Chapter 4 of Orality and Literacy (+ some thought on 'Knowledge Language')

Quotation from

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World

By Walter J. Ong

Routledge: London, 2002 (first published in 1982).

also available in Questia

Chapter 4 WRITING RESTRUCTURES CONSCIOUSNESS: THE NEW WORLD OF AUTONOMOUS DISCOURSE

Modern consciousness has been shaped by writing.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. (p. 77)

Oral speech was no longer the same with oral speech in primary orality

Affeced by written discourse, the oral speech in the age of writing became more or less 'context-free' or 'autonomous'.

Writing establishes what has been called ‘context-free’ language (Hirsch 1977, pp. 21-3, 26) or ‘autonomous’ discourse (Olson 1980a), discourse which cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can be because written discourse has been detached from its author.
(p. 77)

Invention of the Greek alphabet as a breakthrough

There are a number of developmental stages in writing (when I use the word 'developmental' here, I neglect to give a serious thought on logogram along with most western researchers. As a Japanese who uses Chinese characters (logogram) everyday, I'm reluctant to say that alphabet is in the last stage of development after logogram).

Early types of alphabet was 'consonant alphabet'; the alphabet that only consists of consonant, for which readers have to supply vowels by themselves when they read a text. The Greek alphabet began to contain vowels, resulting in a very kind media for communication.

[I]t does appear that the Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they developed the first alphabet complete with vowels. Havelock (1976) believes that this crucial, more nearly total transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient cultures. The reader of Semitic writing had to draw on non-textual as well as textual data: he had to know the language he was reading in order to know what vowels to supply between the consonants. Semitic writing was still very much immersed in the non-textual human lifeworld. The vocalic Greek alphabet was more remote from that world (as Plato’s ideas were to be). It analyzed sound more abstractly into purely spatial components. It could be used to write or read words even from languages one did not know (allowing for some inaccuracies due to phonemic differences between languages). Little children could acquire the Greek alphabet when they were very young and their vocabulary limited. (It has just been noted that for Israeli schoolchildren to about the third grade vowel ‘points’ have to be added to the ordinary consonantal Hebrew script.) The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. It was also internationalizing in that it provided a way of processing even foreign tongues. This Greek achievement in abstractly analyzing the elusive world of sound into visual equivalents (not perfectly, of course, but in effect fully) both presaged and implemented their further analytic exploits. (p. 89)

Writing as an entirely new culture

Writing created a new culture of an isolated individual developing the 'Theory of Mind' of his readers.

Yet words are alone in a text. Moreover, in composing a text, in ‘writing’ something, the one producing the written utterance is also alone. Writing is a solipsistic operation. I am writing a book which I hope will be read by hundreds of thousands of people, so I must be isolated from everyone. While writing the present book, I have left word that I am ‘out’ for hours and days?so that no one, including persons who will presumably read the book, can interrupt my solitude. (p. 100)

Extratextual context is missing not only for readers but also for the writer. Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. ‘The writer’s audience is always a fiction’ (Ong 1977, pp. 53-81). The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for him, to which he is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living. (p. 101)

[W]ritten words sharpen analysis, for the individual words are called on to do more. To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without intonation, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for any possible reader in any possible situation, and you have to make your language work so as to come clear all by itself, with no existential context. The need for this exquisite circumspection makes writing the agonizing work it commonly is. (pp. 102-103)

Diary and novel as modern inventions

It is interesting to note that diary discourse, culture we now take for so granted, was a new invention.

Even in a personal diary addressed to myself I must fictionalize the addressee. Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself. But I never really talk this way to myself. Nor could I without writing or indeed without print. The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century (Boerner 1969). The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction. (p. 101)

Likewise, "[t]he psychodynamics of writing matured very slowly in narrative.(p. 102)", starting from easily imaginable Plato's Socrates or Chaucer's groups of people taliking to each other, to the 19th Century style "in which both author and reader are havinig difficulty situating themselves. (p. 102)".


The new writing culture, not our natural development and agonizingly difficult to learn, may have divided people into, roughly speaking, two types: those who speak with 'elaborated linguistic code' and those with 'restricted code' (Bernstein) . (I might say, though, given our natural history 'restricted code' is not really 'restricted' but 'natural'. We may refer to the two concepts as 'natural linguistic code' and 'elaborated linguisted code' (or 'extended linguisted code').


Learned Latin

Ong argues that the Greek rhetoric and the Learned Latin were the inteactions of orality and literacy that formed the basis of Western culture. (p. 107).

