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In this paper I attempt to clarify some questions having to do with
technological determinism. I will discuss the questions in the context
of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. (1)
How are we to understand it when Ong speaks of the "analytic reflectiveness
implemented by writing" (p. 137; emphasis added)? Is writing an independent
agency, capable of acting unilaterally upon the human being from without?
Is it a physical cause, reliably producing its preordained effect?
Or consider this statement:
The most spectacular and intrusive of the recent technological
transformations of the word, television, manifests perhaps most clearly,
and certainly most massively and deeply, the breaking up of the closed
systems associated with the verbal art forms generated by writing and
print. Television blurs the fictional with the real on a scale previously
inconceivable. It does so not through deliberate choices made by executives,
directors, writers, technicians, performers, or viewers, but rather of
its very nature. (Ong, 1977: p. 315)
Does television really have a fixed nature, independent of the choices of
those who bring it into being as a complex weave of human activities? What
sort of a nature would this be? That of a physical object? A natural force?
When, citing this remark by Ong, Roger Silverstone acknowledges the case
"for seeing television as...a compelling technology that must...affect cultural
forms and content" (Silverstone: p. 150), is he saying anything more than
that culture must affect culture?
In this brief paper I can do little more than wave my arms summarily
at a proposed set of principles for guiding us through the mine fields
of technological determinism.
When television first appeared, it tended to mimick radio, illustrating
the general principle that new technologies often begin their lives by imitating
the old. But, with time, we began to take hold of part -- perhaps a very
tiny part -- of its range of expressive possibilities.
Did I state that correctly? Did we really take hold of television --
or, as Ong seems to say, did it take hold of us? Remember that, according
to Ong, television achieves certain results independent of the "choices
made by executives, directors, writers, technicians, performers, or viewers."
The results are "of television's very nature."
But surely this is not true. What else could have determined the results,
if not precisely the choices all those people made? And, of course, they
don't all make the same choices. Some viewers, for example, mostly watch
public television, while others spend their time with MTV. Some watch
a great deal of television, and others very little. Some watch critically,
and others sit there like sponges.
But, actually, I omitted the operative word in Ong's claim. He says
that television achieves its results independent of our deliberate
choices. This is clearly true, at least in substantial part. But it need
not mean that television acts upon us from without in the manner of physical
cause and effect. It may just mean, for example, that we are not fully
aware of the ways in which we have participated in making television
what it is. In other words, we may not be aware of our own natures.
This brings me to the first of my principles:
The seemingly inevitable results of new, technologically
mediated forms of expression can be seen as reflecting the "givenness"
or "fixedness" of human nature.
That is, because we are what we are -- or so far as we are what we
are -- the expressive uses we make of the media of communication are somewhat
predictable. Leveraging ourselves upon this fact, perhaps we can overcome
the contradiction between the idea that television has taken hold of us
and the idea that we have taken hold of television. If we have taken hold
of television, and if we have done so according to a fixed human nature
whose use of any medium is a foregone conlusion, then it seems equally true
to say that the medium has taken hold of us.
But this still feels like technological determinism -- a fact owing
to the emphasis upon a fixed human nature. Which brings me to my second
principle:
While each of us has a given nature at any particular time,
and while it may even be possible to take a statistical sum of those natures
as "human nature," nothing about our natures is absolutely fixed and unchanging.
This is where technological determinism falls out of the picture altogether.
As I have written elsewhere (Talbott, 1996), in the very act of pursuing
our studies about the effects of communication technologies, we broaden
our own understanding. This understanding, in turn, changes our relation
to the technologies. So I might have stated the second principle this way:
To the extent we explore the truth of the first principle
(about how the "inevitable" results of technology reflect our given natures),
to that extent we falsify the principle by changing our own natures.
So far as we are what we are -- so far as our natures are given and resistant
to change -- we are subject to the determinations of our technologies, which
are at the same time the determinations of our own natures. (This mutuality
should not surprise us. You might say that to the degree our natures are
fixed, we ourselves are pieces of technology.) So far, on the other hand,
as we are free to work on our natures, we are not subject to determination
from withhout. And we work on our natures in part by becoming aware
of what has previously determined us. So, of all people, media ecologists,
who pursue exactly such awareness, should not flirt with a hard-and-fast
technological determinism.
