ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Thanks to Ed for following up here. I first read this book in graduate school and as much as anything it's responsible for my present professional course. It was my introduction to textual criticism, to media studies, and eventually digital studies. Before Ong, it had never occured to me that writing was in any sense technological. Writing simply seemed natural, something I had learned in school at a very young age; Ong made me see that it was the ultimate artifice, and that insight opened up entire fields of study. From Ong I went on to read people like Eric Havelock (see his Preface to Plato) Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind), and Jack Goody and Ian Watt, all of whom do "orality and literacy". I also sought out and read George Landow's original edition of Hypertext as a direct consequence of my encounter with Ong. Ultimately I found that lurid yellow cover more seductive than the more anthropological strains of orality and literacy, but Ong also set the stage for my subsequent encounter with people like Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker. (Indeed, I think there are some unacknowledged debts to Ong in the current material/social text tradition of textual studies.)

None of this personal history is to say that Ong is above critique. Ong (who died very recently) was a product of his time, and his background; he was trained as a Jesuit priest as well as a psychologist. But there are still aspects of the text that transcend its intellectual limitations; it is, for example, unfaillinginly informative (see, for example the discussion of early writing materials, 94-6); constantly eloquent, even startling in its formulations: "sound exists only as it is going out of existence"; "vision dissects" (72); "the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space" (82); and, while Ong is certainly vulnerable to the charge of structuralist overdeterminacy, I also maintain that the opening chapter is unusually honest in its articulation of the irreducible otherness of an oral society.

It's easy to understand why statements such as "without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials" (14-15) fall flat. (All of the original sins are on display here: universalism, essentialism, teleology.) But, to capitalize on Jess's language of pragmatics during class, this does not detract from the fact that the key oppositons of the text simply work _for me_; that is, they jibe with everthing I've since read and come to understand about writing from a historical, phenomenological, and technological sense. When I teach Ong to undergraduates, for example, one vivid way I've found to illustrate the opposition between orality (sound, lifeworld, presence) and writing (visual dissection, separation of the knower and the known) are the images of the anthrax letters still available online (http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/102301.htm); these letters are, to borrow a phrase from Susan Stewart, crimes of writing--they cannot be anything else.

Comments?

At the risk of inciting argument, I have to say that I think the real elitism is in reading Ong's argument as though it's a condemnation of oral cultures. Ong says that Luria's non-literate subjects thought in terms that were not analytic, abstract, or logical/syllogistic, true. But this is only a critique if you valorize analytic, abstract, and logical thought as the primary markers of intelligence. Of course, as Matt pointed out in class, we need to avoid making oral cultures unnecessarily utopian and magical, and I'm not trying to do that here. However, I read Luria's reported results as descriptive, not prescriptive, and I don't agree that Ong immediately passes judgment. I think people are bristling at phrases like "barely literate," which for Luria and Ong are simply descriptors of the subjects' level of orality, and which are only pejorative if you assume "literate" as preferable.

Now, of course, Ong does say that he believes civilization needs to achieve literacy in order to reach its fullest potential. I can see why people bristle, but do we really disagree here? It's tough because to some degree we are inevitably bogged down in terminology, since by "civilization" we mean (or Ong means) a society that results in works of art, literature, economics, political institutions, etc., many of which are not possible without writing -- and we also mean a progressive forward movement, with the society constantly building on its own achievements, which is difficult without record-keeping. But, of course, this is a definition that comes out of a literate culture. However, at some point one has to bite the semantic bullet; yes, civilization may only require writing according to our writing-centric notion of civilization, but like it or not, that's our paradigm.

