Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

168 ORALITY AND LITERACY
SOCIAL SCIENCES, PHILOSOPHY, BIBLICAL
STUDIES
Other fields open to orality-literacy studies can only be mentioned
here. Anthropology and linguistics, as has been seen, have already
felt the effects and contributed greatly to our knowledge of orality
in its contrasts with literacy. Sociology has thus far felt the effects
less strongly. Historiography has yet to feel the effects: How
interpret ancient historians, such as Livy, who wrote to be read
aloud? What is the relation of Renaissance historiography and the
orality embalmed in rhetoric? Writing created history. What did
print do to what writing created? The fuller answer cannot be
simply quantitative, in terms of increased ‘facts’. What does the
feeling for closure fostered by print have to do with the plotting of
historical writing, the selection of the kinds of theme that historians
use to break into the seamless web of events around them so that a
story can be told? In keeping with the agonistic structures of old
oral cultures, early history, though written, was largely the story of
wars and political confrontation. Today we have moved to the
history of consciousness. This shift in focus here obviously relates
to the interiorizing drift in the chirographic mentality. In what
ways?
So far as I know, philosophy, and, with it, intellectual history,
has done little with orality studies. Philosophy and all the sciences
and ‘arts’ (analytic studies of procedures, such as Aristotle’s Art of
Rhetoric) depend for their existence on writing, which is to say
they are produced not by the unaided human mind but by the
mind making use of a technology that has been deeply interiorized,
incorporated into mental processes themselves. The mind interacts
with the material world around it more profoundly and creatively
than has hitherto been thought. Philosophy, it seems, should be
reflectively aware of itself as a technological product—which is to
say a special kind of very human product. Logic itself emerges from
the technology of writing.
Analytic explicatory thought has grown out of oral wisdom only
gradually, and perhaps is still divesting itself of oral residue as we
accommodate our conceptualizations to the computer age.
Havelock (1978a) has shown how a concept such as Platonic
justice develops under the influence of writing out of archaic
evaluative accounts of human operations (oral ‘situational
thinking’) innocent of the concept of ‘justice’ as such. Further