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    F I L M - P H I L O S O P H Y
    Internet Salon (ISSN 1466-4615)
    http://www.film-philosophy.com

    Volume 3  Number 45, November 1999

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    Phillip H. Gochenour

    Assessing Ong



_Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong_
Edited by Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat
Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999
ISBN: 1-57591-009-8
247 pp.

I was first exposed to the work of Walter Ong several years ago, while
attending a seminar led by Friederich Kittler at Humboldt Universitaet in
Berlin. It may seem odd that I had to travel to a German seminar room to
learn about an English-speaking Jesuit priest, but that is an accurate
reflection of the reception afforded to Ong's work among those who share
his language. Although he treads much of the same philosophical ground as
his former colleague at St Louis University, Marshall McLuhan, and asserts
a relation between modes of media and styles of consciousness, Ong does not
seem to enjoy the same currency among American media theorists as his more
skillfully self-promoting colleague. Perhaps this is because his work is
not as easily reduced to catchphrases like 'The Medium is the Message', but
it may also be because the basic theoretical premise of Ong's major work,
_Orality and Literacy_, must endure a considerable challenge from
poststructuralist criticism in general, and from Derrida and _On
Grammatology_ in particular. These are issues taken up by at least two
essays in the latest collection of essays on Ong's work, _Time, Memory, and
the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong_, edited by Dennis L.
Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat, and while any attention paid Ong's work from
his American colleagues must be welcomed, it remains unclear, after reading
these essays, whether the problems facing those who use Ong's schema to
explain aspects of social change are effectively solved, or if Ong's
thought has truly advanced to the next rank, alongside that of McLuhan's.

_Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts_ is divided into three sections: an
Introduction; a set of four essays collected under the heading 'The
Historical and Continuing Relevance of Ong's Thought'; and a second set of
seven essays collected under the heading of 'Ongian Readings'. The
Introduction attempts to lay out a basic schema of Ong's thought, and to
give an overview of the essays in the two major sections -- no surprises
here. What is odd, however, is that for a work that is attempting to give
an overview of Ong's thought and relate it to a number of contemporary
critical movements, and that, in the words of the editors, 'seeks to
attract as wide a spectrum of readers as possible', there is no
biographical information on Ong whatsoever. Here the editors seem to have
chosen to follow the New Critical path that Ong himself first followed as a
critic, but one is left with very little feeling for what is at stake in
all of this for Ong, or what may have led him from one intellectual path to
another. This omission seems even more glaring given the frequent reference
in the Introduction to an interview conducted by Weeks with Ong in order to
gather information for the Introduction. Compounding this is the extreme
paucity of direct quotes from Ong himself -- we get frequent usages such as
'Ong departs from deconstruction, he said in the Weeks interview, because .
. .'. Why paraphrase the man, why not instead give us the direct quote and
let us examine Ong's statements directly? The effect here is that Ong seems
to be someone who must be interpreted for us, or, more disturbingly, whose
direct statements cannot bear scrutiny.

Also odd in the Introduction, especially given the Derridian criticism that
the first two essays attempt to refute, is the rather strong Christian tone
that occasionally surfaces. The Introduction concludes with the following
statement: 'Ong points out that the present universe, with all its digital
communications revolutions, other changes, and its persistent mysteries, is
still, for persons of faith, just as much God's world and the subject of
God's concern and love as it has always been' (22). Now, it is true that
Ong was a Jesuit, and one should eventually expect to find a relation
between his work and his faith, but since one of the criticisms of Ong's
work is that is creates abstract metaphysical categories that privilege
certain groups above others, it does not seem like a good idea to invoke a
major metaphysical entity at the conclusion of an introduction on Ong's
work. Also, if this is a work designed to appeal to a wide audience, one
wonders if that wide audience is supposed to consist primarily of 'persons
of faith'. And finally, if this is a work that is supposed to advance Ong's
thought along theoretical and philosophical grounds, one also wonders if
this is the right note to end the Introduction; it seems rather undermining
to say that all theory and philosophy eventually falls by the wayside and
is of negligible importance next to God's love and concern.

As I have already mentioned, the first two essays in the first section,
'The Historical and Continuing Relevance of Ong's Thought', attempt to deal
with the major theoretical problem posed to Ong's work by deconstruction,
and by Derrida in particular. In her essay 'Orality, Literacy, and Print
Revisited', Julie Stone Peters opens with Derrida's criticism of
Levi-Strauss, and the latter's distinction between primarily oral cultures,
which have a 'purer', 'primary' experience of the world, and literate
cultures, which have 'fallen' from that pure primary experience through the
interposition of writing. As Peters puts it: 'For Derrida the
anthropological analysis of the effects that accompany 'literacy' and
'orality' (like the artificial orality/literacy distinction itself) serves
classic theology and metaphysics.' (28) Of course, what is good for
Levi-Strauss is good for Ong too, and when Ong positions oral cultures as
being closer to the 'lifeworld' (as he does in _Orality and Literacy_) he
seems to be falling back into the creation of a distinction that serves
classic theology, a charge that, again, would be easy to level against him
because of his own position as a priest.

