Die Christen (mse)

Werner H. Kelber

Jesus and Tradition: Words in Time, Words in Space

in: Semeia 65. Orality and Textuality in Early Christian Literature (1995)

And yet, in order to grasp the fuller implications of hearers' participation (not simply responses!), we will in the end have to overcome our textbound thinking and come to terms with a reality that is not encoded in texts at all. It means that we must learn to think of a large part of tradition as an extratextual phenomenon. What permitted hearers to interiorize the so-called parable of the "Good Samaritan," for example, was a culture shared by speaker and hearers alike. Unless hearers have some experience or knowledge of the role of priests, Lévites, and Samaritans in society, or rather of their social construction, this parable will not strike a responsive chord with them. Whether hearers are Samaritans themselves or informed by anti-Samaritan sentiments will make a difference in the way they hear the story. Shared experiences about the dangers of traveling, the role of priests and Lévites, and the ethics of charity weave a texture of cultural commonality that makes the story resonate in the hearts and minds of hearers. Tradition in this encompassing sense is a circumambient contextuality or biosphere in which speaker and hearers live. It includes texts and experiences transmitted through or derived from texts. But it is anything but reducible to intertextuality. Tradition in this broadest sense is largely an invisible nexus of references and identities from which people draw sustenance, in which they live, and in relation to which they make sense of their lives. This invisible biosphere is at once the most elusive and the foundational feature of tradition. (S. 159)

This essay has a t t e m p t e d to raise consciousness about the Enlightenment parentage of the modern discipline of biblical scholarship. Throughout, the underlying, nagging question has been whether the scholarly discourse of reason corresponds with the hermeneutical sensibilities of late antiquity. To be sure, serious doubts about the premises of historical criticism have been raised before. From the collapse of the liberal quest, for example, we had to learn the lesson that written language and historical actuality do not relate to each other in a one-toone relationship. What we have to learn additionally is that our understanding of the hermeneutical status and functioning of language itself is patently culture-bound. Our search for singular originality concealed behind layers of textual encumbrances reveals much about the force of our desire, b u t falls short of u n d e r s t a n d i n g the oral implementation of multioriginality in the present act of speaking. Only on paper do texts appear to relate in a one-to-one relation to other texts. The fixation on authorial intent, on language as self-legitimating discourse, on the reduction of tradition to processes of textual transmission and stratification, a n d on the perception of ancient chirographs as visualizable, disengaged objects opens a vast conceptual gap that separates our o w n typographic rationalities from ancient media sensibilities. (S. 162)

Walter J. Ong: Orality and Literacy London 2002 S. 70ff

THE INTERIORITY OF SOUND In treating some psychodynamics of orality, we have thus far attended chiefly to one characteristic of sound itself, its evanescence, its relationship to time. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence. Other characteristics of sound also determine or influence oral psychodynamics. The principal one of these other characteristics is the unique relationship of sound to interiority when sound is compared to the rest of the senses. This relationship is important because of the interiority of human consciousness and of human communication itself. It can be discussed only summarily here. I have treated the matter in greater fullness and depth in The Presence of the Word, to which the interested reader is referred (1967b, Index). To test the physical interior of an object as interior, no sense works so directly as sound. The human sense of sight is adapted best to light diffusely reflected from surfaces. (Diffuse reflection, as from a printed page or a landscape, contrasts with specular reflection, as from a mirror.) A source of light, such as a fire, may be intriguing but it is optically baffling: the eye cannot get a ‘fix’ on anything within the fire. Similarly, a translucent object, such as alabaster, is intriguing because, although it is not a source of light, the eye cannot get a ‘fix’ on it either. Depth can be perceived by the eye, but most satisfactorily as a series of surfaces: the trunks of trees in a grove, for example, or chairs in an auditorium. The eye does not perceive an interior strictly as an interior: inside a room, the walls it perceives are still surfaces, outsides. Taste and smell are not much help in registering inferiority or exteriority. Touch is. But touch partially destroys interiority in the process of perceiving it. If I wish to discover by touch whether a box is empty or full, I have to make a hole in the box to insert a

