43. [back]

Among the files of “Oral Remembering and Narrative Structures” (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, 1981: Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk. Ed. Deborah Tannen. Washington: Georgetown UP, 1982. 12-24) is an outline for the then in-progress Orality and Literacy. For the book’s introduction, Ong writes:

Not a “movement” nor a set of theories (Russian Formalism, Structuralism, new Criticism) but an awareness. No “school” or canon. Not reductionism, but relationism.

Please Note, Copy, Distribute and Post the following:

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…)