"To go by your words...." Review of Ong's ch. 3-unfinished

SOME PSYCHODYNAMICS OF ORALITY



Imagine a culture where no one has ever looked up anything.



Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.



Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility.



There is no equivalent of a "still shot" in sound.



Among ORAL peoples generally language is a mode of action and not simply a countersign of thought.



TYPOGRAPHIC folk forget to think of words as primary oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, 'out there' on a flat surface.



ORAL peoples commonly think of names (one kind of words) as conveying power over things.



First of all, names do give human beings power over what they name: without leaning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand.



Secondly, CHIROGRAPHIC and TYPOGRAPHIC folk tend to think of names as labels, written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named.



YOU KNOW WHAT YOU CAN RECALL: MNEMONICS AND FORMULAS



Sound determines not only modes of expression but also thought processes.



How do persons in an ORAL culture recall?



What does or can an ORAL culture know in an organized fashion?



Sustained thought in an ORAL culture is tied to cummunication.



How could you ever call back to mind thoughts you had so laboriously worked out?



You would have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns,



in heavily rhythmic,



Balanced patterns,



in repetions,



or antitheses,



in alliterations and assonances,



in epithetic and other formulary expressions,



in standard thematic settings.



Proverbs are patterned for retention and ready recall.



Protracted orally based thought tends to be highly rhythmic.



Formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as mnemonic aids in their own right.



"Divide and conquer"



"To err is human, to forgive is divine"



"Sorrow is better than laughter, because when the face is sad the heart grows wiser"



"The Clinging vine"



Often rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other sorts can be found occassionaly in print.



For ORAL cultures they form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible wihtout them, for it consists in these.



A judge in an ORAl culture is often called on to articulate sets of relevant proverbs out of which he can produce equitable decisions in the cases under formal litigation before him.



Heavily patterning and communal fixed formulas in oral cultures serve some of the purposes of writing in CHIROGRAPHIC cultures.



ORAL culture experience is intellectualized mnemonically.



Putting experience into any words can implement its recall.



In a primary ORAL culture, thought and expression tend to be of the following sorts.



1. Additive rather than subordinative



The oral cultures tend to use words as additives like 'and' repeatedly.



Writing usualy uses 'and' 'when' 'then' 'thus' 'while' to provide a flow of naration with the analytic, which is subordinative.



Chirographic structures look more to syntactics (organization of the discourse itself).



Written discourse(...) is more dependent simply upon linquistic structure, since it lacks the normal full existential contexts which surround oral discourse and help determine meaning in oral discourse somewhat independently of grammar.



2. Aggregative rather than analytic



Oral folk prefer not the soldier, but the BRAVE soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.



Once a formulary expression is made as such, it is best kept intact.

Without a writing system, breaking up thought (that is analysis) is a high-risk procedure.



3. Redundant or 'copius'



Thought requires continuity.



Writing establishes in the text a 'line' of continuity outside the mind.



Context can be retrieved by glancing back over the text selectively.



In oral discourse, the situation is different.



you must move ahead slowly, keeping close to the focus of attention much of what it has already dealt with. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer suerly on the track.



Whereas sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the technology of writing.



With Writing, the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and reorganize its more norma, redundant processes.



In oral delivery, though a pause may be effective, hesitation is always disabling.



It is better to repeat something rather than simply to stop speaking while fishing for the next idea.



ORAL cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility.



Early written texts often bloated with 'amplification', annoyingly redundant by modern standards.



4. Conservative or traditionalist



Oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned ardously over the ages. This need establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation.



The text frees the mind of conservative tasks, that is, of its memory work, and thus enables the mind to turn itself to new speculation.



(ORAL)-at every telling the story has to be introduced uniquely into a unique situation, for in oral cultures an audience must be brought to respond, often viqorously.



In ORAl tradition, there will be as many minor variants of a myth as there are repetitions of it, and the number of repetitions can be increased indefinitely.



(ORAL) to stay with the times the formulas and themes are reshuffled rather than supplanted with new materials.



5. Close to the human lifeworld



Oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all thier knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alein, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings.



Oral culture as no vehicle so neutral as a list.



Oral cultures know few statistics or facts divorced from human or quasi-human activity.



Oral cultures has nothing corresponding to how-to-do-it manuals for the trades.



Trades were learned by apprenticeship which means from observation and practice with only minimal verbalized explanation.



Primary Oral culture is little concerned with preserving knowledge of skills as an abstract, self-subsistent corpus.



6. AGONISTICALLY TONED



ORAl cultures striked literates as extraordinarily agonistic in thier verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle.



By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.



Standard in ORAl societies across the world, reciprocal name-calling has been fitted with a specific name in linguistics: flyting (or fliting). Growing up in a still dominantly oral culture, certain young black males in the U.S., the Carribean, and elsewhere, engage in what is known variously as the 'dozens' or 'joning' or 'sounding' or by other names, in which one opponent tries to outdo the other in vilifying the other's mother.



Not only in the use to which knowledge is put, but also in the celebration of physical behavior, oral cultures reveal themselves as agonistically programmed.



Violence in ORAl art forms is also connected with the structure of orality itself. When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high-both attractions and, even mmore, antagonisms.