hand or finger: this means that the box is to that extent open, to that extent less an interior. Hearing can register interiority without violating it. I can rap a box to find whether it is empty or full or a wall to find whether it is hollow or solid inside. Or I can ring a coin to learn whether it is silver or lead. Sounds all register the interior structures of whatever it is that produces them. A violin filled with concrete will not sound like a normal violin. A saxophone sounds differently from a flute: it is structured differently inside. And above all, the human voice comes from inside the human organism which provides the voice’s resonances. Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence. This centering effect of sound is what high-fidelity sound reproduction exploits with intense sophistication. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight. By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart (Descartes’ campaigning for clarity and distinctness registered an intensification of vision in the human sensorium— Ong 1967b, pp. 63, 221). The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together. Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says ‘I’ means something different by it from what every other person means. What is ‘I’ to me is only ‘you’ to you. And this ‘I’ incorporates experience into itself by ‘getting it all together’. Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. Without harmony, an interior condition, the psyche is in bad health.

� It should be noted that the concepts interior and exterior are not mathematical concepts and cannot be differentiated mathematically. They are existentially grounded concepts, based on experience of one’s own body, which is both inside me (I do not ask you to stop kicking my body but to stop kicking me) and outside me (I feel myself as in some sense inside my body). The body is a frontier between myself and everything else. What we mean by ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ can be conveyed only by reference to experience of bodiliness. Attempted definitions of ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ are inevitably tautological: ‘interior’ is defined by ‘in’, which is defined by ‘between’, which is defined by ‘inside’, and so on round and round the tautological circle. The same is true with ‘exterior’. When we speak of interior and exterior, even in the case of physical objects, we are referring to our own sense of ourselves: I am inside here and everything else is outside. By interior and exterior we point to our own experience of bodiliness (Ong 1967b, pp. 117–22, 1 76–9, 228, 231) and analyze other objects by reference to this experience. In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man’s sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world (Eliade 1958, pp. 231–5, etc.). Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or ‘world’, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be ‘explored’. The ancient oral world knew few ‘explorers’, though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims. It will be seen that most of the characteristics of orally based thought and expression discussed earlier in this chapter relate intimately to the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of sound as perceived by human beings. A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies

� rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies (which would come with the inscribed, visualized word: vision is a dissecting sense). It is consonant also with the conservative holism (the homeostatic present that must be kept intact, the formulary expressions that must be kept intact), with situational thinking (again holistic, with human action at the center) rather than abstract thinking, with a certain humanistic organization of knowledge around the actions of human and anthropomorphic beings, interiorized persons, rather than around impersonal things. The denominators used here to describe the primary oral world will be useful again later to describe what happened to human consciousness when writing and print reduced the oral-aural world to a world of visualized pages. ORALITY, COMMUNITY AND THE SACRAL Because in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups. When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only when oral speech begins again. Writing and print isolate. There is no collective noun or concept for readers corresponding to ‘audience’. The collective ‘readership’—this magazine has a readership of two million—is a far-gone abstraction. To think of readers as a united group, we have to fall back on calling them an ‘audience’, as though they were in fact listeners. The spoken word forms unities on a large scale, too: countries with two or more different spoken languages are likely to have major problems in establishing or maintaining national unity, as today in Canada or Belgium or many developing countries. The interiorizing force of the oral word relates in a special way to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence. In most religions the spoken word functions integrally in ceremonial and devotional life. Eventually in the larger world religions sacred texts develop, too, in which the sense of the sacral is attached also to the written word. Still, a textually supported religious tradition can