Latin, first a vernacular language, developed into various vernacular languages in spoken mode, but retained its original form in writing.

Learned Latin was a direct result of writing. Between about AD 550 and 700 the Latin spoken as a vernacular in various parts of Europe had evolved into various early forms of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, French, and the other Romance languages. By AD 700, speakers of these offshoots of Latin could no longer understand the old written Latin, intelligible perhaps to some of their greatgrandparents. Their spoken language had moved too far away from its origins. But schooling, and with it most official discourse of Church or state, continued in Latin. There was really no alternative. (p. 101)

However, Learned Latin did not lose orality.

Learned Latin related to orality and literacy, however, in paradoxical ways. On the one hand, as just noted, it was a chirographically controlled language. Of the millions who spoke it for the next 1400 years, every one was able also to write it. There were no purely oral users. But chirographic control of Learned Latin did not preclude its alliance with orality. Paradoxically, the textuality that kept Latin rooted in classical antiquity thereby kept it rooted also in orality, for the classical ideal of education had been to produce not the effective writer but the rhetor,the orator, the public speaker. The grammar of Learned Latin came from this old oral world. So did its basic vocabulary, although, like all languages actually in use, it incorporated thousands of new words over the centuries. (pp. 111-112)

I'm tempted to call Learned Latin 'non-biological language' for nobody spoke it as their first language. It is detached from humans' lifeworld. However, this detachment may have propted a new mode of knowledge: modern science.

Devoid of baby-talk, insulated from the earliest life of childhood where language has its deepest psychic roots, a first language to none of its users, pronounced across Europe in often mutually unintelligible ways but always written the same way, Learned Latin was a striking exemplification of the power of writing for isolating discourse and of the unparalleled productivity of such isolation. Writing, as has earlier been seen, serves to separate and distance the knower and the known and thus to establish objectivity. It has been suggested (Ong 1977, pp. 24-9) that Learned Latin effects even greater objectivity by establishing knowledge in a medium insulated from the emotion-charged depths of one’s mother tongue, thus reducing interference from the human lifeworld and making possible the exquisitely abstract world of medieval scholasticism and of the new mathematical modern science which followed on the scholastic experience. Without Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would have got under way with greater difficulty, if it had got under way at all. Modern science grew in Latin soil, for philosophers and scientists through the time of Sir Isaac Newton commonly both wrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin. (p. 112)

English as a Knowledge Language

Contemporary English is definitely a 'biological' language for native speakers. However, for someone like me who acquried (or is acquiring) it in a foreign land, it may be more like a Learned Language, particularly because my use of English is mostly academic. In fact, I don't usually use English to express or share emotions. My motivation of using and learning English is 'instrumental', not 'integrative', to use an old terminology in English Language Teaching.

However, English as Learned Language (or 'Knowledge Language' as I prefer to callit) is not like Learned Latin because of the internet. Spoken mode is shared thanks to YouTube, Ustream, Podcasting and various other means on the internet. Spoken mode of 'Knowledge English' may not diverge, as has been the case with wide spreading languages up to now, but converge becuause of the first truely global media: the internet.



References

Boerner, Peter (1969) Tagebuch (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler).
Ong, W. (1977) Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press).

Go to Questia Online Library

Empire and Communications by Harold Innis

Quotation from Wikipedia

Empire and Communications

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_and_communications

(I feel free to quote from Wikipedia. Thanks Wikipedia and its contributors. My gratitude to Wikipedia and its contributors.)

Empire and Communications examines the impact of media such as stone, clay, papyrus and the alphabet on the empires of Egypt and Babylonia . It also looks at the oral tradition in ancient Greece ; the written tradition and the Roman Empire ; the influence of parchment and paper in medieval Europe and the effects of paper and the printing press in modern times.


"The effective government of large areas," he writes, "depends to a very important extent on the efficiency of communication."[3]

Innis divides the history of the empires and civilizations he will examine into two periods, one for writing and the other for printing. "In the writing period we can note the importance of various media such as the clay tablet of Mesopotamia , the papyrus roll in the Egyptian and in the Graeco-Roman world, parchment codex in the late Graeco-Roman world and the early Middle Ages, and paper after its introduction in the Western world from China."[7] Innis notes that he will concentrate on paper as a medium in the printing period along with the introduction of paper-making machinery at the beginning of the 19th century and the use of wood pulp in the manufacture of paper after 1850.[7]

He is quick to add however, that it would be presumptuous to conclude that writing alone determined the course of civilizations.


