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]

While Ong’s use of secondary orality is well known and widely used in relation to digital contexts, his use of secondary literacy is largely unknown. The term’s obscurity comes as no surprise as it’s buried in a 1996 interview in Composition FORUM (Kleine, Michael, and Fredric G. Gale. “The Elusive Presence of the Word: An Interview with Walter Ong.” Composition FORUM 7.2 (1996): 65-86): (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)

The University Archivist also passed along to me “The Image Culture” by Christine Rosen, published in The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Again, I’m posting this as an article to return to, but from a quick skim of the introduction, I see Rosen ends the intro with this:

Two things in particular are at stake in our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture:

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From Fr. Ong’s MLA 1984 presentation on literacy studies, given in the panel “What is Literacy Theory,” which exists as a 5 page double-spaced typescript (handwritten revisions are blue):

It is certainly crucial that the study of literacy, and of orality-literacy contrasts, be familiar to those working in the history and theories of education, cognitive-development psychology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, rhetoric and–most especially–logic and metaphysics, theology and biblical studies, general semantics, communications, and political socialization, not to mention technological development in Third World countries as well as marketing in these countries (James Hauf has recently delivered an important paper at an international convention on the misapprehensions all too evident in the high-technology marketing in oral cultures.). But, perhaps most urgently of all, teachers of basic writing need knowledge of literacy or orality-literacy studies. They need them to understand many of their students’ present difficulties but also to understand themselves and the work that they are [page break] engaged in.” (2-3)

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Dennis G. Jerz has already linked to and quoted my favorite passage from Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “Lost and Found in Cyberspace,” so let me quote from another passage:

In terms of challenges to future historians, Donadio cites Steven Kellman who has just written a new biography of Henry Roth; he suggests, rather indisputably, that “Our understanding of the Constitution . . . would be quite different if the thoughts about it exchanged by Jefferson, Madison and Monroe had vanished into the electronic ether.”

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Steve Krause has a nice short piece on the fear of blogs which made me think of Ong’s “The End of the Age of Literacy,” which I wrote about on 6 Aug 2004. Among other claims made in the article to which provoked Steve’s response is the claim that online communication like blogs are keeping students from learning how to “interact socially in the normal way through verbal communication’” [emphasis mine]. Writing is, apparently, bad for “normal” human development.

Steve notes that this rise in anti-blogishness seems to come largely from the medias most threatened by blogs. This is, of course, the history of media write large. I’m waiting for the day when blogs are used to decry some evil new communications technology as a threat to our literacy and our socialization.