� continue to authenticate the primacy of the oral in many ways. In Christianity, for example, the Bible is read aloud at liturgical services. For God is thought of always as ‘speaking’ to human beings, not as writing to them. The orality of the mindset in the Biblical text, even in its epistolary sections, is overwhelming (Ong 1967b, pp. 176–91). The Hebrew dabar, which means word, means also event and thus refers directly to the spoken word. The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word. In Trinitarian theology, the Second Person of the Godhead is the Word, and the human analogue for the Word here is not the human written word, but the human spoken word. God the Father ‘speaks’ to his Son: he does not inscribe him. Jesus, the Word of God, left nothing in writing, though he could read and write (Luke 4:16). ‘Faith comes through hearing’, we read in the Letter to the Romans (10:17). ‘The letter kills, the spirit [breath, on which rides the spoken word] gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6). WORDS ARE NOT SIGNS Jacques Derrida has made the point that ‘there is no linguistic sign before writing’ (1976, p. 14). But neither is there a linguistic ‘sign’ after writing if the oral reference of the written text is adverted to. Though it releases unheard-of potentials of the word, a textual, visual representation of a word is not a real word, but a ‘secondary modeling system’ (cf. Lotman 1977). Thought is nested in speech, not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound. What the reader is seeing on this page are not real words but coded symbols whereby a properly informed human being can evoke in his or her consciousness real words, in actual or imagined sound. It is impossible for script to be more than marks on a surface unless it is used by a conscious human being as a cue to sounded words, real or imagined, directly or indirectly. Chirographic and typographic folk find it convincing to think of the word, essentially a sound, as a ‘sign’ because ‘sign’ refers primarily to something visually apprehended. Signum, which furnished us with the word ‘sign’, meant the standard that a unit of the Roman army carried aloft for visual identification— etymologically, the ‘object one follows’ (Proto-Indo-European root, sekw-, to follow). Though the Romans knew the alphabet,

� this signum was not a lettered word but some kind of pictorial design or image, such as an eagle, for example. The feeling for letter names as labels or tags was long in establishing itself, for primary orality lingered in residue, as will be seen, centuries after the invention of writing and even of print. As late as the European Renaissance, quite literate alchemists using labels for their vials and boxes tended to put on the labels not a written name, but iconographic signs, such as various signs of the zodiac, and shopkeepers identified their shops not with lettered words but with iconographic symbols such as the ivy bush for a tavern, the barber’s pole, the pawnbroker’s three spheres. (On iconographic labeling, see Yates 1966.) These tags or labels do not at all name what they refer to: the words ‘ivy bush’ are not the word ‘tavern’, the word ‘pole’ is not the word ‘barber’. Names were still words that moved through time: these quiescent, unspoken, symbols were something else again. They were ‘signs’, as words are not. Our complacency in thinking of words as signs is due to the tendency, perhaps incipient in oral cultures but clearly marked in chirographic cultures and far more marked in typographic and electronic cultures, to reduce all sensation and indeed all human experience to visual analogues. Sound is an event in time, and ‘time marches on’, relentlessly, with no stop or division. Time is seemingly tamed if we treat it spatially on a calendar or the face of a clock, where we can make it appear as divided into separate units next to each other. But this also falsifies time. Real time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous: at midnight yesterday did not click over into today. No one can find the exact point of midnight, and if it is not exact, how can it be midnight? And we have no experience of today as being next to yesterday, as it is represented on a calendar. Reduced to space, time seems more under control—but only seems to be, for real, indivisible time carries us to real death. (This is not to deny that spatial reductionism is immeasurably useful and technologically necessary, but only to say that its accomplishments are intellectually limited, and can be deceiving.) Similarly, we reduce sound to oscillograph patterns and to waves of certain ‘lengths’, which can be worked with by a deaf person who can have no knowledge of what the experience of sound is. Or we reduce sound to script and to the most radical of all scripts, the alphabet.

� Oral man is not so likely to think of words as ‘signs’, quiescent visual phenomena. Homer refers to them with the standard epithet ‘winged words’—which suggests evanescence, power, and freedom: words are constantly moving, but by flight, which is a powerful form of movement, and one lifting the flier free of the ordinary, gross, heavy, ‘objective’ world. In contending with Jean Jacques Rousseau, Derrida is of course quite correct in rejecting the persuasion that writing is no more than incidental to the spoken word (Derrida 1976, p. 7). But to try to construct a logic of writing without investigation in depth of the orality out of which writing emerged and in which writing is permanently and ineluctably grounded is to limit one’s understanding, although it does produce at the same time effects that are brilliantly intriguing but also at times psychedelic, that is, due to sensory distortions. Freeing ourselves of chirographic and typographic bias in our understanding of language is probably more difficult than any of us can imagine, far more difficult, it would seem, than the ‘deconstruction’ of literature, for this ‘deconstruction’ remains a literary activity. More will be said about this problem in treating the internalizing of technology in the next chapter.