VITUPERATION in ORAl or residually oral cultures is the fulsome expression of praise which is found everywhere in connection with orality



Praise in old, residually oral, rhetoric tradition strikes persons from a high-literacy culture as insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentios. But praise goes with the highly polarized, agonistic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villians and heroes.



The agonistic dynamics of oral thought processes and expression have been central to the development of western culture, where they were institutionalized by the 'art' of rhetoric, and by the related dialectic of Socrates and Plato, which furnished agonistic oral verbalization with a scientific base worked out with the help of writing.



7 EMPATHECTIC AND PARTICIPATORY RATHER THAN OBJECTIVELY DISTANCED



For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known, or 'getting with it'.



writing seperates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for 'objectivity'. in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing.



the "OBJECTIVTY" which Homer and other oral performers do have is that enforced by formulaic expression: the individual's reaction is not expressed as simply individual or 'subjectice' but rather as encased in the communal reaction, the communal 'soul'.



Plato has excluded the poets from his Republice, for studying them was essentially learning to react with 'soul', to feel oneself identified with Achilles or Odysseus.



The editores of THE Mwindo Epic call attention to a similar strong identification of Candi Rureke, the performer of the epic, and through him of his listeners, with the hero Mwindo, and indentification which actually affects the grammar of the narration, so that on accosion the narrator slip into the first person when describing the actions of the hero....In the sensibility of the narrator and his audience the hero of the oral performance assimilates into the oral world even the transcribers who are de-oralizing it into text.



8 Homeostatic



Oral societies can be characterized as homeostatic. That is to say, oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.



Print cultures have invented dictionaries in which the various meanings of a word as it occurs in datable texts can be recorded in formal definitions.



Dictionaries advertise semantic discrepancies.



(ORAL CULTURES) meaning of each word is controlled by waht Goody and Watt call 'direct semantic ratification', that is, by the real-life situations in which the word is used here and now.



Words acquire their meanings only from thier always insistent actual habitat [such as] gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real spoken worde always occurs.





Rhymes and games transmitted orally from one generation of samll children to the next even in hig-technology culture have similar words which have lsot their original referential meanings and are in effect nonsense syllables.



Part of the past with no immediatly discernible relevance to the present ha[s] simply fallen away. The present imposed its own economy on past remembrances.



ORal Traditions relfect a society's present cultural values rather than idle curiosity about the past.



Oral culture encourage triumpalism, (remember the winners forget the loosers) which in modern times has regularly tended somewhat to disappear as once-oral societies become more and more literate.



9. SITUATIONAL RATHER THAN ABSTRACT



All conceptual thinking is to a degree abstract.



if all conceptual thinking is thus to some degree abstract, some uses of concepts are more abstract than other uses.



ORAl cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of refernce that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld.



Franz Boas believed;



primitice peoples thought as we do but used a different set of categories.



Whereas Lucien Levy-Bruhl;



concluded that primitve though was prelogical, and magice in the sense that it was based on belif systems rather than on practical actuality.



"IT TAKES ONLY A MODERATE DEGREE OF LITERACY TO MAKE A TREMENDOUS DIFFERENCE IN THOUGHT PROCESSES."



LURIA'S FINDINGS:



a. Illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror,door, house, apricot drying-borad. Luria's subjects identified the designs as representations of real things they knew. They never dealt with abstract circles or squares but rather with concrete objects. Teachers' school students on the other hand, moderately literate, idetified geometrical figures by categorical geometric names: circles, squares, triangles, and so on. THey had been trained to give school-room answers, not real-life responses.



b. [Illiterate subjects] revert to situational rather than categorical thinking. THey were convinced that thinking other than operational thinking, that is, categorical thinking, was not important, uninteresting, and trivilializing.



c. Illiterate subjects seemed not to operate with formal deductive procedures at all --which is not the same as to say that they could not htink or that their thinking was not governed by logic, but only that they would not fit their thinking into pure logical forms, which they seem to have found uninteresting.



Example;

the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zembla is in the far north and there is always snow there. What color are the bears?



"I don't know. I've seen a black bear. I've never seen any others...each locality has its own animals"



When the syllogism is given to him a second time, a barely literate 45-year old chairman of a collective farm manages 'To go by your words, they should all be white'.



The chairman's limited literacy leaves him more comfortable in the person-to-person human lifeworld than in the world of pure abstractions:



Syllogism is self-contained: its conclusions are derived from its premises only. persons not academically educated are not acquainted with this special ground rule but tend rather in their interpretation of given statements to go beyond the statements themselves, as one does nomrally in real-life situations or in riddles (common in all ORAl cultures).



This fact dramatized the chirographic base of logic. The riddle belongs in the oral world. TO solve a riddle, canniness is needed: one draws on knowledge, often deeply subconscious, beyond the words themselves in the riddle.



d. There is no way to refute the world of primary orality. All you can do is walk away from it into literacy.



e. LUria's illtierates had difficulty in articulate self-analysis. Self-analysis requires a certain demolition of situational thinking. IT calls for isolation of the self, around which the entire lived world swirls for each individual person.



An oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figueres, abstact categorition, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self;analyis, all ofwhic