Visual Translation of
Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy
Most languages through the course of human existence have been primarily oral, and we have no way of knowing how many existed or went extinct. Walter J. Ong estimates that "only around 106 have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature" (7). According to Ong, primary orality cannot exist once it is exposed to the idea of literacy, so it does not exist in our contemporaneous world. However, traces of residual oral culture have been studied in contemporary cultures, providing much of the context for Ong's theories.
Ong brings oral culture to our attention, showing it as something of value in its own right. He vests it with significance, then reveals we must "die to continue living" (15), an indication of his position on writing as the "most momentous of all human technological inventions" (84). Within Hayden White's historiographical perspective, Ong falls within the comedic vein of emplotment, since technology (writing and printing) ultimately frees humans to be more creative, more productive, and more analytical. He achieves the harmony of the comedic by primarily citing research that bears up his theories, and downplaying or ignoring conflicting arguments. Richard Cullen Rath, for example, contests Ong’s static view of orality, asserting that oral cultures are not monolithic or “ahistorical,” and that Ong’s catalogue of “intrinsic properties of orality” limits historians to a view of “orality as an initial, natural, and primitive state of mind” (424). Carol Fleisher Feldman challenges Ong, along with others, in the viewpoint that “writing is necessary for the forms of consciousness found in modern Western thought” (47), citing evidence that oral forms can demonstrate “remoteness from everyday activity” and demand “skill of their makers,” qualities that align them with typographic “artful genres of poetry, legal briefs, biblical exegesis, and the novel” (48).
Ong fits a conservative ideological lens, with the history of human communication changing as human conditions change, and progress defined as the ascension of Westernized literate values, and his argument follows an organiscist perspective, citing examples of research, such as Milman Parry’s findings on Homeric poems or Albert B. Lord’s study of Yugoslav bards, as parts that substantiate the view of the whole (Ong’s theory of orality). His overarching tropological pre-figuring mode is metonymy, as he uses multiple singular representations to stand for the whole. When he mentions that “Fieldwork across the globe has corroborated and extended” Parry’s and Lord’s works, for example, he just cites Jack Goody (61).
The changes wrought by literate communication altered the way we conceive the natural world, according to Ong. In science, literate capabilities made possible listing, categorizing, and cataloging of the natural world in a way not possible in primary orality, a fact noted by Goody, M.T. Clanchy, and Ong. Primary oral cultures represented animals in pictures, though they did not have symbolic iconography. Early writing developed in the process of recording quanities of domestic animals along with other commodities, and many pictographs and even letters can trace their genesis to animal images. We still use pictures along with textual descriptions of animals, for, as William M. Ivins Jr. notes, moveable type and print processes are "congenial" to the use of illustrative prints (qtd. in Ong 124). I am curious about this intersection of oral/textual representation--do images operate as a vestigal link to orality? How has the evolution of data recording effected our understanding of natural systems? And, in a world increasing represented in digital information, how do imagery and text work together to instantiate our understanding of the natural world? This is the focus of my article, which will examine the historical development of taxonomic systems which employ graphic representations of biota.
The metahistorical framework I will apply to my own project will be ironic, radical, satirical, and contextual. The tools of speech and text that help us coordinate actions and improve survivability as a species may act as impediments to understanding other species; the paradox is that categorically atomizing knowledge may help us understand nature on one level while moving us further and further away from the life-world. I am not a utopian, but there is a chance we may still be able to avert the sixth great extinction with appropriate understanding and action. Of course, that would call for human exceptionalism, of which I am skeptical. The context within which this research will take place is the Enlightenment mythos of scientific objectivity, which colors the Western relationship with nature.
Works Cited
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