� S. 78ff

PLATO, WRITING AND COMPUTERS Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resource for what ought to be the internal resource of memorized multiplication tables. Calculators weaken the mind, relieve it of the work that keeps it strong. Thirdly, a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation; if you ask a text, you get back nothing except the same, often stupid, words which called for your question in the first place. In the modern critique of the computer, the same objection is put, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’. Fourthly, in keeping with the agonistic mentality of oral cultures, Plato’s Socrates also holds it against writing that the written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken word can: real speech and thought always exist essentially in a context of give-and-take between real persons.Writing is passive, out of it, in an unreal, unnatural world. So are computers. A fortiori, print is vulnerable to these same charges. Those who are disturbed by Plato’s misgivings about writing will be even more disturbed to find that print created similar misgivings when it was first introduced. Hieronimo Squarciafico, who in fact promoted the printing of the Latin classics, also argued in 1477 that already ‘abundance of books makes men less studious’ (quoted in Lowry

1979, pp. 29–31): it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work (the pocket-computer complaint once more), downgrading the wise man and wise woman in favor of the pocket compendium. Of course, others saw print as a welcome leveler: everyone becomes a wise man or woman (Lowry 1979, pp. 31–2). One weakness in Plato’s position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing, just as one weakness in anti-print positions is that their proponents, to make their objections more effective, put the objections into print. The same weakness in anti-computer positions is that, to make them effective, their proponents articulate them in articles or books printed from tapes composed on computer terminals. Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word. Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato’s philosophically analytic thought, as has been seen (Havelock 1963), including his critique of writing, was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes. In fact, as Havelock has beautifully shown (1963), Plato’s entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture (represented by the poets, whom he would not allow in his Republic). The term idea, form, is visually based, coming from the same root as the Latin video, to see, and such English derivatives as vision, visible, or videotape. Platonic form was form conceived of by analogy with visible form. The Platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld at all but utterly above and beyond it. Plato of course was not at all fully aware of the unconscious forces at work in his psyche to produce this reaction, or overreaction, of the literate person to lingering, retardant orality. Such considerations alert us to the paradoxes that beset the relationships between the original spoken word and all its technological transformations. The reason for the tantalizing involutions here is obviously that intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement

� its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexive process. One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death. This association is suggested in Plato’s charge that writing is inhuman, thing-like, and that it destroys memory. It is also abundantly evident in countless references to writing (and/or print) traceable in printed dictionaries of quotations, from 2 Corinthians 3:6, ‘The letter kills but the spirit gives life’ and Horace’s reference to his three books of Odes as a ‘monument’ (Odes iii.30.1), presaging his own death, on to and beyond Henry Vaughan’s assurance to Sir Thomas Bodley that in the Bodleian Library at Oxford ‘every book is thy epitaph’. In Pippa Passes, Robert Browning calls attention to the still widespread practice of pressing living flowers to death between the pages of printed books, ‘faded yellow blossoms/twixt page and page’. The dead flower, once alive, is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers (Ong 1977, pp. 230–71). WRITING IS A TECHNOLOGY Plato was thinking of writing as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of the computer. Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ourselves, as Plato’s age had not yet made it fully a part of itself (Havelock 1963), we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology as we commonly assume printing and the computer to be. Yet writing (and especially alphabetic writing) is a technology, calling for the use of tools and other equipment: styli or brushes or pens, carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood, as well as inks or paints, and much more. Clanchy (1979, pp. 88–115) discusses the matter circumstantially, in its western medieval context, in his chapter entitled ‘The technology of writing’. Writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies. It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.

