Technical Issues Solved

The technical issues seem to have been solved and Notes from the Walter Ong Collection seems to be working fine now, including publishing a RSS feed. All new posts should be there. And don't forget to check out the two-week old Walter J. Ong Collection website.

Technical Problems

The move to a Saint Louis University server seems to have caused some problems that need to be worked out. Unfortunately, I do not have complete access to the server, and the library will be closed until after the New Year. Until that time, I’ll keep posting here, which may be easier to use.

Walter J. Ong Collection Web Site

I'm pleased to announce, on behalf of the Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University, that the Walter J. Ong Collection Web site is now live. The Walter J. Ong Collection website seeks to provide scholars, students, and researchers with information about the Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection, to host a digital repository for collection materials, and to serve as a comprehensive resource on the life and works of Walter J. Ong, S.J. Our initial digital offerings include a number of unpublished lectures (typescripts saved as .pdf files), including those from his Lincoln Lecture Series in Africa in 1974, an audio recording of a lecture, and a number of photographs of Walter J. Ong and his family.

There will be much more to come over the next few months, and, really, many years to come.

Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive has Moved

Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive is being reborn as Notes from the Walter J. Ong Collection, and will now be hosted on a Saint Louis University server at http://ongnotes.slu.edu. The move is intended to give this blog official status and to join it with the soon-to-come Walter J. Ong Collection web site.

Ong and the Ecological Age

A number of people have asked me about an Ong quote I included in a CFP in which Ong suggests that we are in an ecological age:

The age in which humans existence is now framed, the age in which human life and technology so massively and intimately interact, can well be styled not only the information age and the age of interpretation, but, perhaps, even more inclusively, the ecological age, in principle an age of total interconnectedness, where everything on the earth, and even the universe, is interconnected with everything else, no only in itself but, ideally, in human understanding and activity.

That passage is from Ch. 12 of Ong's unfinished book Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Chapter 12 is titled "Language, Technology, and the Human" and the quote is on page 4 of the typescript. Ch. 12 is one of the more unfinished chapters (there are 13 chapters and a prologue which range from 3 to 28 typed pages). I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but the entire typescript is about 40,000 words. As Language as Hermeneutic does not yet have an item number, MLA bibliographic information would be:

Ong, Walter J. Language as Hermeneutic: A Primer on the Word and Digitization. Ts. Walter J. Ong Manuscript Collection. Pius XII Memorial Library, Saint Louis University.

Unfortunately, each chapter has its own pagination, so you'd need to indicate that it's on page 4 of chapter 12. Or you could go the easy route and cite this blog entry.

Those interested in the above quote should take a look at Ong's "Ecology and Some of Its Future," which was published in 2002 (Explorations in Media Ecology 1.1 (2002): 5-11). It's a short piece but a good one. And no, I checked and this quote isn't in the article.

Cross posted to Machina Memorialis.

MLA 2006 Session 108: Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy at Twenty-Five

Abstracts for MLA 2006 session "Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy at Twenty-Five" (Session 108; Thursday, 28 December; 8:30–9:45 a.m., Congress C, Loews) are now available.

Cross-posted to Machina Memorialis.

The Ever Present Presence of the Spoken Word

The more I read in cognitive studies, the more I find that Ong was already there, working with ideas and theories that cognitive studies is now exploring or finding to be true. Let me juxtapose two snippets I've come across in the past few days, one from Ong's "Comment: Voice, Print, and Culture" (The Journal of Typographic Research 4.1 (1970): 77-83), which expresses a common Ongian theme, and one from Jeanne Fahnestock's "Rhetoric in the Age of Cognitive Science" (The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. 159-179):

Man communicates through all his senses, and in ways so complicated that even at this late day many, and perhaps most, of them have never been adequately described. But in some mysterious fashion, among all forms of communication--through touch, taste, smell, sight, or what have you--communication through sound is paramount. Words have a primacy over all other forms of communication. No matter how familiar we are with an object or a process, we do not feel that we have full mastery of it until we can verbalize it to others. And we do not enter into full communication with another person without speech.

