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.]
From “Renaissance Ideas and the American Catholic Mind” (Thought 29.4 (1954): 327-356):
In the ancient world, language had been bound less to writing and thus less to space, but rather to time, for language had there been felt primarily as something uttered, not as something recorded. Verba volant, scripta manent. Spoken words, like time itself, fly. Only when speech is no longer an utterance but the series of marks on a spatial field which we call writing can it endure for more than the moment in which it passes over the lips. The ancient world had, indeed, known writing, but as a subordinate art, committed to scribes rather than to the real rhetorician, and oriented toward oral speech in a way writing is not today. Fro even when one was reading to oneself, one habitually read aloud–a habit which persisted through the Middle Ages. The literary tradition of the ancient world was the rhetorical tradition, and its greatest figures are orators, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Cicero, Quintilian, or at the very least playwrites such as Sophocles and Aeschylus who composed for oral delivery. The historians are relatively minor figures–and, even so, their histories are not what history is today, but a pastiche of speeches attributed to the characters they write about. Poets, as we know, wrote not be read, but to be recited.
Unlike the ancients for whom language flowed with time, the humanists, in binding language to the written record, on the contrary bound language to space. On the one hand, this proves that the humanists were post medieval men, sharing the bias of the scientific mind, its passion for the fixed and permanent, even to the neglect of the living, its preference for sight rather than sound. On the other hand, the approach to language through space was inevitable among those who turned, as humanists did, to the past. For again, verba volant, script manent. The past is never vocal. The present alone has a voice. The past had only a written record. (340-41)
During M/MLA, I was asked if I’d come across any notes for a 2nd ed. of Orality & Literacy which Ong had supposedly be working on or at least thinking about a few years ago. I went digging in the boxes of papers which had been on Ong’s desk and found a three page, single-spaced typescript and a series of letters to and from Routledge, all dating from July 2001 - Jan 2002. Routledge wanted to include Orality & Literacy in a reissue of the top ten bestsellers of the New Accents series to celebrate the series’ 25 anniversary. The plan was to redesign the covers, provide a new General Editor’s Preface, redo a new layout and design, and, if the individual authors wished, an updated bibliography and/or a new concluding chapter of no more than 5,000 words.
The typescript itself, which is dated 28 August 2001, is titled “Memos for 2nd edition of Orality and Literacy, and has two sections (page 3 ends with “III” indicating at least a 3rd section was intended). Section I begins with the comment that electronics has brought us into a new stage we might call “electronic verbalization” and makes the point that orality-literacy-electronic verbalization is not a linear progression from one stage to the next but instead, to use Bolter’s term, each remediates the other (my use of Bolter here, Fr. Ong doesn’t use remediate or refer to Bolter). The rest of this section, maybe 1 1/4 pages, discusses jazz and how the Polish Philological Institute in Lublin have been relating it to orality & literacy. Fr. Ong does make reference to the 1958 book Jam Session: An Anthology of Jazz, edited by Ralph J. Gleason. A contributor to the collection had given a copy of it to Fr. Ong, I think in the 1960s, but I’d need to check. The second part of the typescript focuses on memory and how in an oral culture it is effectiveness, not verbatium recall, that is important.
It’s possible that there’s more written, but I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. The letters and the typescript are all paper clipped together. However, he did send the piece to Routledge as “some memos that I have made for my own thinking” and there is the indication of a third section (the “III” at the bottom of page 3). I’m not yet formally working with the loose papers yet, so we’ll have to wait to see if I find anything else yet (I’ve checked the filing cabinets and there’s nothing on the revision there). There’s also a CD-ROM of the files Fr. Ong had on his computer, which I’ve glanced over but will check again.
What may also be of note are some files towards the monograph “Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization,” which was also the title of a class Fr. Ong taught in the late 80s or early 90s (I’ve come across a few syllabi). There’s a series of chapters, some quite short and some long, which match up to a projected outline. There’s some letters indicating Fr. Ong had contacted Harvard UP in 1990 about the project, and they indicate he intended the work to be similiar in size and scope of Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write. There’s a note that the project was abandoned in 1994 and there’s some hand-written calculations indicating it was at 40,000 words and that Havelock’s book was 50,000 words.
I need to reread it, but “Hermeneutic Forever: Voice, Text, Digitization, and the ‘I’” seems to be a condensed version of some of the ideas rather than a chapter lifted from the larger project. “Digitization, Ancient and Modern” also seems to be related as does “Information and/or Communication.” There’s also a folder with what appear to be various drafts or attempts at these three pieces as well as some other things. One that caught my eye immediately was a response, or maybe a better term is riff, on Marry Carruthers’ “Inventional Mnemonics and the Ornaments of Style: The Case of Etymology” which was published in Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 2.2 (1992): 103-114 (this article had been in among Fr. Ong’s books). While I haven’t read Fr. Ong’s response yet, Carruthers does use the phrase “elaborately punning riffs of memory” in her article and Fr. Ong uses it as a opportunity to discuss improvisation and orality.
