Subtitle: Studies
in the Evolution of Counsciousness and Culture
1977, Cornell
University
Preface
Major
developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and
consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of
the word from primary orality to its present state.
I. Cleavage and
Growth
1.
Transformations of the Word and Alienation
Orality, Writing
and Disjuncture
There is an
alienation in the technological history of the word. The technological
inventions of writings, print, and electronic verbalization have restructured
consciousness.
The psyche in a
culture innocent of writing knows by a kind of empathetic identification of the
knower and known, in which the object of
knowledge and the total being of the knower enter into a kind of fusion, in a
way which literate cultures would typically find unsatisfyingly vague and
garbled and somehow too intense and participatory.
With writing, the
earlier noetic state undergoes a kind of cleavage, separating the knower from
the external universe and then from himself.
Oral cultures
appropriate actuality in reccurent, formulaic agglomerates, communally
generated and shared.
Oral utterance
encourages a sense of continuity with life, a sense of participation, because
it is itself participatory. Writing and print, despite their intrinsic value,
have obscured the nature of the word and of thought itself, for they have
sequestered the essentially participatory word from its natural habitat, sound,
and assimilated it to a mark on a surface, where a real word cannot exist at
all.
Many persons in
the technological cultures are strongly conditioned to think unreflectively
that the printed word is the real word, and that the spoken word is
inconsequential.
Languages, in
which words originate, are commonly styled „tongues” (langue, lingua, tongue)
and require no external technological skills at all.
Identity, Mother
Tongues, and Distancing Languages
The association
with mother and early nature and nurture is why speech is so closely involved
with our personal identity and with cultural identity.
A mother’s
closeness is not only biological and psychological. It is linguistic as well.
Father language
for Western Europe: learned latin. For over a millennium, all the teachers and
all the learners were males. The admission of women to academic education and
the decline of Latin moved pari passu.
Other
chirographically controlled languages: Old Church Slavonic, Byzantine Greek,
Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, Rabbinic Hebrew.
At a crucial
stage in its development the most advanced thought of mankind in widely
separated parts of the globe has been worked out in linguistic economies far
removed from the heart and from the entire world of infancy.
Learned Latin had
been isolated from infant development and thus from the physiological and
psychosomatic roots of consciousness and which had been given instead an
artificial base in writing.
Modern science
and much of modern technology developed out of an intellectual world which
shaped its concepts and vocabulary and its cognitive style on Learned Latin.
Modern science only gradually became viable in the vernacular atmosphere as it
transformed this atmosphere by injecting it with Latin terms and forms of
thought.
Writing made
possible the separation of the knower and the known, the substitution of
knowledge-by-analysis for knowledge-by-empathy.
Learned Latin was
a literary medium in a specialized, distanced sense.
Mass Vernaculars,
Magnavocabularies
The mass
languages with magnavocabularies relate to the spoken word with utmost
complexity. They could not sustain
themselves at all without writing and printing.
Technology,
Alienation and the Evolution of Consciousness
Native languages
have little or no litterature (technologically processed speech) to teach.
Since writing
came into existence, the evolution of the word and the evolution of
consciousness have been intimately tied in with technologies and technological
developments.
Each of the
so-called „media” (writing, printing, electronci devices) makes possible
thoughts processes inconceivable before. The „media” are more significantly
within the mind than outside it.
II. The
Sequestration of Voice
2. The Writer’s
Audience Is Always a Fiction
I
The standard
locus in Western intellectual tradition for study of audience responses has
been rhetoric. But rhetoric originally concerned oral communication, as is
indicated by its name, which comes from the Greek word for public speaking.
The spoken word
is part of present actuality and has its meaning established by the total
situation in which it comes into being. Context for the spoken word is simply
present, centered in the person speaking and the one or ones to whom he addresses
himself and to whom he is related existentially in terms of the circumambient
actuality.
Writing normally
calls for some kind of withdrawal.
If the writer
succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his
imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from
earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had
learned to know in still earlier writers, and so on back to the down of
writtern narrative.