Peters's attempt to salvage Ong from Derridian criticism initially begins
by focusing on another comment by Derrida, that there is certainly a
history of writing 'in the colloquial sense'. From this point, she proceeds
to give an excellent historical overview of the various approaches to
studying this history of writing and its relation to cultural change,
following various anthropological and cultural studies movements from early
Soviet linguists such as A. R. Luria, all the way up to such contemporaries
as Kittler. Along the way she divides these various movements into 'strong'
and 'weak' camps, which, respectively, see significant, global cultural
change brought about by the advent of technologies such as writing, and
those who distrust such seemingly structuralist approaches and insist on
studying cultural change as a local phenomenon brought about by a number of
agencies. As someone who has struggled in his own work to come up with a
model for understanding the relation of technology and media to cultural
shifts, I found this overview to be extremely interesting and useful.
However, I am not sure that it finally rescues Ong from Derridian
criticism, because it doesn't really settle the main point of dispute
between these two camps -- can we talk about 'print', for example, as
something that remains an ahistorical entity across cultures, and which
brings about identical effects in those cultures where it is introduced?
According to Peters, the 'strong' camp would certainly argue yes, while the
'weak' camp would argue that we must look at how print is 'discursively'
constructed within the culture; on the one hand, the technology changes
culture, while on the other, culture changes technology. At one point,
Peters seems to opt for a middle ground between these two camps, when she
writes: 'We need both sides of the story: our refiguration of things, but
also their refiguration of us.' (43) This would seem to lead to a kind of
chicken-and-egg problem, however, that cannot be definitively concluded.
Peters seems to employ a kind of academic version of 'I'm rubber, you're
glue, what you say bounces off me and sticks to you'. While the proponents
of 'weak' models would distrust 'strong' models for their creation of
ahistorical metaphysical entities like 'print', Peters argues, these same
proponents must themselves create local, fixed, ahistorical entities of
their own, such as concrete subjects, in order to make their own analyses
work. Without some degree of generalization, Peters argues, analysis of any
sort becomes frozen, unable to locate the very units or entities which will
be analyzed. In the end, the best we might hope for is some
self-consciousness of the entities we create when we undertake analysis.

But how does Ong fare after this discussion? Significantly, for a
collection of essays on Ong's thought, Peters never returns to this
question. In a much earlier paragraph Peters discusses Ong and the way in
which he shares some of Derrida's suspicions about the ways in which
various cultures have attempted to position themselves above others, but we
are left with no real conclusions about how this lengthy history of
cultural studies might enable us to return to Ong's work. Ultimately,
whether one adopts a strong or weak model of cultural change seems to be a
matter of religious belief, and questions about the validity of one mode of
analysis over the other seems to make about as much sense as asking whether
Southern Baptists have a more valid world view than Hindus.

The same Derridian spectre haunts the second essay, 'Discoverers of
Something New' by co-editor Jane Hoogestraat, but Hoogestraat's strategy is
less an attempt at exorcism than one of reconciliation, this time by way of
postcolonial theory. Reading in Derrida's critique of Levi-Strauss a
concern for the way in which Levi-Strauss even discredits the speech of
indigenous peoples as true speech, Hoogestraat points to the way in which
Derrida 'problematize[s] the passage from orality to literacy, to argue
different, more complex boundaries and openings between the two than
Levi-Strauss would allow for' (52). It is in the complexity of the
interaction between literate ethnographers and oral cultures, one that
often inscribes an absence by the ethnographer on the oral culture, that
Hoogestraat sees the need for Ong's concept of orality, which allows for at
least a partial recovery of what is lost in the records of colonialist
conquerors. Working from an essay by Stephen Tyler, Hoogestraat puts it
very simply:

'In certain forms of ethnography . . . a record of an almost purely oral
culture survives only as an absence in the written record of an
ethnographer. It requires, and I believe Tyler's essay centers on this
point, both an understanding of what Ong means by 'orality' and what
Derrida means by 'absence' to understand the clash between an oral and a
written culture.' (53)

Hoogestraat's strategy, then, is to show that Ong's concept of orality
enables us to understand what is absent in the written accounts of
Europeans, and that it is absent because literate culture is unable to
recognize something different from itself as anything except an absence.
This allows us then to repudiate many of Levi-Strauss's claims for
indigenous cultures lacking *ecriture*, because we can certainly say that
there was indeed a language that structured their social relations -- it
merely structured them differently, as Hoogestraat points out by using
Stephen Greenblatt's example of the different concepts of property
relations that were inherent in the literate culture of Europeans and the
oral culture of Native Americans.