One of the major misreadings of Ong’s work, I think, is the belief that he believes something just magically happened, that somehow a switch in the human brain was flipped from “oral” to “literate.” The fact that much of Ong’s theories rely upon an auditory-visual shift which is itself tied to conceptions of space. Even this isn’t a complete picture as I haven’t referred to presence and a number of other things. Any way, I found the following passage interesting, not because any of it is new to me but because of how it works as a synopsis. It’s from “From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance Mind: A Study of the Significance of the Allegorical Tableau.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17.4 (1959): 423-440.
Printing itself is a kind of captial phenomenon in the concentration of thought on spatial forms. With the invention of printing from movable type made from matrices struck with a punch–the essence of fifteenth-century typographical developments–meaning was committed to space or ’stored’ in space in a more definitive way than ever before . Picture writing had been the initial commitment of the word to space. The alphabet had gone further, breaking down the word, a denizen of the world of sound, into spatially discrete parts. But in a manuscript culture these parts or letters had had to be ‘manufactured’ by a scribe as they were used. They pre-existed only in his imagination. With the invention of printing from movable type, the parts or letters, and even the parts from which the letters are made (matrices and punches), are prefabricated. As maneuverable parts, the printing types are actually stored in space, in little compartments in a case, from which they are moved onto a composing stick, thence onto a stone, and finally onto a press, where multiplication is effected by mere local motion bringing paper into contact under pressure with the printing form.
Moreover, the books which finally evolve from this process are quite different from manuscript codices with regard to the relationships of the words or ‘contents’ (this spatial notion of ‘contents’ actually comes into currency only after printing is developed). Now, for the first time, a schoolmaster can say to his class, ‘Everyone turn to page 7, and in line 4 from the top of the page look at the third word from the left.’ For every book in the class will have the words locked into position in exactly the same place on each page–a condition which did not obtain in a manuscript culture, where the same words were found on quite different pages and in quite different positions on the page in the various manuscript copies of a work, so that the auditory memory and not the visual tended to be the primary operative tool. But with typography, the ability to find and deal with some bit of knowledge tends to be more an operation in space than in oral mnemonics. The bright student is now rather more likely to be visile rather than audile. (435-36)
To further illustrate the importance of auditory-visual shift and spatial understanding, here’s a passage from “Ramus and the Transit to the Modern Mind,” originally published in Modern Schoolman 32.4 (1955): 301-11, and quoted here from An Ong Reader, 229-238.
The study of Ramism makes it evident that to understand the history of method we have to abandon our own favorite lines of explanation and get back to the issues as they really existed. The basic issue was not the struggle between inductive and deductive method, for there never was any serious or concerted opposition to inductive method but, if anything, too much respect for it–philosophers commonly took it for granted that induction was essential groundwork and therefore that it was easy to do and needed no special attention. The basic issue was the struggle between sound and sight, between habits of thinking based on listening to voices and habits of thinking based on looking at surfaces, between living in a world inhabited by persons who talk back and living in a world occupied by passive objects scattered in ’systems’ through the new Copernican space. The real obstacle in the way of fuller inductive development was not deduction but the voice and person of the teacher, who kept talking all through the scholastic centuries. The way in which teaching actually blocked observation in dissection as practiced in medical lectures has been shown by Herbert Butterfield [The Origins of Modern Science. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1950] (32-33). This situation is symptomatic of the whole state of mind at the time. But this same teacher proved all-important, nevertheless, in paving the way for a more inductive approach, since his incessant talking helped reduce the dialogue of dialectic to a monologue and thus was a preparation for the more complete elimination of personal components in the scientific situation in favor of an ‘objective’ apersonal approach. (236)
and
This drive toward the spatial, this reinforcement of the visile component of cognition, is a drive toward the construction of the observational, depersonalized collection of objects in terms of which we picture the world today, because it is a drive to think of things as surfaces, objects, rather than as symbols or as persons with voices. But the drive in Ramus’ case is completely blind: he has no noteworthy expressed partiality for an observational approach at all. What he wants is ‘arts,’ something to know that is clear, distinct, set down once and for all in a book, and in the last analysis, picturable–the visile Ramus is the forerunner of the visile Descartes here. At this point, the way is prepared for ’subjectivity’ by the death of the element of dialogue in dialectic. The two-part Socratic personal interchange is gone, and even the monologue of the teacher is gone–in other words, persons and voice are gone. An art is now a ‘thing,’ not a possession of the mind but something with surface, like the rest of the coming Newtonian mind. (237)