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is a three-page typescript, dating to 1971, which was in a folder with a number of other typescripts, all labeled “Unpublished Material: Inactive.”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.

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]

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]

From a letter in the “Literacy and Orality in Our Times” publication files, dated Dec. 14, 1978:

I do indeed say that writing is artificial, and maybe one of our divergences is due to my not having explained that I do not consider being artificial necessarily bad at all, but rather of itself good. Nothing is more human than artifice. Only human beings can make products that are truly artificial–extensions into the outside world of the interiority of human consciousness or, if you wish, appropriations of the outside world into the interiority of consciousness.

I first heard Fr. Ong say something like this in 1998 or 1999, though then it was “There is nothing more natural to humans that the artificial.” I love the sentiment and world view that it expresses.

In 1978, presumably in his role as president of the MLA, Ong testified in support of H.J Res. 639 to Authorize the President to Call a White House Conference on the Humanities.¹ His testimony was given on 13 January 1978 in the Field Museum in Chicago, IL. (more…)

1. The full citation for this publication has to be the longest bibliographic entry for a non-reprinted work by Ong. It is: Ong, Walter J. “Statement of Rev. Walter J. Ong, Professor of English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at St. Louis University; and President, Modern Language Association of America.” White House Conference on the Humanities. Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, and the Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First and Second Session, on H.J Res. 639 to Authorize the President to call a White House Conference on the Humanities. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978. 684-88. [back]

In the Language as Hermeneutic course files (not the same as the Language as Hermeneutic book manuscript files) there are a number of fragmentary pieces that are, more or less, notes for the book as well as notes for the class. One such piece is “Intertextuality as Retrieval of Orality”:

The commonplace tradition and the doctrine of imitation ruled verbal expression from primary orality through the age of residual orality terminated by romanticism. In the commonplace tradition, the echoing of earlier utterance was encouraged and taught.

Intertextuality has attacked the fixity of the text, which had made the text in the first place the primary focus of interpretation.

Reader-oriented criticism has also attacked the fixity of the text.

Derrida’s Glas the ultimate: everything fits and misfits everything else, echoes everything (Culler.)

The discovery that echoing and reechoing is so pervasive in Text, Writing, and  Ècriture is really a retrieval of orality, a hint of the oral base of text.

The whole economy of orality is repetition, echoing, imitation.

Discourse (oral—and written, too, if there is such a thing) is essentially echoing (cf. catechesis), repetition, imitation. A response to a question echoes the question.

All this shows how deeply language is basically a call, a cry, rather than mere transfer of information.

Analogy between (1) oral person’s paraphrasing a statement when asked to repeat it (question sets up a new context) and (2) different readers’ readings of a text (always put into a new situation).

A handwritten note in the upper left-hand corner reads: “All this is in effect said in “Before Textuality: orality and Interpretation.”

From “Theorems on Language, Technology, and Community: The Embedding of Thought in the Material World.” Theorem 2:

Language is always encounter, either between two or more living persons or between a living person, a reader, and a text earlier produced by a living person or persons, who, however in the reader’s time may have been dead for up to 8000 years (before around 6000 BCE, when writing first appears, there were no texts [)].

As encounter, language always involves more than words. There is no speech act (including writing) that stands on its own, related only to its utterer and to words.

Thought, insofar as it involves words (it also of course involves innumerable other things, for how can we describe comprehensively what we do when we just “think”), is also an encounter (with a very really imagined someone, if only another version of oneself.

Hermeneutics arises from encounter, which all use of language entails, but which is never merely linguistic. The concept of hermeneutics or interpretation is based on person-to-person negotiation. Etymologies: hermeneutics, interpretation. There are no texts outside such negotiation.

In the collection files is a two-page, single-spaced document titled “Theorems on Language, Technology, and Community: The Embedding of Thought in the Material World,” which dates from the early 1990s. In it are 12 theorems, ranging from a few words to 20 lines. Theorem 7 is a comment on deconstruction:

Deconstructive hermeneutics expects texts to interpret texts. Since words can never be explained entirely in other words, tets so treated will of course deconstruct themselves. Moreover, since all texts are language at one remove from sound (coded from sound into sight), deconstructive hermeneutics is therefore in ccertain senses unreal. (Writing is psychologically associated with death.) Still, the immobilizing of writing in texts opens vast new horizons for language and thought and for understanding of both. Derrida et al. end always with absence and death, because they look at texts in depth.

We’ll be posting “Theorems on Language, Technology, and Community” on the Walter J. Ong Collection web site soon.

[Note: For more on writing and death, see "Maranatha: Death and Life in the Text of the Book" in Interfaces of the Word.]

From Mark Nielson’s “A Bridge Builder: Walter J. Ong at 80″ (America 167.16 (Nov. 21, 1992): 404-406):

The seminal discovery of his long career came nearly 40 years ago. “It happened while I was doing my dissertation research in France,” recalls Ong. “I was reading Rudoph Bultmann, the Protestant theologian, who made reference to the idea that knowing, for the Hebrews, had to do with hearing and sound, while the Greeks thought of knowing as related to seeing. I guess it took me about a day, but suddenly I could see how the whole thing fit together.”

The “whole thing” was how radically thought–not just the ability to express ideas, but the kind of ideas one could think about–was transformed by the arrival of writing and then print. Working in the reserve room of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Ong saw for the first time that print, and writing before it, located knowledge in space, in words on the page, rather in the temporal world of sound. (404)