Television, in all its manifestations, is as complex a web of cultural expressions
as you could possibly ask for. Certainly these expressions can powerfully
affect us -- but not in the manner of physical cause and effect. Stick a
probe into someone's brain and you can make his leg twitch, or produce feelings
unbidden. Strike his eyeball and he will see flashes of light. The role
of such physical causes upon our consciousness is pathological, and is not
what we are usually referring to when we speak about the evolution of culture
or consciousness.
But there is another way we can be affected, and that is by engaging
in conversation. We don't cause things to happen within each other
in the material sense; rather we persuade one another. We help
each other to see. My third principle, then, is this:
Technologically based media (such as television) affect
us, but the effects that count do not constitute technological determinism
in the sense of physical cause and effect. Rather, we are engaged in a
cultural conversation, where what counts above all is the impact of meaning
upon meaning.
And this immediately calls for a fourth principle:
The impact of meaning upon meaning can occur without our
being fully conscious of it.
Certainly Freud, whatever the value of his large, theoretical constructions,
helped us to see that unconscious meanings can indeed be at work within
us. It is an open question, then, when Postman talks about the machine having
ideas of its own and working its will upon us, often contrary to all our
(conscious) expectations -- it is an open question how much those ideas
and that will are the working out of our own meanings, unconscious though
they be.
I would like to sketch a radical answer to this open question -- namely,
the answer that says all the effects of any given technology must
be understood -- can only conceivably be understood -- in terms of an
ongoing cultural conversation, a conversation of meanings. As we will
see, however, these meanings need not all be conscious, and, in fact,
need not al be our own in a personal sense.
My fifth principle is the heart of my positive message:
If we want to pursue media ecology studies, or the history
of culture, or the evolution of consciousness, we must take up a position
wholly within consciousness itself. We must talk about the changing contours
of consciousness, and the conversations, conscious or unconscious, through
which it evolves.
Things, including technological products and media of communication, have
no meaning for our studies until we have learned to see their interiors
-- that is, until we have assimilated them to the conversations of human
consciousness.
Here I certainly must supply some elaboration and illustration,
and I would like to do so by considering briefly the development of literacy,
which Ong spoke of as "implementing" analytical reflectiveness. Exactly
what is implementing what? Is something altering consciousness from without,
or do we see instead a movement of consciousness that can only be understood
from within consciousness itself?
Consider what Havelock says about the Greeks:
The Greek tongue (of Homer's time)...cannot frame words to
express that "I" am one thing and the tradition is another....The Greek
ego in order to achieve that kind of cultural experience which after Plato
becomes possible and then normal...must separate itself out and by an
effort of sheer will must rally itself to the point where it can say "I
am I, an autonomous little universe of my own, able to speak, think and
act in independence of what I happen to remember." (Havelock: pp. 199-200)
A Herculean labor indeed! But where does this rallying of self, this effort
of sheer will, fit into the picture of alphabetic characters restructuring
human consciousness? I suggest that the activity of consciousness itself,
to which Havelock points, is the primary story, and the talk about alphabets
and literacy is nonsense until it is made part of this primary story. I
can best illustrate what I mean by offering mini-commentaries on a few of
Ong's remarks. First I will just turn some of those remarks on their heads,
making questions of them.
* "Chirographic and typographic folk tend to think of names as labels,
written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named. Oral
folk have no sense of a name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name
as something that can be seen" (p. 33).
But does literacy produce a mind that can see words as labels, or does
it take a mind that has become capable of seeing words as labels to begin
to grasp literacy? And how would we decide between these two possibilities?
* "It takes only a moderate degree of literacy to make a tremendous
difference in thought processes" (p. 50).
Or, should we say, it requires a tremendous change in thought processes
to achieve even a moderate degree of literacy?
* "Since in a primary oral culture conceptualized knowledge that is
not repeated aloud soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy
in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the
ages. This need establishes a highly traditional or conservative set of
mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation" (p.
41).
But does orality produce a conservative mind uninterested in experimentation,
or is it that a conservative mind not yet capable of observing itself,
for which the idea of experimentation holds no meaning, is naturally content
with oral expression?
* "By separating the knower from the known...writing makes possible
increasingly articulate introspectivity" (p. 105).
Or is it that the increasing separation of the knower from the known,
and a growing power of introspection, are what first make writing possible?
* And lastly: "The democratizing quality of the alphabet can be seen
in South Korea" (p. 93).
