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.

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.]

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]

From “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):

Before writing, there was lore but no learning; great wisdom but not the reflective; sequential understanding that we know as philosophy. There was oral performance of great skill and beauty (such as writers can no longer achieve) but not what we know as literature. There was oratorical skill but no reflective exploration of the art of rhetoric—just as there were various aphorisms about the handling of disease but no articulated science of medicine. The highly sequential analytic understanding which the humanities and science bespeak cannot be achieved by the mind without some kind of writing system or without the mental process, such as science and history and philosophy, which the mind could not perform until it had invented writing. This means that, although the humanities are concerned with the totality of the human condition, as bodies of knowledge they are inescapably bound to literacy. (685)

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.]

In “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” file is a typescript titled “Oral Performance, Writing, and Audiences.” According to the headnote, the typescript is an “edited transcript” of the second half of a talk given at Lindbergh High School (here in St. Louis) on September 27, 1967. The first half of the lecture, which is not included in the typescript, was from pages 111-117 of The Presence of the Word, and the second half of the lecture, which the typescript represents, was “based on very sparse notes.” So, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” seems to have begun as “Oral Performance, Writing, and Audiences.”

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)

from Rev. of Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy, by Geoffrey H. Hartman. Philosophy and Rhetoric 15.4 (1982): 274-77.

Wonderful though they may be, “texts are false bottoms,” Hartman states (p. 66). This they certainly are. Despite the potentials of the word which texts alone can release, despite the specific pleasures of the text, there is not text apart from sound. All text is pretext. This is the basic paradox of textuality. From the inscribed page, the marks we call writing have always to be run through someone’s auditory imagination if not through the ear itself to acquire any meaning at all. A certain fundamental allegiance, acknowledged or unacknowledged, to the spoken word can never be renounced, even by those who like ourselves, use the spoken word for noetic activities, such as Derrida’s and Hartman’s brilliant lucubrations, which are utterly impossible without writing” (277).

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.