My only real objection to Ong is that, until the idea of secondary orality is developed in a slightly less murky way, it's unclear what relevance his work still has to our society. Our experience still breaks down to oral/aural and literary/visual (though that's overly reductive), but our culture is inextricably literate, and despite confusing moments where he says that "only the very oldest people alive today remember a primary oral culture," I think Ong handily dispatches the idea that anyone alive in the vast majority of the world today can even fully conceive of primary orality, of complete unawareness of writing. Outside of historical interest, then, it's not clear to me what *practical* applications Ong has. But the spectre of secondary orality, which I feel Ong never satisfactorily defines, is an intriguing one. To some degree I feel that one of the goals of digital studies is to give Ong (and Eisenstein) new relevance, by recapitulating some aspects of the early, crucial, and well-documented shifts in the ways we conceive of language.

Sorry so long... just, as Ed said, thinking "out loud," which I think is a funny way to describe typed communication (dude, think about that! We all knew what he meant, we probably didn't even give it a second thought, but there was nothing physically "out loud" about it).

Ed- I was intrigued by your question regarding plagiarism. With the Internet's ability to shoot information around in relative anonymity, it seems the term "plagiarism" might quickly become a point of semantic argument. I'm sure that recording companies and artists crusading against Napster and Kazaa have a clearly articulated version. But creatively speaking, where can the line be drawn? I'm thinking of the copyright laws that state 10% of a song is the limit of free exchange, while recently I can across a version of Jay Z's black album that a DJ had put the lyrics over the Beatles’ White Album. Is this plagiarism or artistic expression? Incorporating ideas or even specific passages into one’s work is something we have been trained for. What of the Internet users that have no such training? I guess this is one of the many issues that reach into the Internet’s relative anarchy, and that, short of a government somehow seizing control, will likely see no definitive resolution. Does the constant possibility of plagiarism taint literature found on the Internet? Should a site be completely ignored if it does not contain a .gov or .edu at the end of its address? Sure, we scholars are prudently loath to accept information from undefined sources. Are we being too cautious?

Speaking of speaking out loud -- this is kind of like blurting out, but I can't think of any other way to wrap my critique, so.....of course Ong has some useful and important things to say. We are still reading him, aren't we? From my disciplinary corner of the world, probably his strongest asset as a writer and thinker is that he IS provocative and relevant today, and in ways he may or may not have imagined, because he thought deeply. And his insights, particularly about writing as a technology have been and continue to be extremely influential. While some of his quotations make good sound bites and some don't -- that isn't my real beef. (Who among us can claim otherwise?) What I fear is that we are letting our admiration for him and our fondness for his arguments allow us to let ourselves and him off the hook when we say, "Oh well, he was a product of his time." I suggest that he was (as are we all) more a product of his self-selected corner of his time. And that is what I think must be pointed out when we read him today. When he wrote, there was plenty of discourse around to challenge his universalizing approach to his material. While he does indeed begin with caveats, that isn't the same thing at all as beginning or ending by making plain what you aren't entertaining in your argument. And while one can find plenty of nuggets, indeed a entire motherload of intriguing material within his text, all of which can make for lively discussion and debate, I suggest that an alternate and also equally viable approach is to look at the broad strokes of his argument and critique it in positive and negative terms for the directions in which it pointed others to follow.

Okay, I’m on-line and have been reading all the comments at once, and I’m finally getting in on the blog discussion.

I agree with Kimberlee and I also agree that Ong has some strong points that Matt articulates in the above passage; Ong also has weak points that Matt and Kimberlee discuss while acknowledging how Ong produced his scholarship in a particular cultural and scholarly moment. One cannot, of course, impose a presentism and say “Ong should have” when we are working with scholarly tools that were unavailable to him (though the book is written in 1982 and it is obvious that he is working within a structuralist discourse that was at its peak in the 1970s (at least in American Studies) that was based in early and mid-20th century French thought). But we should acknowledge the problems with his arguments and methodology and ensure that we don’t replicate them.