� By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write ‘naturally’. Oral speech is fully natural to human beings in the sense that every human being in every culture who is not physiologically or psychologically impaired learns to talk. Talk implements conscious life but it wells up into consciousness out of unconscious depths, though of course with the conscious as well as unconscious co-operation of society. Grammar rules live in the unconscious in the sense that you can know how to use the rules and even how to set up new rules without being able to state what they are. Writing or script differs as such from speech in that it does not inevitably well up out of the unconscious. The process of putting spoken language into writing is governed by consciously contrived, articulable rules: for example, a certain pictogram will stand for a certain specific word, or a will represent a certain phoneme, b another, and so on. (This is not to deny that the writer-reader situation created by writing deeply affects unconscious processes involved in composing in writing, once one has learned the explicit, conscious rules. More about this later.) To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does. Technologies are artificial, but—paradox again—artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it. The modern orchestra, for example, is the result of high technology. A violin is an instrument, which is to say a tool. An organ is a huge machine, with sources of power—pumps, bellows, electric generators—totally outside its operator. Beethoven’s score for his Fifth Symphony consists of very careful directions to highly trained technicians, specifying exactly how to use their tools. Legato: do not take your finger off one key until you have hit the next. Staccato: hit the key and take your finger off immediately. And so

� on. As musicologists well know, it is pointless to object to electronic compositions such as Morton Subotnik’s The Wild Bull on the grounds that the sounds come out of a mechanical contrivance. What do you think the sounds of an organ come out of? Or the sounds of a violin or even of a whistle? The fact is that by using a mechanical contrivance, a violinist or an organist can express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance. To achieve such expression of course the violinist or organist has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself. This calls for years of ‘practice’, learning how to make the tool do what it can do. Such shaping of a tool to oneself, learning a technological skill, is hardly dehumanizing. The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life. Writing is an even more deeply interiorized technology than instrumental musical performance is. But to understand what it is, which means to understand it in relation to its past, to orality, the fact that it is a technology must be honestly faced. WHAT IS ‘WRITING’ OR ‘SCRIPT’? Writing, in the strict sense of the word, the technology which has shaped and powered the intellectual activity of modern man, was a very late development in human history. Homo sapiens has been on earth perhaps some 50,000 years (Leakey and Lewin 1979, pp. 141 and 168). The first script, or true writing, that we know, was developed among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia only around the year 3500 BC (Diringer 1953; Gelb 1963). Human beings had been drawing pictures for countless millennia before this. And various recording devices or aides-mémoire had been used by various societies: a notched stick, rows of pebbles, other tallying devices such as the quipu of the Incas (a stick with suspended cords onto which other cords were tied), the ‘winter count’ calendars of the Native American Plains Indians, and so on. But a script is more than a mere memory aid. Even when it is pictographic, a script is more than pictures. Pictures represent objects. A picture of a man and a house and a tree of itself says nothing. (If a proper code or set of conventions is supplied, it might: but a code is not picturable, unless with the help of another unpicturable code. Codes ultimately have to be explained by

� something more than pictures; that is, either in words or in a total human context, humanly understood.) A script in the sense of true writing, as understood here, does not consist of mere pictures, of representations of things, but is a representation of an utterance, of words that someone says or is imagined to say. It is of course possible to count as ‘writing’ any semiotic mark, that is, any visible or sensible mark which an individual makes and assigns a meaning to. Thus a simple scratch on a rock or a notch on a stick interpretable only by the one who makes it would be ‘writing’. If this is what is meant by writing, the antiquity of writing is perhaps comparable to the antiquity of speech. However, investigations of writing which take ‘writing’ to mean any visible or sensible mark with an assigned meaning merge writing with purely biological behavior. When does a footprint or a deposit of feces or urine (used by many species of animals for communication—Wilson 1975, pp. 228–9) become ‘writing’? Using the term ‘writing’ in this extended sense to include any semiotic marking trivializes its meaning. The critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge was achieved within human consciousness not when simple semiotic marking was devised but when a coded system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text. This is what we usually mean today by writing in its sharply focused sense. With writing or script in this full sense, encoded visible markings engage words fully so that the exquisitely intricate structures and references evolved in sound can be visibly recorded exactly in their specific complexity and, because visibly recorded, can implement production of still more exquisite structures and references, far surpassing the potentials of oral utterance. Writing, in this ordinary sense, was and is the most momentous of all human technological inventions. It is not a mere appendage to speech.