Speech is essentially a spoken and heard phenomenon, a matter of voice and ear, an event in the world of sound. Words are sounds. Written words are substitutes for sound and are only marks on a surface until they are converted to sound again, either in the imagination or by actual vocalization.

We know this, but we find it almost impossible to grasp its full implications. The spoken word has become entangled with writing and print. When we talk about words, we are seldom sure whether we mean spoken words or written words or printed words or all of these simultaneously.

We have to make a supreme effort today to establish a sense of vocalization as such. And yet, if we lack this sense, we cannot understand the development of communications systems in any real depth. For this reason, to get to the roots of our condition today, we must indulge in a little history. (77)

Here we find Ong, once again, privileging the role of sound. Words, he liked to argue, are events rather than signs. Contrast the above, however, with this passage from Jeanne Fahnestock's essay. This is taken from a section titled "Residual Orality." The essay, I should note, makes no reference to Ong or to orality-literacy contrasts except for this subheading:

A critic might complain at this point about an emphasis on sound since in our culture important texts are read not heard, and the sound dimensions of written texts are unimportant. But brain imaging studies challenge that view by showing that reading has an aural and even an oral dimension. Indeed these imaging studies show a surprising involvement of the "output" areas of the brain in decoding of different kinds of "input." In one experiment, subjects were instructed to move a finger and then to watch a moving finger in a movie. IN both cases, doing and watching, the same area in the premotor cortex showed heightened activity. In fact, the same area was stimulated when a subject was told simply to imagine the finger movement (Dublin 41). It seems as though the brain "rehearses" motion even when only thinking about it.

An overlap between reading and hearing, two means of consuming language, is perhaps not surprising. But an overlap between reading/hearing and speaking, that is between consuming and producing language, is. Formerly these activities were thought to be quite distinct. [....]

Researchers using fMRI have demonstrated that some parts of Broca's area, presumably dedicated only to language production, are activated during comprehension. "An initial explanation of this finding was that silent, covert subvocalization was occurring as part of comprehension. That is, in trying to understand the words being heard, the person was rehearsing the speaking of those words without being aware of doing so" (Dubin 51). A new appreciation of this motor component in higher cognition has come with an increasing appreciation of the role of the cerebellum, which has long been understood as the part of the brain involved in posture, movement of the limbs, and skilled small muscle movements such as those involved in speaking and writing. Imaging studies have shown, for example, that "verbal working memory for letters, words and even names utilized a strategy of silent, nonconscious rehearsal that involves some of the same parts of the brain as actually speaking these items. Studies showed activation of cerebellar regions that would normally be involved in the motor speech task, even though no actual speech occurred" (Dubin 45). Because for all nondeaf humans language is a heard and spoken system before it is a system of visual and written symbols, it persists in the auditory and motor regions of the brain even during silent reading. Hence language as revealed in brain imaging studies is always in some sense heard, and the aurally based effects of the figures can persist even in a written text that is read silently. This conclusion would not have surprised the early modern rhetoricians. (170-71)

The spoken word, it seems, is always with us, just as Ong has always argued.

On Language and Thought

Mixing Memory has a repost on cognitive science's return to linguistic relativity.

Over the last decade or so, however, cognitive scientists have been revisiting linguistic relativity (linguistic determinism is probably gone for good). They've discovered that language does in fact constrain the way we perceive and conceptualize a wide variety of things, including time, space, number, events, and perhaps even color (see this article for a short and accessible summary of some of the research, along with a nice reference section). In 2003, a collection of essays describing much of the research on linguistic relativity was published under the title Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. It's an excellent book (and it includes a chapter by Michael Tomasello, for those of you who are in the reading group), presenting many interesting ideas and experiments. I highly recommend it for people who are interested in the topic. To give you a taste, I thought I'd post on one chapter ["Sex, Syntax, and Semantics"], which I chose both because I find it very interesting, and because the chapter is available, in its entirety, online.

The full post provides a summary of Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips' "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics," which is linked to above.

