Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

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.

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]

[The above title is, of course, a allusion to Ong's essay "The Talked Book," which is different than a talking book, but there you go. While I'm titling this post "The Talking Book 2.0," that's probably a term better used for books on CD-ROM. And now that I think about it, there's also .mp3, .wav, etc. audio books, and now those self-playing digital audio books from Playaway. But as this is the second generation talking book for accessibility issues, I'll leave it as "The Talking Book, 2.0."] (more…)

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.