In this case Ong himself supplies the reversal on the very next page,
where he says, "Only in the twentieth century, with the greater democratization
of Korea, did the alphabet achieve its present (still less than total)
ascendancy."
Well, I hope it may be occurring to you that these are more or less
artificial antitheses. It's hard to rule out either member of the various
pairs. And, in fact, as soon as we realize that we are talking in all
cases about movements wholly within consciousness, then determinism
falls out of the picture, and we find that the apparent antitheses present
us with nonconflicting, complementary movements.
Ong speaks, for example, of the "interiorization" of writing and print,
which makes possible new kinds of thinking (pp. 9, 43, 173). If we wanted,
we could ask, as before, "Does interiorized writing lead to a new kind
of thinking, or does a new kind of thinking get exteriorized in writing?"
But the answer in this case is clear. Yes, a new kind of thinking gets
interiorized through reading and writing. But interior always precedes
exterior. That is, writing itself is first of all the exteriorization
of an interior before ever it could provide material for subsequent interiorization.
This is why writing can affect us profoundly.
This is critically important. What we interiorize when we read and write
is already an interior. Teach someone to write characters without understanding
-- or even to read without understanding (as in reading a foreign language)
-- and you will not have enabled him to interiorize literacy, because
you will not have provided him with an interior he can engage in conversation.
(2)
So when Ong tells us that "philosophical thinking" cannot be carried
on by the unaided human mind but only by the human mind that has familiarized
itself with and deeply interiorized the technology of writing (p. 173),
we can offer the not very traumatic, though decisively important re-phrasing,
"...only by the mind that has exercised itself upon its own literate expressions."
Similarly, Ong describes how "the shift from oral, mnemonic formulas
to writing "freed the mind for more original, more abstract thought" (p.
24). Our slight re-wording could render this as follows: "The mind gained
by degrees enough freedom and self-awareness to abstract the word from
the continuous flow of meaning and to conceive the project of writing
it down as an objective `thing.' The newly detached word (as an ever-renewed
and strengthened inner achievement) then provided endless, repetitive
exercise in this project of freedom. The exercise remains what it began
as: an inner gesture of consciousness to separate itself from the outer
signifier of consciousness, and to practice (in increasing freedom) the
recombining of signifier and meaning."
Literacy, writing, and print refer to extensive cultural complexes.
Like all cultural expressions, they originate in human consciousness.
As to terms like "paper" and "ink," in their existence as mere physical
materials they have no meaning for our inquiry at all. Only when they
are made into expressions of the human interior do they gain relevance.
Just as the air is taken hold of by the intentional human vocal apparatus
and formed into speech suffused with meaning, so, too, pen and paper can
be taken hold of intentionally by our bodies so that our movements and
markings are invested with meanings flowing from our interiors. The two
media may have many differences, but they both consist of an outer, sense-perceptible
medium through which an inner meaning can be grasped. Without the inner
aspect, they give us nothing to talk about if our subject is culture or
the evolution of human consciousness. Even as to history in the broadest
sense, R. G. Collingwood was able to write, "All history is the history
of ideas."
In my last few minutes I would like to sketch the barest outlines of an
evolution of consciousness as it might look in its own terms, without
the imagined intrusion of alien causal factors extrinsic to consciousness.
When we contemplate the earliest light of history, what we see looks
very much like man's slow emergence as a distinct individual from antecedent
unities. The early Greeks could not speak of bodies or material things
without also speaking of inner, soul qualities. Conversely, they could
not speak of gods or soul qualities without also speaking of material
embodiment. Matter and spirit had not yet pulled apart into the starkly
opposed concepts of our day. Similarly, speaking of primitive societies,
Francis Cornford remarks that we must "give up thinking of the individual
as having any separate existence over against society, and rather conceive
him as completely immersed in one continuous social mentality" (p. 47).
And the word itself was originally an inner/outer unity, where outer,
sense-perceptible sound and inner meaning were inseparable.
History can be seen from one point of view as the fragmentation of these
unities. Here Owen Barfield introduces the crucial notion of polarity
(Barfield, 1967). The unities do not break up into absolute opposites,
but into polar opposities, where each pole can only exist by virtue
of, and in dependence upon, the other. (There is no such thing as a magnetic
north pole without a south pole. The tiniest sliver cut off from the north
end of a magnet would still contain both a north and south pole.) So the
object recedes to its place "out there" only to the degree that, and only
because, the subject is gathered "in here," and vice versa. But the antecedent
unity of the polarity, like that of the magnet, is never wholly lost,
so that we get into trouble when we start thinking, as science finally
did, that the object out there can be conceived in absolute terms, independently
of the observer in here.