This is what I meant when I said that claiming an uneducated, or illiterate, person as a non-analytic thinking was elitist (one who was in an “oral” mode of thought), and that believing that text messaging, or instant messaging, or other forms of communication that exhibit writing are not up to the English 101 standards of what we call clarity display non-analytic thinking simply because of poor grammatical structure, bad thesis statements, no thesis statements, or poor writing skills. I have seen all of these after teaching 4 sections of English 101 over two semesters but I also know that the students are not non-analytic thinkers, but that they simply don’t have the academic skills and tools to put their (many times good) ideas in academic discourses that speak with a certain jargon or value certain types of writing and organization.

First, a note on the word “elitist.” I think I cut too hard with this word, and I chose it out of frustration for what I many times see in English departments today. There is a tendency to compare new works or works of popular culture to English department canons (and assign value judgments) in many courses that I have been in as an undergraduate English major at William and Mary and in the English courses that I have taken here. It has, on occasion, driven me batty, and I apologize for the use of the pejorative—especially when I (and others of us) am implicated in the term by getting a PhD at a nationally recognized university—hardly non-elitist.

Second, a note on analytic and binary thought. The problem that I have with Ong is that he is so structuralist in his approach. This is not to say that non-analytic thought does not exist, but that there are more modes of thought that Ong and Luria do not recognize, and that their disciplinary and methodological biases blind them to this. To work in social binaries is to limit the range and fluidity of how people think or interact with technologies. Saying that writing is a technology is a fantastic statement, and attempting to discover how writing as a technology has affected thought patterns is an ambitious goal, but I think Ong may go a bit too far at times in making claims of how it has changed. Ed and Matt pointed out in class that it is difficult to imagine or evaluate what a purely “oral” culture would be or how one would think in that culture. But for Ong to use the work of Luria that claims that illiterate peasants are in an oral culture and do not think conceptually or analytically was highly problematic.

Matt, you linked the letters as evidences of crimes of writing, and that they may be for us, but that is a value judgment that is developed through cultural taste (which is why I pointed to Pierre Bourdieu who spent much of his life analyzing the construction of taste and classes). Sojourner Truth, an illiterate black woman in the 19th century, asked the question “Ain’t I a woman?” and while we can evaluate the grammatical style of the question and how it could be phrased more eloquently or more formally in an English 101 skill level, it is difficult to say that the question is not analytic and highly sophisticated in examining how black women were and are treated in American cultures. Is it situational thinking? Maybe. Is it analytic? Maybe. Is it enough evidence to determine how she thinks? Not really. And that’s the problem with Ong and Luria. They spend too much time asking questions, determining if people think like Ong and Luria, and less time on listening to people talk about themselves, their lives, their cultures.

Structuralist thought contributed a lot to how we conduct research and what we investigate today, and it provides many indispensable tools, but it also has a lot of problems. When I read Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media I was aghast at his conceptions of only two types of media: hot and cool (cool media like TV are non-interactive and have passive modes of reception vs. active reception in hot media like reading—incidentally the Neterature value judgments pick up where McLuhan left off in the 60s/70s with the claim that because the computer screen is like the TV screen there is a passive mode of reception with the medium), but was pleased that he circulated questions that people began evaluating and helped put Media studies on the academic and cultural map in the US. Ong seems to have similar problems that Ed alludes to in discussing “videocy.” Literacy comes in many different modes besides writing—what about visual literacy? We are socially constructed people who learn how to read numerous “texts” whether they are ads, films, music, art, computers, our built environment, or the social structures that we work and live in—which ones produce analytic thinking? Which ones should be privileged?

Okay, I think I’m finished, and I look forward to hearing from folks; again, I’m sorry to create such a ruckus in class.

I have to agree with some of what Andrew is saying with regard to the "givens" in Ong that affect the viability of his entire argument. The binary that Andrew refers to is really a problem for me. It reminds me of the theory in physics about the scientist affecting the outcome of an experiment just by viewing it. It is not possible to reduce the variables to as basic a level as Ong via Luria does. There are so many other variables that affect thinking styles, hard wiring of the brain, analytical skills, whatever you want to call it. The determination of literate or illiterate is not the only qualifier for a population. The interviewer's questions alone are embedded with the interviewer's own literacy. Although I don't necessarily disagree with some of the conclusions drawn by Ong, I don't always find his "evidence" to be reliable.