Harold Innis traces the evolution of ancient Egyptian dynasties and kingdoms in terms of their use of stone or papyrus as dominant media of communication. His outline of Egyptian civilization is a complex and highly-detailed analysis of how these media, along with several other technologies, affected the distribution of power in society.


Innis begins, as other historians do, with the crucial importance of the Nile as a formative influence on Egyptian civilization. The river provided the water and fertile land needed for agricultural production in a desert region.[11] Innis writes that the Nile therefore, "acted as a principle of order and centralization, necessitated collective work, created solidarity, imposed organizations on the people, and cemented them in a society."[12]


Priestly power, Innis writes, resulted from religious control over the complex and difficult art of writing. The monarch's attempts to maintain an empire extended in space were defeated by a priestly monopoly over knowledge systems concerned with time --- systems that began with the need for accurate predictions about when the Nile would overflow its banks.[22] Innis argues that priestly theocracy gradually cost Egypt its empire. "Monopoly over writing supported an emphasis on religion and the time concept, which defeated efforts to solve the problem of space."[23]


[U]nlike in Egypt where calculating the timing of the Nile's flooding was a source of power, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia were used for irrigation. Therefore the ability to measure time precisely was somewhat less critical. Nevertheless, as in Egypt, the small city-states of Sumer depended on the rivers and so, the cycles of agricultural production were organized around them.[25] The rivers also provided communications materials. In Egypt, the Nile's papyrus became a medium for writing while in Mesopotamia, the rivers yielded the alluvial sediments the Sumerians used to fashion the clay tablets on which they inscribed their wedge-shaped, cuneiform script.[26] Their earliest writing recorded agricultural accounts and economic transactions.[27]


Innis writes that as a heavy material, clay was not very portable and so was not generally suited for communication over large areas. Cuneiform inscription required years of training overseen by priests. Innis contends therefore, that as a writing medium, clay tended to favour decentralization and religious control.[29]


Around 2350 BC, the Sumerians were conquered by their northern, Semitic neighbours the Akkadians . Under Sargon the Great , the empire expanded to include extensive territories reaching northwest as far as Turkey and west to theMediterranean .[31] Thus begins the rise and fall of a series of empires over approximately two thousand years. Innis mentions many of them, but focuses more attention on innovations that facilitated their growth. These include the advancement of civil law under Hammurabi , the development of mathematics including fixed standards of weights and measures , as well as the breeding of horses that combined speed with strength and that, along with three-man chariots , helped deliver spectacular military victories to the Assyrians .[32]


In discussing the advent and spread of the alphabet , Innis refers to what he sees as the subversive relationship between those at the centre of civilizations and those on their fringes or margins. He argues that monopolies of knowledge develop at the centre only to be challenged and eventually overthrown by new ideas or techniques that take shape on the margins.[33] Thus, the Phoenician alphabet, a radically-simplified writing system, undermined the elaborate hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts overseen by priestly elites in Egypt and Babylonia. "The Phoenicians had no monopoly of knowledge," Innis writes, "[which] might hamper the development of writing."[34] As a trading people, the Phoenicians needed "a swift and concise method of recording transactions."[34] The alphabet with its limited number of visual symbols to represent the primary elements of human speech was well suited to trade. "Commerce and the alphabet were inextricably interwoven, particularly when letters of the alphabet were used as numerals."[35]


"Greek civilization," Innis writes, "was a reflection of the power of the spoken word."[42] In this chapter [= Chapter 4], he explores how the vitality of the spoken word helped the ancient Greeks create a civilization that profoundly influenced all of Europe. Greek civilization differed in significant ways from the empires of Egypt and Babylonia. Innis biographer John Watson notes that those preceding empires "had revolved around an uneasy alliance of absolute monarchs and scholarly theocrats."[43] The monarchs ruled by force while an elite priestly class controlled religious dogma through their monopolies of knowledge over complex writing systems. "The monarch was typically a war leader whose grasp of the concept of space allowed him to expand his territory," Watson writes, "incorporating even the most highly articulated theocracies. The priests specialized in elaborating conceptions of time and continuity."[43] Innis argues that the Greeks struck a different balance, one based on "the freshness and elasticity of an oral tradition" that left its stamp on Western poetry, drama, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, science and mathematics.[44]


Innis argues that Plato's use of the flexible oral tradition in his writing enabled him to escape the confines of a rigid philosophical system. "Continuous philosophical discussion aimed at truth. The life and movement of dialectic opposed the establishment of a finished system of dogma."[47] This balance between speech and prose also contributed to the immortality of Plato's work.[47]


