Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

SOME THEOREMS 173
mind’. This is the paradox of human communication.
Communication is intersubjective. The media model is not. There
is no adequate model in the physical universe for this operation of
consciousness, which is distinctively human and which signals the
capacity of human beings to form true communities wherein
person shares with person interiorly, inter-subjectively.
Willingness to live with the ‘media’ model of communication
shows chirographic conditioning. First, chirographic cultures
regard speech as more specifically informational than do oral
cultures, where speech is more performance-oriented, more a way
of doing somethingto someone. Second, the written text appears
prima facie to be a one-way informational street, for no real
recipient (reader, hearer) is present when the texts come into
being. But in speaking as in writing, some recipient must be
present, or there can be no text produced: so, isolated from real
persons, the writer conjures up a fictional person or persons. ‘The
writer’s audience is always a fiction’ (Ong 1977, pp. 54–81). For a
writer any real recipient is normally absent (if a recipient is
accidentally present, the inscribing of the message itself proceeds
as though the person were somehow absent—otherwise, why
write?). The fictionalizing of readers is what makes writing so
difficult. The process is complex and fraught with uncertainties. I
have to know the tradition—the intertextuality, if you wish—in
which I am working so that I can create for real readers fictional
roles that they are able and willing to play. It is not easy to get
inside the minds of absent persons most of whom you will never
know. But it is not impossible if you and they are familiar with the
literary tradition they work in. I hope that I have somewhat
succeeded in laying hold on tradition sufficiently to get inside the
minds of readers of this present book.
THE INWARD TURN: CONSCIOUSNESS AND
THE TEXT
Since at least the time of Hegel, awareness has been growing that
human consciousness evolves. Although being human means being
a person and thus being unique and induplicable, growth in
historical knowledge has made it apparent that the way in which a
person feels himself or herself in the cosmos has evolved in a
patterned fashion over the ages. Modern studies in the shift from
orality to literacy and the sequels of literacy, print and the