Hoogestraat's essay is, in my opinion, a stronger argument for the
'continuing relevance of Ong's thought' not simply because she actually
refers to and cites Ong throughout, but because she demonstrates what use
Ong's thought can be as a theoretical tool. Instead of getting caught up in
problems of theoretical modeling which finally lead one to not know what
the solution to the problem might be, Hoogestraat shows how Ong is quite
useful: not for solving problems, or providing models, but for showing us
where there might be a problem in the first place. Hoogestraat's basic
argument would seem to be this: were it not for a conceptual model like
Ong's, in which we differentiate between oral and literate cultures, we
might not realize in the first place the true nature of the conflict
between colonialist and colonized. Also, by providing us with historical
examples to consider, she draws out the usefulness of Ong for considering
the interaction between cultures at specific historical moments. Ong may
not provide the best model for understanding the complexity of those
interactions -- Hoogstraat herself offers a critique of what might be
called the 'phallocentrism' of Ong's work -- but he does make us realize
that we need to consider those interactions on a more complex level. Thus,
Hoogestraat very nicely distances Ong from Levi-Strauss, whose view of
interactions between cultures could only record the absence of what was
indeed most present.

The first two essays in this opening section, then, have a distinct
theoretical orientation, which makes it difficult to understand how they
relate to the remaining two essays, 'Orality, Literacy, and Dialogue' by
Vincent Caseregola, and 'The Bard's Audience is Always More Than a Fiction'
by John Miles Foley. In the first essay, Caseregola considers the evolution
of the essay as an example of the interaction between oral and literate
consciousness, drawing upon the work of both Ong and Bahktin, especially
the latter's concept of 'dialogic imagination'. While an interesting
examination of the development of the essay, it is hard to see how this
essay relates back to the theoretical problems raised by the first two --
it seems more of an Ongian reading of a 'genre' of writing, to use
Ceseregola's term, than an examination of Ong's thought in relation to
contemporary critical and theoretical problems. The same can be said of
Foley's essay, which, in his words, is to work with Ong's notion of the
'communicative responsibilities' of the writer and his/her audience, 'and
to understand how it may apply to the kind of verbal artists I will be
subsuming under the label bard' (93). Again, while Foley's essay delves
into some interesting considerations of the role played by many 'verbal
artists' in relation to their audience, and while it is also dependant on
Ong's formulations of the oral and literate, it is not at all of a piece
with the two essays that opened this section, and seems, again, something
that would be more appropriate as an Ongian reading. In short, while the
first two essays introduce high theoretical stakes, and place Ong's work in
relation to a number of contemporary critical and theoretical problems, the
second two fail to follow up on these grounds. In keeping with Ong's
concept of 'dialogue', this space may have been more usefully opened to
critics of Ong's, who would have at least provided us with some lively
discussion that would have opened the door for further consideration of
Ong's relevance, or, if the editors had wished to provide a more positive
impression, contributions could have been solicited from the numerous
critics of prominence, such as Kittler, Greenblatt, or Tyler, who would
have no doubt argued quite in depth for the significance of Ong's work. As
it is, our appetite is scarcely whetted for serious consideration of the
philosophical ramifications of Ong's work (a meal of rather heavy
substance) than we are presented, in rather short order, with the dessert.
>From here out, the continuing relevance of Ong's work will be assumed,
rather than debated.

The essays in the third section are brought together under the rubric of
'Ongian Readings'. The seven essays in this section all represent attempts
to use an Ongian framework to bring out readings of specific authors
(Chaucer, Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Dylan Thomas), to examine specific
cultural moments and movements, or to relate Ong's work to theories of
aesthetics. The essays cover a period ranging from the Classical period up
to High Modernism, and represent attempts to use Ong in as wide a field of
inquiry as possible.