The error gets even worse when we begin to imagine that this impossible
objective-matter-as-such precedes and is the origin of consciousness.
Barfield somewhere remarks that to ask about the origin of language is
rather like asking about the origin of origin. We were uttered by language
on the way toward finally interiorizing the word and learning to utter
it from within our now separate selves. This is, of course, good theology
of the sort Ong would appreciate, for "In the beginning was the Word...."
But the notion is by no means restricted to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
So when Ong says that oral peoples "consider words to have great power"
(p. 32), we have to agree. It's not just that they were considered
to have great power; they did have great power. The creative word,
reverberating through the world as a whole, resonated within the consciousness
of the human being, creating and shaping that inner space within which
eventually the word could be spoken anew, this time as the free expression
of the human individual.
Likewise, if, as Ong says, oral compositions deal with "heavy," outsized,
monumental characters (p. 70), we have to agree -- not in the first instance
because this was a requirement for memory, as he suggests, but because
the word reverberating through the world is a creative, archetypal word.
It is the word of the gods, from whom all peoples felt themselves descended.
At first, all history is cosmic history, and all activity is divine activity.
The gradual polarization of these earlier unities gave us the increasingly
sharp distinctions between the sacred and profane, subject and object,
self and world, word and thing, meaning and reference, poetic and prosaic,
knower and known. Certainly literacy played a huge role in these various
splittings. But I hope you will agree that this role cannot consist of
the effect of a "technology," conceived as a material cause, upon consciousness.
Every word spoken, heard, written, or read is first of all a gesture of
consciousness before it can affect anything.
What may have predisposed us to think of material determination is the
fact that clearly the individual, say, in Greece of the craft literacy
period, did not understand and choose the directions of his own inner
evolution. This is not surprising; the individual was not yet there to
choose his own coming into being as an individual! But this does not mean
he was being molded by technology in any material, causal sense. After
all, what worked upon him from without was the word. This working
has a lot to do with what Havelock was pointing at when he spoke of the
rallying of the self and the sheer effort of will through which alone
the individual "I" could come into being (Havelock: pp. 199-200). The
rallying could not be masterminded by a self that didn't yet exist. Only
slowly did the collective mentality of the tribe, the ensouled reality
of the world, the reality that encompassed both man and gods, polarize
into the familiar tension that we know between self and other.
The possibility of talking about technological determinism in the physical
cause-and-effect sense only arose with the extreme polarization of consciousness
between observed object and observing subject. Only today could we have
come up with such an idea. But we must not forget the antecedent unity
that can never wholly be lost. There is no object affecting us that does
not exist by virtue of consciousness. We meet ourselves, whether collectively
or individually, whether unconsciously or consciously, in every human
artifact, and even in the things of the world.
According to Thomas J. Farrell, "The presence and growth of human interiority
is arguably the most distinctive theme in all of Ong's work" (Farrell:
p. 29). All I am really saying is that any study of the evolution of consciousness
or of the social impact of technology must begin and end with this interiority.
There is simply nothing else to talk about.
Thank you.
This paper was read on May 17, 1997, at a seminar on the work of Walter
Ong. The seminar was conducted by the Department of Communications and Media
Studies, Fordham University, New York city.
1. All citations from Ong's work will be
from this book unless otherwise indicated.
2. Actually, it would probably be impossible
to teach these skills without providing some meanings, and these
would constitute an interior for the student to engage and be engaged by.
Barfield, Owen. Speaker's Meaning. Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.
Gronbeck, Bruce E, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A.
Soukup, Media, Consciousness, and Culture. Newbury Park: Sage,
1991.
Farrell, Thomas J. "An Overview of Walter J. Ong's
Work." In Gronbeck, Farrell, and Soukup, 1991.
Havelock, E. A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies
in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London:
Routledge, 1982.
Silverstone, Roger. "Television, Rhetoric, and the
Return of the Unconscious in Secondary Oral Culture." In Gronbeck, Farrell,
and Soukup, 1991.
Talbott, Stephen L. "Media Ecology: Taking Account
of the Knower." Media Ecology. Paper presented to the 1996 annual
conference of the New York Speech Communication Association conference.
Revised version published in Media Ecology (forthcoming).
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