According to Innis, Plato and Aristotle developed prose in defence of a new culture in which gods and poets were subordinated to philosophical and scientific inquiry.[50] Innis argues that eventually, the spread of writing widened the gap between the city-states hastening the collapse of Greek civilization.[51]


To administer such a vast empire, the Romans were forced to establish centralized bureaucracies .[66] These bureaucracies depended on supplies of cheap papyrus from the Nile Delta for the long-distance transmission of written rules, orders and procedures.[67] The bureaucratic Roman state backed by the influence of writing, in turn, fostered absolutism, the form of government in which power is vested in a single ruler.[68]

Innis discusses various aspects of Ptolemaic rule over Egypt including the founding of the ancient library and university at Alexandria made possible by access to abundant supplies of papyrus. "By 285 BC the library established by Ptolemy I had 20,000 manuscripts," Innis writes, "and by the middle of the first century 700,000, while a smaller library established by Ptolemy II ...possibly for duplicates had 42,800."[80] He points out that the power of the written tradition in library and university gave rise to specialists, not poets and scholars ? drudges who corrected proofs and those who indulged in the mania of book collecting. "Literature was divorced from life, thought from action, poetry from philosophy."[81]


Innis writes that the Antigonids "gradually transformed the small city-states of Greece into municipalities."[83] They captured Athens in 261 BC and Sparta in 222 BC. The Greek cities of this period developed common interests. "With supplies of papyrus and parchment and the employment of educated slaves," Innis writes, "books were produced on an unprecedented scale. Hellenistic capitals provided a large reading public."[84] Most of these books however, were "third-hand compendia of snippets and textbooks, short cuts to knowledge, quantities of tragedies, and an active comedy of manners in Athens. Literary men wrote books about other books and became bibliophiles ."[84] Innis reports that by the second century "everything had been swamped by the growth of rhetoric ."[84] He argues that once classicalGreek philosophy "became crystallized in writing," it was superseded by an emphasis on philosophical teaching.[84] He mentions Stoicism , the Cynics and Epicurean teachings all of which emphasized the priority of reason over popular religion. "The Olympian religion and the city-state were replaced by philosophy and science for the educated and by Eastern religions for the common man."[85] As communication between these two groups became increasingly difficult, cultural division stimulated the rise of a class structure. Innis concludes that the increasing emphasis on writing also created divisions among Athens, Alexandria and Pergamum weakening science and philosophy and opening "the way to religions from the East and force from Rome in the West."[86]


Monopolies of knowledge had developed and declined partly in relation to the medium of communication on which they were built, and tended to alternate as they emphasized religion, decentralization and time; or force, centralization, and space. Sumerian culture based on the medium of clay was fused with Semitic culture based on the medium of stone to produce the Babylonian empires. Egyptian civilization, based on a fusion of dependence on stone and dependence on papyrus, produced an unstable empire which eventually succumbed to religion. The Assyrian and Persian empires attempted to comnine Egyptian and Babylonian civilization, and the latter succeeded with its appeal to toleration. Hebrew civilization emphasized the sacred character of writing in opposition to political organizations that emphasized the graven image. Greek civilization based on the oral tradition produced the powerful leaven that destroyed political empires. Rome assumed control over the medium on which Egyptian civilization had been based, and built up an extensive bureaucracy, but the latter survived in a fusion in the Byzantine Empire with Christianity based on the parchment codex.

Notes
3 Innis, Harold. (2007) Empire and Communications. Toronto: Dundurn Press, p.23. ISBN 13: 978-1-55002-662-7. This is the fourth and latest edition of Innis's book. The original edition of 1950 published by Oxford University Press was reissued in 1972 by University of Toronto Press, edited by Mary Quayle Innis with an introduction by Marshall McLuhan. An illustrated third edition was published by Press Porcepic in 1986.
7 Innis (Empire), p.27
11 O'Brien, Patrick K., general editor. (1999) Atlas of World History. New York: Oxford University Press, p.30.
12 Innis (Empire), p.32.
22 Innis (Empire), p.44.
23 Innis (Empire), p.45.
25 Innis (Empire), p.46.
26 Heyer, Paul. (2003) Harold Innis. Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., p.48.
27 Innis, (Empire), p.46.
29 Innis (Empire), pp.48-49.
31 Innis (Empire), p.50 and O'Brien, p.28.
32 Innis (Empire), pp.51-60.
33 Innis (Empire), p.62.
34 Innis (Empire), p.64.
35 Innis (Empire), pp.64-65.
42 Innis (Empire), p.78.
43 Watson, ohn Alexander. (2006) Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p.368.
44 ohn Alexander. (2006) Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
47 Innis (Empire), p.79.
50 Innis (Empire), pp.79-80.
51 Innis (Empire), p.104.
66 Innis (Empire), p.122.
67 Innis (Empire), pp.125 & 129.
68 Innis (Empire), p.125.
80 Innis (Empire), pp.112-113.
81 Innis (Empire), p.113.
83 Innis (Empire), p.115.
84 Innis (Empire), p.116.
85 Innis (Empire), p.117.
86 Innis (Empire)p.117.