II
There exist a
tradition in fictionalizing audiences that is a component part of literary
tradition.
Audience is a
fiction => 1. The writer must construct in his imagination, an audience cast
in some sort of a role. 2. The audience must correspondingly fictionalize
itself.
III
IV
Even an oral
narrator calls on his audience to fictionalize itself to some extent.
Homer’s language
is „once upon a time” language. It estableshes a fictional world.
V
„Because history
is always a selection and interpretation of those incidents the individual
historian believes will account better than other incidents for some
explanations of a totality, history partakes quite evidently of the nature of
poetry. It is a making. The historian does not make the elements out of which
he constructs history, in the sense that he must build with events that have
come about independently of him, but his selection of events and his way of
verbalizing them so that they can be dealt with as „facts”, and consequently
the overall pattern he reports, are all his own creation, a making. No two
historians say exactly the same thing about the same given events, even though
they are both telling the truth. There is no one thing to say about anything;
there are many things that can be said.”
Rhetoric fixed
knowledge in agonistic structures.
Knowledge of the
degrees of admissible ignorance for readers is absolutely essential if one is
to publish successfully.
The epistolary
situation is made tolerable by conventions, and learning to write letters is
largerly a matter of learning what the writer-reader conventions are.
The audience of a
diarist is even more encased in fictions.
We are familiar
enough today with talk about masks – in literary criticism, psychology,
phenomenology, and elsewhere. Personae, earlier generally thought of as
applying to characters in a play or other fiction (dramatis personae), are
imputed with full justification to narrators and, since all discourse has roots
in narrative, to everyone who uses language.
Masks are
inevitable in all human communication, even oral.
3. Media
Transformation: The Talked Book
Question: Do the
new media (television) wipe out the old (books)?
Answer1: That
electronics is wiping out books and print generally.
Answer2: Books
are books, and they are here to stay.
A new medium of
verbal communication not only does not wipe out the old, but actually
reinforces the older medium or media. However, in doing do it transforms the
old, so that the old is no longer what it used to be.
Writing is the
product of urbanization.
Writing not only
encouraged talk, it also remade talk. After writing, talk had to sound
literate, post-oral.
Print also
transformes writing.
A new medium,
finally, transforms not only the one which immediately precedes it but often
all of those which preceded it all the way back to the beginning.
4. African
Talking Drums and Oral Noetics
The talking drums
of Subsaharian Africa metamorphose primary oral processes in ways which are
unique, at least in their sophistication and cultural importance.
I
African talking
drums are the most highly developed acoustc speech surrogates known anywhere in
the world.
Writing systems
or scripts are also speech surrogates, but visual rather than acoustic.
II
III
The „words” on
the drums are set into stereotyped contexts or patterns.
It takes much
longer to say something on a drum than viva voce, on the average eight times as
long.
IV
The salient
features of an oral culture that are advertised in the use of talking drums:
a) stereotyped or
formulaic expression
b)
standardization of themes
c) epithetic
identification for „disambiguation” of classes or of individuals
d) generation of
„heavy” or ceremonial characters
e) formulary,
ceremonial appropriation of history
f) cultivation of
praise and vituperation
g) copiousness.
Oral cultures
think in formulas, and communicate in them.
Oral noetics, as
manifested in poetry and narration of primary oral cultures, organizes thought
largely around a controlled set of themes, more or less central to the human
lifeworld: birth, marriage, death, celebration, struggle (ceremonial or ludic),
initiation rites, dance and other ceremonies, arrivals and departures,
descriptions or manipulations of implements (shields, swords, plows, boats,
looms), and son on.
V
5. „I See What
You Say”: Sense Analogues for Intelect
Bernard
Lonergan’s philosophical investigations of man’s noetic activities.