S. 114ff

�PRINT, SPACE AND CLOSURE

HEARING-DOMINANCE YIELDS TO SIGHTDOMINANCE Although this book attends chiefly to oral culture and to the changes in thought and expression introduced by writing, it must give some brief attention to print, for print both reinforces and transforms the effects of writing on thought and expression. Since the shift from oral to written speech is essentially a shift from sound to visual space, here the effects of print on the use of visual space can be the central, though not the only, focus of attention. This focus brings out not only the relationship between print and writing, but also the relationship of print to the orality still residual in writing and early print culture. Moreover, while all the effects of print do not reduce to its effects on the use of visual space, many of the other effects do relate to this use in various ways. In a work of this scope there is no way even to enumerate all the effects of print. Even a cursory glance at Elizabeth Eisenstein’s two volumes, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), makes abundantly evident how diversified and vast the particular effects of print have been. Eisenstein spells out in detail how print made the Italian Renaissance a permanent European Renaissance, how it implemented the Protestant Reformation and reoriented Catholic religious practice, how it affected the development of modern capitalism, implemented western European exploration of the globe, changed family life and politics, diffused knowledge as never before, made universal literacy a serious objective, made possible the rise of modern sciences, and otherwise altered social

� and intellectual life. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) Marshall McLuhan has called attention to many of the subtler ways print has affected consciousness, as George Steiner has also done in Language and Silence (1967) and as I have undertaken to do elsewhere (Ong 1958b; 1967b; 1971; 1977). These subtler effects of print on consciousness, rather than readily observable social effects, concern us particularly here. For thousands of years human beings have been printing designs from variously carved surfaces, and since the seventh or eighth century Chinese, Koreans and Japanese have been printing verbal texts, at first from wood blocks engraved in relief (Carter 1955). But the crucial development in the global history of printing was the invention of alphabetic letterpress print in fifteenth-century Europe. Alphabetic writing had broken the word up into spatial equivalents of phonemic units (in principle, though the letters never quite worked out as totally phonemic indicators). But the letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur. With alphabetic letterpress print it is otherwise. Words are made out of units (types) which pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute. Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did. Like the alphabet, alphabetic letterpress print was a nonce invention (Ong 1967b, and references there cited). The Chinese had had movable type, but no alphabet, only characters, basically pictographic. Before the mid-1400s the Koreans and Uigur Turks had both the alphabet and movable type, but the movable types bore not separate letters but whole words. Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceablepart techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word, and, with it, poetic activity (Ong 1958b, pp. 306–18).

� Hearing rather than sight had dominated the older poetic world in significant ways, even long after writing was deeply interiorized. Manuscript culture in the West remained always marginally oral. Ambrose of Milan caught the earlier mood in his Commentary on Luke (iv. 5): ‘Sight is often deceived, hearing serves as guarantee.’ In the West through the Renaissance, the oration was the most taught of all verbal productions and remained implicitly the basic paradigm for all discourse, written as well as oral. Written material was subsidiary to hearing in ways which strike us today as bizarre. Writing served largely to recycle knowledge back into the oral world, as in medieval university disputations, in the reading of literary and other texts to groups (Crosby 1936; Ahern 1981; Nelson 1976–7), and in reading aloud even when reading to oneself. At least as late as the twelfth century in England, checking even written financial accounts was still done aurally, by having them read aloud. Clanchy (1979, pp. 215, 183) describes the practice and draws attention to the fact that it still registers in our vocabulary: even today, we speak of ‘auditing’, that is, ‘hearing’ account books, though what an accountant actually does today is examine them by sight. Earlier, residually oral folk could understand even figures better by listening than by looking. Manuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in retrieval of material preserved in texts. Manuscripts were not easy to read, by later typographic standards, and what readers found in manuscripts they tended to commit at least somewhat to memory. Relocating material in a manuscript was not always easy. Memorization was encouraged and facilitated also by the fact that in highly oral manuscript cultures, the verbalization one encountered even in written texts often continued the oral mnemonic patterning that made for ready recall. Moreover, readers commonly vocalized, read slowly aloud or sotto voce, even when reading alone, and this also helped fix matter in the memory. Well after printing was developed, auditory processing continued for some time to dominate the visible, printed text, though it was eventually eroded away by print. Auditory dominance can be seen strikingly in such things as early printed title pages, which often seem to us crazily erratic in the their inattention to visual word units. Sixteenth-century title pages very commonly divide even major words, including the author’s name, with hyphens, presenting the first part of a word in one line in