"Internalization" or "embodiment"?

The article below was inspired by Dr. Karen Johnson's seminar in Hyogo University of Teacher Education on May 19 and 20, 2010. All errors and misunderstanding here, however, are entirely mine. I thank my friend, Tatsuhiro Yoshida at HUTE for his excellent coordination of the seminar.



Vygotsky's concept of "internalization" is not necessarily easy to understand correctly. DeVries (2000) says:

Vygotsky emphasized internalization in development, but it is not easy from reading Vygotsky’s works available in English to determine exactly what he meant by his famous statement:

We could formulate the general genetic law of cultural development as follows: Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social plane, and then on the psychological plane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological category, and then within the child as an intrapsychological category. (Vygotsky, 1930a/1981, p. 163)

(p. 7 in the PDF version)

DeVries (2000) emphasizes that "internalization is not a process of copying material from the environment but is a transformative process" (p. 7 in the PDF version)

To endorse his argument, DeVries quotes Vygotsky:

Perhaps Vygotsky is misunderstood to mean that what is experienced interpsychologically is simply internalized in unchanged form to become intrapsychological. The following statement may be interpreted to contradict this idea:

“what was an outward sign operation. . . is now transformed into a new intrapsychological layer (emphasis in original) and gives birth to a new psychological system, incomparably superior in content, and culturalpsychological in genesis” (Vygotsky and Luria, 1930, pp. 109-110; quoted in Lawrence and Valsiner, 1993, p. 163).

(p. 8 in the PDF version)

In any case, I also had a difficulty when I tried to understand Vygotskyean concept of "internalization" as I was hearing the word "internalization"and it kept echoing in my mind. For me, the word is somehow associated with the simple notion of what-was-outside-gets-into-the-inside-and-the-inside-increases-its-amount-of-knowledge.


Personally, I may prefer "embodiment" to "internalization" to mean what I assume Vygotsky wanted to say. (I have no knowledge of Russian and cannot have a look at the original word Vygotsky used.)

Taking a pointing gesture of a baby as an example, Stahl (2000) explains Vygotskyean notion of symbols, artifacts, or cognitive skills being "internalized".

This deictic gesture already embodies a reference to the intended object - in fact, in this example that is the artifact’s very meaning. So we have the first step toward a symbolic artifact representing an intended object. And in the origin of the gesture we already see the basis for intersubjective shared understanding of the meaning, because the pointing gesture is premised upon the mutual recognition of the underlying intention.

The beauty of the word "embodiment", as I understand it, is that the 'body' is in and out at the same time . The body is free from the dichotomous and mutually exclusive contrast of "In vs. Out". The body is both in and out (or either in or out, or neither in nor out, if you like). When I "embody" something, that something is both inside me (in that I've internalized it) and outside me (in that what's been internalized can be expressed or performed outwardly).


Thank you for reading my playing with words.



References

DeVries, R. (2000) Vygotsky, Piaget, and Education: a reciprocal assimilation of theories and educational practices. New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 18, Issues 2-3, August 2000, Pages 187-213.
(Available from the author in an PDF format at
http://www.uni.edu/freeburg/Publications/Vygotsky%20Piaget%20and%20Edu.pdf)

Lawrence, J., & Valsiner, J. (1993). Conceptual roots of internalization: From transmission to transformation. Human Development, 36, 150-167.

Vygotsky, L. (1930a/1981). The genesis of higher mental functions. In J. Wertsch (Ed.), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology (pp. 147-188), New York: Sharpe, Inc.

Stahl, G. (2000) Artifact-mediated Cognition: Vygotsky’s theory of Mind as the Result of Activity with Artifacts - Notes on Vygotsky and Engestrom. (obtained at http://gerrystahl.net/readings/simrocket/vygotsky.html#top on May 22, 2010)

P.S.
In the process of writing this short article, I also found a review by Rosemary Luckin of University of Sussex interesting.

Review of "Vygotsky and cognitive science: language and the unification of the social and computational mind" by William Frawley. Harvard University Press 1997.

PDF is freely available at
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J98/J98-3010.pdf