„Now, if human
knowing is to be conceived exclusively, by an epistemological necessity, as
similar to ocular vision, it follows as a first consequence that human
understanding must be excluded from human knowledge. For understanding is not
like seeing. Understanding grows with time: you understand one point, then
another, and a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and your understanding
changes several times until you have things right. Seeing is not like that, so
that to say that knowing is like seeing is to disregard understanding as a
constitutive element in human knowledge.” (p. 122)
If knowing is
like sight, the subject can know himself only by making himself something to be
looked at. If we make ocular vision an analogue for intellectual knowing, the
subject can know himself only by making himself an exterior.
When knowing is
equated unquestioningly with vision this is because the latter is invested with
symbolic or mythological qualities.
Modern mythology:
one can be absolutely convinced that a cognitional act can be a congnitional
act only if it resembles ocular vision.
hypervisualism
II
Our technological
culture is addicted to visualism.
The shift from
oral to visual is connected with surprising changes in personality structures
as well as in social institutions.
In intellectual
history as elsewhere there are limits to what a person can freely choose. We
can choose only what somehow know. You cannot deliberately choose to do the
unthinkable.
A given situation
forces certain matters on the attention of thinking men and at least favors, if
it does not command, the development of thought in certain fields rather than
in others.
Intellectual
developments are not matters of free choice insofar as they depend on the
structure of actuality itself.
Major steps on
the road to modern visualism:
- the alphabet;
- the printing;
- modern
mathematically implemented science.
III
What is
distinctive of the visualist development leading to our modern technological
culture is that it learns to vocalize visual observation, by vocalizing it
manages to intellectualize it, and by intellectualizing it comes to generate
further specific visual observation.
The visualism we
are talking of is a visualism strenghtened by intimate association with voice.
This association is capital. Noetic activity itself is rooted directely in the
world of sound, through vocalization an hearing. For man there is no
understanding without some involvement in words.
IV
We would be
incapacitated for dealing with knowledge and intellection without massive
visualist conceptualization.
The economy of
sensorium:
Touch – taste –
smell – hearing – sight
To learn to think
and understand, it is far more necessary to be able to hear and talk than to be
able to see.
Formalization is
needed because our knowledge is both fragmenting and distancing. We need
apartness.
Sight is a
fragmenting or dissecting sense. It cuts appart. It dismembers. Man’s knowing
is in a way murderous insofar as it is analogous to vision.
The movement from
the analogy of touch to the analogy of sight is a movement from the generic to
the specific.
For some
knowledge, definition, distinctness, edge, precision, clarity is irrelevant or
even devastating. Ex: knowledge of another person.
Because of the
contrast between sight and sound, knowledge of things is more immediately
assimilable to knowledge by sight; knowledge of persons more immediately
assimilable to knowledge by hearing.
V
We can never
entirely dispense with sight as an analogue for intellectual knowing, either by
avoiding all reference to sight or by defining sight analogues in terms which
transcend sight.
Touch is the
first used and the most immediate (non-distancing) and basic of the senses.
VI
The concept of
„understanding” does imply an analogy of intellectual knowing to sensory
knowing, but in significant ways to kinesthetic knowing.
Mother and earth
are close to us, ground our sense of touch (which develops in contact with
mother), and deeply involved in subjectivity. Father and sky are more remote,
more object-like, apprehended more by sight than by touch.
III. Closure and
print
6. Typographic
Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare
Commonplaces and
Their Significance
Major question:
Why was the commonplace tradition once so important, since it now seems so
affected and boring and aesthetically counterproductive?
The term
„commonplace” has to do in one way or another with the exploitation of what is
already known.
A commonplace is
a standard brief disquisition or purple patch on any of hundreds or thousands
of given subjects.
The noetic
economy of an oral culture demands that knowledge be processed in more or less
formulary style and that it be constantly recycled orally.
Ioannes Ravisius
Textor: Exemplary Collector
Jean Tixier,
Seigneur de Ravisi, latinized his name as Ioannes Ravisius Textor, profesor of
rhetoric. He wrote Officina (a dictionary of classified excerpts from extant
writing) and Epitheta, both in latin.
The Officina
proffers more or less bare, hard ideas, „naked” thoughts, whereas the Epitheta
provides an assortment of options for giving the presumably bare or „naked”
thought of the rhetorically untrained weaver of words a richer, more attractive
texture.