As I've stated many times before, much of Ong's own work is rooted in an understanding that language use can give us insights into cognition, dating back to his dissertation work. As he explains it, while working in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, he came across Rudolph Bultmann's reference to the idea that knowing was located in terms of hearing and sound for the ancient Hebrews and in terms of seeing and vision for the ancient Greeks.

Cross posted to Machina Memorialis.

CFP: Orality and Literacy 2.0 (1 December 2006; CW 2007)

And, finally, the 25th anniversary of Orality and Literacy CFP for the Computers and Writing 2007.

CFP: Orality and Literacy 2.0: Orality-Literacy Contrasts and the Next 25 Years

As you may know, I've organizing conference sessions for both the upcoming MLA and CCCC to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982-2007). I'd like to finish this celebration off with one or two sessions at Computers and Writing 2007 (Wayne State University, 17-20 May 2007), centered around the theme "Orality and Literacy 2.0: Orality-Literacy Contrasts and the Next 25 Years." Since Orality and Literacy is itself broad in scope, I want to keep the list of possible topics broad as well. Potential topics include:

• classification and folksonomy


• digital culture


• digital literacies


• digital rhetoric


• digital textuality


• digital writing


• digitization


• ecological approaches to culture, knowledge, and technology (including but not limited to information ecology and media ecology)


• embodied cognition


• hermeneutics in the digital era


• materiality and media


• media dynamics


• medium theory


• memory


• network theory


• oralism


• the organization of the sensorium in its relation to media


• performance studies


• phenomenology and noetics


• texts and/as technology


• visualism and visual culture

While Orality and Literacy's 25th anniversary is the occasion for the session(s), presentations need not adhere closely to that text, although familiarity with Ong's work on orality-literacy contrasts and a nod to those works would be appropriate. What I am particularly interested in is the state of orality-literacy contrasts now and possibilities for the future. Although not required, I would also like to include some presentations which make specific connections with the conference theme of Virtual Urbanism.

For more more information about the Computers and Writing 2007 and the conference theme, please see the conference web site, and those interested in learning more about Ong's work on orality-literacy contrasts may find my bibliography of use.

Please send inquiries and abstracts (no more than 300 words) by December 1, 2006 to John Walter walterj[at]slu[dot]edu.

If you or someone you know may be interested in participating, I’m more than happy to discuss suggested topics and exchange ideas as the proposals are being drafted.

I’ve set the submission deadline early enough (December 1) so that if I don't include someone’s paper, they’ll have more than enough time to work up and submit another proposal to the conference if they wish.

Cross posted to Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archive

Ong Sessions at MLA 2006 and CCCC 2007

With the CCCC acceptance letter earlier this week, I can now say that my plans for a series of confernece sessions celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word is really going to be a series. I'll get a web page up with abstracts at some point, but here's the info for both the MLA 2006 and CCCC 2007 sessions:

MLA 2006

108. Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy at Twenty-Five

Thursday, 28 December

8:30–9:45 a.m., Congress C, Loews

Presiding: John P. Walter, Saint Louis Univ.

1. “Orality, Literacy, and Ong’s Asymmetrical Opposition,” Jerry S. Harp, Lewis and Clark Coll.

2. “Orality and Literacy as a Methodological Apparatus for Examining Women’s Rhetorics,” Melissa Jane Fiesta, California State Univ., Long Beach.

3. “Ong, Derrida, and the New Media Theory,” David Martyn, Macalester Coll.

CCCC 2007

Session D.07: 25 Years of Reading and Misreading Orality and Literacy

Thursday, 22 March

3:15-4:30 p.m.

Presiding: John Paul Walter, Saint Louis University.

1. "Apologia Pro Libro Suo," Betty R. Youngkin, University of Dayton.

2. "Walter Ong and Adult Literacy Programs: An Assessment and Modest Proposal," Catherine Quick, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

3. "The Vocality of Text: Orality and Literacy as Knowledge Making Tool," Gina M. Merys, Creighton University.