� large type and the latter part in smaller type, as in the edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Gouernour published in London by Thomas Berthelet in 1534 (Figure 1 here; see Steinberg 1974, p. 154). Inconsequential words may be set in huge type faces: on the title page shown here the initial ‘THE’ is by far the most prominent word of all. The result is often aesthetically pleasing as a visual design, but it plays havoc with our present sense of textuality. Yet this practice, not our practice, is the

original practice from which our present practice has deviated. Our attitudes are the ones that have changed, and thus that need to be explained. Why does the original, presumably more ‘natural’ procedure seem wrong to us? Because we feel the printed words before us as visual units (even though we sound them at least in the imagination when we read). Evidently, in processing text for meaning, the sixteenth century was concentrating less on the sight of the word and more on its sound than we do. All text involves sight and sound. But whereas we feel reading as a visual activity cueing in sounds for us, the early age of print still felt it as primarily a listening process, simply set in motion by sight. If you felt yourself as reader to be listening to words, what difference did it make if the visible text went its own visually aesthetic way? It will be recalled that pre-print manuscripts commonly ran words together or kept spaces between them minimal. Eventually, however, print replaced the lingering hearingdominance in the world of thought and expression with the sightdominance which had its beginnings with writing but could not flourish with the support of writing alone. Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into position in this space. Control of position is everything in print. ‘Composing’ type by hand (the original form of typesetting) consists in positioning by hand preformed letter types, which, after use, are carefully repositioned, redistributed for future use into their proper compartments in the case (capitals or ‘upper case’ letters in the upper compartments, small or ‘lower case’ letters in the lower compartments). Composing on the linotype consists in using a machine to position the separate matrices for individual lines so that a line of type can be cast from the properly positioned matrices. Composing on a computer terminal or wordprocesser positions electronic patterns (letters) previously programmed into the computer. Printing from ‘hot metal’ type (that is, from cast type—the older process) calls for locking up the type in an absolutely rigid position in the chase, locking the chase firmly onto a press, affixing and clamping down the makeready, and squeezing the forme of type with great pressure onto the paper printing surface in contact with the platen. Most readers are of course not consciously aware of all this locomotion that has produced the printed text confronting them. Nevertheless, from the appearance of the printed text they pick up

� a sense of the word-in-space quite different from that conveyed by writing. Printed texts look machine-made, as they are. Chirographic control of space tends to be ornamental, ornate, as in calligraphy. Typographic control typically impresses more by its tidiness and inevitability: the lines perfectly regular, all justified on the right side, everything coming out even visually, and without the aid of the guidelines or ruled borders that often occur in manuscripts. This is an insistent world of cold, non-human, facts. ‘That’s the way it is’—Walter Cronkite’s television signature comes from the world of print that underlies the secondary orality of television (Ong 1971, pp. 284–303). By and large, printed texts are far easier to read than manuscript texts. The effects of the greater legibility of print are massive. The greater legibility ultimately makes for rapid, silent reading. Such reading in turn makes for a different relationship between the reader and the authorial voice in the text and calls for different styles of writing. Print involves many persons besides the author in the production of a work—publishers, literary agents, publishers’ readers, copy editors and others. Before as well as after scrutiny by such persons, writing for print often calls for painstaking revisions by the author of an order of magnitude virtually unknown in a manuscript culture. Few lengthy prose works from manuscript cultures could pass editorial scrutiny as original works today: they are not organized for rapid assimilation from a printed page. Manuscript culture is producer-oriented, since every individual copy of a work represents great expenditure of an individual copyist’s time. Medieval manuscripts are turgid with abbreviations, which favor the copyist although they inconvenience the reader. Print is consumer-oriented, since the individual copies of a work represent a much smaller investment of time: a few hours spent in producing a more readable text will immediately improve thousands upon thousands of copies. The effects of print on thought and style have yet to be assessed fully. The journal Visible Language (formerly called the Journal of Typographic Research) published many articles contributory to such an assessment. SPACE AND MEANING Writing had reconstituted the originally oral, spoken word in visual space. Print embedded the word in space more definitively. This