Renaissance
Interactions with the Commonplace Tradition
During the
Renaissance, the commonplace heritage of antiquity and Middle Ages became in
many ways more important than ever before.
Various
arragements for visual retrieval of material in texts had been physically
possible since writing was invented. Indeed, this was what writing was all
about: words, though irreducibly sounds, could now be recovered by the eye (for
reconstitution as sounds).
retrieval through
indexes
vision is a
fractioning sense
index locorum
communium – index of commonplaces
Evolution of
Visual Retrieval: Textor, Theodor Zwinger and Others
An oral culture
can make no lists of commonplaces, for lists demand writing, but such a culture
has as its commonplace collections the formal oral performances such as
orations or narrative poetry or prose or other poetry.
anthologia (gr.)
= florilegium (lat.)
Effects on
Renaissance Literature: A Sonnet of Shakespeare’s
A literary work
consists of an assemblage of individually conceived parts.
the paradigmatic
status of the epithet in the commonplace tradition
In these perspectives
Shakespeare's value becomes once more that of a skilful conservator and
reflector of the amassed wisdom of a sizable portion of the human race. Like
his contemporaries generally, Shakespeare was not original in the way in which
poets since the romantic age have often programed themselves to be original. He
did not "create" from nothing. He did not want to, nor did he even
consider the possibility. (There is no such possibility.) He wanted to rework
the old wisdom in an always fresh and meaningful way. Shakespeare is perhaps
our most quotable author in English, or at least the most quoted. It is, or
should be, a commonplace that the reason he is quotable is that his text consists
so much of quotations-not grossly appropriated, but nuanced, woven into the
texture of his work more tightly than is normally possible in any performance,
no matter how sophisticated, in the oral tradition, in which the practice of
composing out of other compositions is nevertheless grounded, as has been seen.
Shakespeare appropriated the oral tradition and exploited it with the
condensation and pointedness made possible by writing and even more by print.
Encyclopedia users today do not advert to the fact that even today
encyclopedia articles, and even dictionary definitions, still represent
something that someone „says” about a subject. There is no way to lay hold of a
„fact” without some kind of intervention of voice. But we live in a world which
tend to feel that pure „facts”, without voice, are there.
7. From Epithet to Logic: Miltonic Epic and the Closure of Existence
In 1672, John Milton published a logic textbook which he has written
sometimes in years 1641-1647. It is essentially no more than an edition of
Ramus’ Dialectica incorporating Miltonic idiosyncrasies.
Oral cultures do not add antithesis, proverbs, and other formulas and
mnemonic patterning to their thought: their thought consists in such elements
from the start. In a completely oral noetic economy, thought which does not
consist in memorable patterns is an effect nonthought.
An organized, abstract articulation of any „body” of knowledge in the
linear, consciously reflective form taken for granted in written treatises is
quite simply unthinkable in a primary oral culture. Without writing, the mind
cannot work that way.
Logic, like epic and everything else in the noetic world, has both a
conscious and an unconscious side.
the centrality of the epithete in the oral noetic economy
In the new visualist noetic economy for words, epithets became noetically
dysfunctional, impeding rather than expediting the flow of thought.
Classical culture is essentially oral culture somewhat bridled by writing;
romantic culture is typographic.
Epic in its oral original had served not merely aesthetic but also larger
noetic functions: it had been an important way of conceiving, storing,
retrieving and circulating knowledge, a way of keeping the noetic store from
evaporating.
8. The Poem as a Closed Field: The Once New Criticism and the Nature of
Literature
The New Criticism was somehow a major cultural development.
The relationship between the old rhetoric and the New Criticism is one of
opposition.
Until the beginning of the modern technological and romantic age in the
later eighteenth century, Western culture in its intellectual and academic
manifestations, can be meaningfully designated rhetorical culture. It is a
culture in which, even after the development of writing, the pristine
oral-aural modes of knowledge storage and retrieval still dominate noetic
activity.
