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is a three-page typescript, dating to 1971, which was in a folder with a number of other typescripts, all labeled “Unpublished Material: Inactive.”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

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 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]

We’ve added four new audio files to the Walter J. Ong Collection’s digital holdings. They are:

• Catholic Education and Man’s Future on Earth. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 28:15, 25.8 MB.)
• The Christian and Technological Society. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 26:19, 24 MB.)
• The End of the Age of Literacy. The Sounds of Learning Series. Lecture CL-718. Audiotape. Omaha: Opinion Institute, 1960. (Time: 30:46, 28.1 MB.)
• Oral History: Remembering Alice Toklas, John and Simone Brown, and Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. With Claude N. Pavur, S.J. Recorded 10 May 1981. (Time: 15:37, 14.3 MB.)

All together, that makes eight audio files, or over 5 1/2 hours of audio.

At Ghost in the Wire, Kenneth Rufo has a interesting analysis on the trope of media technology displacement and obsolescence. In part, he writes:

The other examples don’t even come this close. With the Half-Blood Prince still flying off shelves, it’s hard to say that either hypertext or video games have ended the culture of book reading. Newspapers are everywhere, with blogs largely parasitic off of their reporting efforts. And fear not, podcasts will not replace radio broadcasts any time soon.

(more…)

In a letter to Mr. John Richardson, Jr., Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs, dated Jan. 11, 1975, Ong writes “The danger from machines is not that machines will ‘take over,’ but that we will regard ourselves as machines. The danger is interior more than exterior.”