Of these seven essays, I found the most effective to be those that dealt
with those specific historical moments when we could expect to see the sort
of literate/oral clash brought up by Hoogestraat, as well as those that
attempt to relate Ong's theoretical schema to large-scale historical
movements. In his essay on Shakespeare, for example, 'What the King Saw,
What the Poet Wrote: Shakespeare Plays Before King James', Alvin Kernan
provides a richly drawn historical portrait of the act of royal theater
spectatorship, and the struggle by Shakespeare to produce works that
contained the energy of oral performance, while also incorporating the
intricacies that marked works designed to be read. Similarly, James
Andreas, in his essay on Chaucer, 'Lewedly to a Lewed Man Speak: Chaucer's
Defense of the Vulgar Tongue', argues for Chaucer's intention to represent
'the interface of dialogue within the living linguistic experience that is
speech: the 'vulgar' mother tongue' (151), thus removing from Chaucer any
label of being the 'Father' of the English language, in the sense of
someone who intended to codify particular linguistic forms. Finally, I
would also have to mention Sr Anne Denise Brannen's essay, 'Breaking the
Ice: Some Highlights of the History of Humour and Sense of Humour', which
traces the evolution of the concept of humor in British aesthetics. In the
category of tracing large historical movements, there is Werner Kelber's
truly excellent essay 'Incarnations, Rememberances, and Transformations of
the Word', which relates, in almost classically Ongian fashion, the
evolution of Western philosophy and theology to techniques of recording and
memory.

Less effective, in my opinion, are those essays which attempt to analyze a
particular author as either oral or literate, such as Thomas Farrel's essay
on 'Faulkner and Male Agonism' and George Wieck's essay on Dylan Thomas,
'The Crucial Antithesis: Orality/Literacy Interaction in the Poetry of
Dylan Thomas', and those which try to use Ong to either develop or explain
aesthetic theory, such as 'The Beautiful and the Merely Pleasing: Love,
Art, and 'The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn'' by Patrick Colm Hogan.
Simply put, while these essays all provide some interesting insights into
their respective subjects, they strike me as being the wrong register for
Ongian analysis, which seems much more suited to examining cultural and
historical movements than the aesthetics of individual authors. In the case
of Kernan's essay on Shakespeare, and Andreas's essay on Chaucer, they are
effective in dealing with individual authors in that they are able to
relate those authors to specific cultural and historical moments, while in
the case of Farrell and Wieck, the analysis focuses much more on the
individual psyche of the individual author, and attempts to determine
whether or not that psyche might be described as oral or literate. In
Wieck's essay on Thomas, for example, he attempts to resolve the 'conflict
of opposites' in Thomas's work by 'view[ing] this subject through the lens
of oral/literate polarities' (231). Well and good, I would say, if some
attempt was made to relate Thomas's work to his being Welsh, and the
near-extermination of that language by the force of British written
colonialism, but Wieck's analysis seems to rest on Thomas's fascination
with the oral word as a kind of romantic entity, while he struggled to
discipline his work to written form. In the end, I remain unconvinced of
the usefulness of an Ongian schema for approaching the problematic aspects
of Thomas's work, and wonder if some other mode of analysis might not be
just as effective.

In reading this last set of essays, a number of general criticisms struck
me as well. First, there is the rather limited time-frame of these essays:
while they progress up to High Modernism with Faulkner and Thomas, they
primarily focus on the 18th century and earlier, and there is no attempt to
incorporate any more contemporary authors. Also remarkable is the pure
canonicity of those authors who are discussed: Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Faulkner, Thomas, etc. Given the arguments of Hoogestraat's essay, I would
think some of the most fertile ground for Ongian readings would be among
those cultures and authors who have experienced the oral/literate clash,
and the way in which that clash is reflected in their works: any number of
African-American writers, for example, would probably benefit considerably
from a detailed Ongian reading (take the work of Toni Morrison, for
example, or the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar). And finally, why do all of
these essays focus exclusively on literature, and almost universally ignore
what Ong calls 'secondary orality', which arises out of the crucible of
that first literate/oral clash? It would be a simple thing to argue that we
exist, in many ways, in a secondarily oral culture, brought about by the
explosion of media technologies -- and secondary orality can easily be seen
in such things as the syntax and use of 'smileys' in email, or the
development of subcultural jargon. Unfortunately, none of these essays
attempts to deal in any way with contemporary culture, the development of
new media forms, or the influence of these media on other media, such as
literature. As a result, they miss some of the most interesting areas for
Ongian analysis.

In conclusion, I would have a hard time recommending this essay collection
to my media theory colleagues. First, I think it fails on its own terms, as
I don't see how these essays will open up a wider field of Ongian analysis,
or demonstrate its effectiveness to a wider audience. If anything, this
collection presents Ongian analysis as being ultimately rather
conservative, effective perhaps for mining another small nugget from a
tapped-out vein, but not very useful for guiding us toward a rich
motherlode. Had the editors chosen essays which dealt in more depth with
the theoretical problems and complexities of Ong's work, and which
demonstrated his usefullness for examining cultural phenomena and movements
which might otherwise go unnoticed, I think this collection would have made
a substantial contribution to Ongian studies. Given what essays are
collected here, however, I think that only individual essays will prove to
be of passing interest to scholars of a specific author.

San Francisco, USA


Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 1999

Phillip H. Gochenour, 'Assessing Ong', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 45,
November 1999
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/gochenour.html>.


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