It is paradoxical that rhetoric was one of the first fields of knowledge
worked up as a formal art with the aid of writing. New inventions normally at
first reinforce what they eventually transform or supplant.
The rhetoric of the New Criticism represents a final break with the older
rhetoric in the way it fixes the eye on typographic expression.
Contest, ceremonial polemic, was a constitutive element in the noetic
organization of the old preromantic rhetorical world and of the poetic this
world enfolded.
9. Maranatha: Death and Life in the Text of the Book
The Bible as Text
The Bible has a special relationship to time. But texts as texts have a
special relationship to time.
Individual parts of the Bible have oral antecedents, more or less evident.
But the Bible is what the word biblos says it is, a book, the Book.
Text as Monument
By contrast with oral verbalization, a written or a printed work has a
special kind of involvement with the past, its textuality as such.
A text as such is so much a thing of the past that it carries with it
necessarily an aura of accomplished death.
In oral communication both speaker and hearer must be alive.
Writing also perdures to the future and in this sense lives. The kind of
life writing enjoys remains bizarre, for it is achieved at the price of death.
The connection between reading and death is very deep.
Horace: „Non omnis moriar.” (I shall not entirely die.)
Death presides at both ends of a writing operation. Like writing, print is
related to death.
Unlike speech, writing is not unreflectivley acquired by every normal
person who grows up to maturity. Writing requires special reflective training,
and terrifying restraints.
The Retrospectivity of Literature
The relationship of the text to death is allied to the relationship of
literature to past time.
From the reader’s standpoint, all literature is preterite.
Narrative and Retrospectivity
Narrative is the primal way in which the human lifeworld is organized
verbally and intellectually. All science itself is grounded somehow in
narrative history.
The Retrospectivity of Plot
Plot is paradoxical. On the one hand, it makes a story seem real and gives
it its psychological appeal or bite. On the other hand, plot is what
differentiates art from real life. Plotting is highly artificial.
Plot and Cyclic Pattern
Cyclic patterns enforce retrospectivity.
Orality and Retrospectivity
Narrative about the past encapsulates most of the lore of an oral culture;
that is to say, it stores the culture’s verbalized knowledge.
Living memory is by no means the same thing as a fixed text.
Textuality and Plot
Closer ploting demands writting.
The Fecundity of Writing and Print
There is an association of writing and print with life as fecundity,
growth, exuberance.
Writing has made possible not only development of science and technology as
well as the humanities, it has also made possible the complex relationship
between large groups of people which a fully populated planet demands.
Oral noetic processes are typically formulaic and conservatives of wholes,
not analytic and dissecting.
Life, Death and the Word of God
The Bible actually ends with an explicit cast into the future.
The entry of the Word into history did take place in a largerly oral
setting.
The Christian believes that the word of God is given in order to be
interiorized, appropriated by men and women of all times and places.
10. From Mimesis to Irony: Writing and Print as Integuments of Voice
Vision, Content and Voice
Participatory Poetics
Writing has made possible litterature.
Writing, Print, and Separation
After the invention of writing, and much more after the invention of print,
the question of who is saying what to whom becomes confusingly and sometimes
devastatingly complicated.
Every written work is its author’s own epitaph.
As the distancing is accomplished by literature, the verbal creation comes
more and more to be regarded as an object.
The alphabet converts sound into space with an efficiency quite un known to
other writing systems.
Mimesis
In literary history and theory, mimesis and irony stand in complementary
relationship. As mimesis loses ground in poetic and other aesthetic theory and
performance, irony gains ground.
Mimesis – art imitates nature.
Mimetic ideas of art are based on acceptance of copying as a primary human
entreprise. And oral cultures build their whole world of knowledge largerly on
copying in speech what has been said before.
Irony
With the Romantic Age, doctrines of „creativity” tend to crowd out mimetic
theory.
Unreliability is one of the essence of irony: the obvious sense is not to
be trusted.
Irony demands a distancing from subject matter similar to that demanded for
analytic thought.
A movie has a narrator without a narrative voice.
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