Maybe the problem for me is that I am hard-wired differently than Ong. My analytical thinking skills were developed in a computer age, where technology, among other things, impacted the way that I think in such a way that I cannot draw the same conclusions from the body of evidence he presents that he has drawn. Hmm.

I have finally overcome my learning curve and figured out how to post to the blog!!! so onward and upward (i hope...)

i think that if anything, Ong actually over-romanticizes both orality and literacy. I agree with Jess that to read his work as a simple treatise on valuing literacy over orality is to do a disservice to many of his ideas. while he talks of writing and how it "enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure.." (7), he also recognizes that "writing can never dispense with orality".

that's certainly not to say that he doesn't present an academic/literate and/or structuralist bias, but at least he does admit that "to dissociate words from writing is psychologically threatening for literates" (14).

i'm especially intrigued by Ong's almost poetic use of language and like Dr. Kirschenbaum, I, too, find that even though I recognize some of his theoretical limitations, much of what he has to say "works" for me as well. As i read the assigned sections, i was constantly jotting down "memorable" passages, ones that resonated strongly with me or that made particular sense. does that make me "elitist"? or am i a product/victim??? of my own academic training? it's hard to say and i'm constantly wrestling with these issues.

when i mentioned in class last week that i thought IM and other digital communication technologies were affecting students' ability to think critically (and I speak of teenagers because this is the student population with which I'm most familiar) i certainly didn't mean to imply that students CANNOT think critically or that the technology is not useful for thinking critically. What I meant to articulate is somewhat akin to Restak's argument that "critical faculties are in abeyance". Though i agree that such a generalization has its problems (shallowness being the least of them i think...), in my experience (and this is purely anecdotal and population specific...)it does apply to an extent that i find less than satisfactory.

Just to say I've really been enjoying all the comments here.

Ruckuses are good.

Welp, I got my fightin gloves strapped on and I'm entering the ring (cue "Eye of the Tiger").

I think that we need to step back for a second and remove ourselves from the rhetoric and methodology of Ong's discourse. There is much to learn from Ong's text-- and much we have neglected in this exchange. I'd like to briefly comment on this idea of "valuing literacy over orality" and how it relates to Ong's position as a whole.

Simply put, yes, to look at Ong's text from this position is to de-value much of its worth, specifically the ability, or "artifice" as Matt puts it, of writing as a spatially mnemonic activity, an oriented technology, one that positions permanence and physicality (a sort of oralogogrammticism-- how's that for a grad school word) as a prosthetic to human communication. This, above all else, is what I feel to be the real value of Ong's work.

From this standpoint, it's easy to see how, in categorizing an intangible, immersive aurality, we moved to a pattern of similarly permanent institutions of law, identity and art(ifice). By giving the oral a spatial correspondence, we bound ourselves to a "coding" of the world, a representative system that attempts to control and formulate human understanding from a perspectival standpoint.

Yo, Adrienne!

Just a quick question, and perhaps one that will show my own ignorance in matters of theory, but is any standpoint capable of being anything other than "perspectival"? or am i misunderstanding the terminology?

"Oralogogrammticism."

Wow.

And lest the discussion remain framed in wholely pugilistic terms, let me say that ultimately I prefer to think of raising a ruckus in the most cooperative sense--of shaking the rafters and stirring the foundations, to arrive at a point where we've blended and mixed and made something new--which you can then sip, or swallow, or feed to the cat.

Some more food for the cat--

By perspectival all I meant was sound is immersive, a 360 experience. Vision isn't.

thanks for the clarification marc. that makes a lot of sense. so see, we're not really duking it out at all....making cat food, maybe....

Brad-- here's a link about recent developments in The Grey Album's legal dilemmas. I personally think it's great....

http://www.nme.com/news/107490.htm