� can be seen in such developments as lists, especially alphabetic indexes, in the use of words (instead of iconographic signs) for labels, in the use of printed drawings of all sorts to convey information, and in the use of abstract typographic space to interact geometrically with printed words in a line of development that runs from Ramism to concrete poetry and to Derrida’s logomachy with the (printed, typically, not simply written) text. (i) Indexes Lists begin with writing. Goody has discussed (1977, pp. 741 1 1) the use of lists in the Ugaritic script of around 1300 BC and in other early scripts. He notes (1977, pp. 87–8) that the information in the lists is abstracted from the social situation in which it had been embedded (‘fattened kids’, ‘pastured ewes’, etc., with no further specifications) and also from linguistic context (normally in oral utterance nouns are not free-floating as in lists, but are embedded in sentences: rarely do we hear an oral recitation of simply a string of nouns—unless they are being read off a written or printed list). In this sense, lists as such have ‘no oral equivalent’ (1977, pp. 86–7) though of course the individual written words sound in the inner ear to yield their meanings. Goody also notes the initially awkward, ad hoc way in which space was utilized in making these lists, with word-dividers to separate items from numbers, ruled lines, wedged lines, and elongated lines. Besides administrative lists, he discusses also event lists, lexical lists (words are listed in various orders, often hierarchically by meaning—gods, then kin of the gods, next gods’ servants), and Egyptian onomastica or name-lists, which were often memorized for oral recitation. Still highly oral manuscript culture felt that having written series of things readied for oral recall was of itself intellectually improving. (Educators in the West until recently had the same feeling, and across the world most educators probably still do.) Writing is here once more at the service of orality. Goody’s examples show the relatively sophisticated processing of verbalized material in chirographic cultures so as to make the material more immediately retrievable through its spatial organization. Lists range names of related items in the same physical, visual space. Print develops far more sophisticated use of space for visual organization and for effective retrieval.

� Indexes are a prime development here. Alphabetic indexes show strikingly the disengagement of words from discourse and their embedding in typographic space. Manuscripts can be alphabetically indexed. They rarely are (Daly 1967, pp. 81–90; Clanchy 1979, pp. 28– 9, 85). Since two manuscripts of a given work, even if copied from the same dictation, almost never correspond page for page, each manuscript of a given work would normally require a separate index. Indexing was not worth the effort. Auditory recall through memorization was more economical, though not thorough-going. For visual location of materials in a manuscript text, pictorial signs were often preferred to alphabetic indexes. A favorite sign was the ‘paragraph’, which originally meant this mark ¶, not a unit of discourse at all. When alphabetic indexes occurred, they were rare, often crude, and commonly not understood, even in thirteenth-century Europe, when sometimes an index made for one manuscript was appended without change of page numbers to another manuscript with a different pagination (Clanchy 1979, p. 144). Indexes seem to have been valued at times for their beauty and mystery rather than for their utility. In 1286, a Genoese compiler could marvel at the alphabetical catalogue he had devised as due not to his own prowess but ‘the grace of God working in me’ (Daly 1967, p. 73). Indexing was long by first letter only—or, rather, by first sound: for example, in a Latin work published as late as 1506 in Rome, since in Italian and Latin as spoken by Italian-speakers the letter h is not pronounced, ‘Halyzones’ is listed under a (discussed in Ong 1977, pp. 169–72). Here even visual retrieval functions aurally. loannes Ravisius Textor’s Specimen epithetorum (Paris, 1518), alphabetizes ‘Apollo’ before all other entries under a, because Textor considers it fitting that in a work concerned with poetry, the god of poetry should get top billing.Clearly, even in a printed alphabetic index, visual retrieval was given low priority. The personalized, oral world still could overrule processing words as things. The alphabetic index is actually a crossroads between auditory and visualist cultures. ‘Index’ is a shortened form of the original index locorum or index locorum communium, ‘index of places’ or ‘index of commonplaces’. Rhetoric had provided the various loci or ‘places’—headings, we would style them—under which various ‘arguments’ could be found, headings such as cause, effect, related things, unlike things, and so on. Coming with this orally based,

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