Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

WRITING RESTRUCTURES CONSCIOUSNESS 107
their skills were reduced to an ‘art’, that is, to a body of
sequentially organized, scientific principles which explained and
abetted what verbal persuasion consisted in. Such an ‘art’ is
presented in Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (techn rh torik ). Oral
cultures, as has been seen, can have no ‘arts’ of this scientifically
organized sort. No one could or can simply recite extempore a
treatise such as Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, as someone in an oral
culture would have to do if this sort of understanding were to be
implemented. Lengthy oral productions follow more
agglomerative, less analytic, patterns. The ‘art’ of rhetoric, though
concerned with oral speech, was, like other ‘arts’, the product of
writing.
Persons from a high-technology culture who become aware of
the vast literature of the past dealing with rhetoric, from classical
antiquity through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and on into
the Age of the Enlightenment (e.g. Kennedy 1980; Murphy 1974;
Howell 1956, 1971), of the universal and obsessive interest in the
subject through the ages and the amount of time spent studying it,
of its vast and intricate terminology for classifying hundreds of
figures of speech in Greek and Latin—antinomasia or
pronominatio, paradiastole or distinctio, anticategoria or accusatio
concertativa, and so on and on and on—(Lanham 1968; Sonnino
1968) are likely to react with, ‘What a waste of time!’ But for its
first discoverers or inventors, the Sophists of fifth-century Greece,
rhetoric was a marvelous thing. It provided a rationale for what
was dearest to their hearts, effective and often showy oral
performance, something which had been a distinctively human
part of human existence for ages but which, before writing, could
never have been so reflectively prepared for or accounted for.
Rhetoric retained much of the old oral feeling for thought and
expression as basically agonistic and formulaic. This shows clearly
in rhetorical teaching about the ‘places’ (Ong 1967b, pp. 56–87;
1971, pp. 147–87; Howell 1956, Index). With its agonistic
heritage, rhetorical teaching assumed that the aim of more or less
all discourse was to prove or disprove a point, against some
opposition. Developing a subject was thought of as a process of
‘invention’, that is, of finding in the store of arguments that others
had always exploited those arguments which were applicable to
your case. These arguments were considered to be lodged or
‘seated’ (Quintilian’s term) in the ‘places’ (topoi in Greek, loci in
Latin), and were often called the loci communes or commonplaces