I worked in marketing at Cornell University Press in Ithaca while completing my dissertation years ago, and one book on our backlist there happened to be Walter Ong’s 1977 Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, which is one of the lesser-known of his several works on “the word” (his 1967 The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History and his 1982 Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word are probably better known, while much more recently (2017) Cornell University Press has published his posthumous Language as Hermeneutic: The Word and Digitization.) I cited several of Ong’s works in Chapter 5 and I want to write a bit more about his ideas than I was able to do there. A 2014 symposium on “Current Opportunities in Ong Scholarship” provided an interesting overview of Ong’s various contributions, and I look forward to seeing a similar event in the near future, as his concerns are still very timely.
Ong (1912-2003), a Jesuit priest, is probably less known as a seminal media theorist than is his contemporary Marshall McLuhan (1911 -1980), since Ong was more apt to publish a scholarly monograph than to appear on a popular television program. (Unlike McLuhan, who soon became a staple of pop culture, as seen below):
Anyway, Ong’s Interfaces of the Word is a collection of essays that deal with such topics as “The Poem as a Closed Field” and “The Writer’s Audience is a Fiction,” but the most intriguing to me is his “Transformation of the Word and Alienation,” in which he discusses the fact that through history the most intellectually influential languages (Learned Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, and Rabbinic Hebrew) have “never been learned as mother tongues but always after a mother tongue has been learned. Second, they have been learned always with the help of writing, for, despite widespread oral use, they have been sustained and controlled by script. Third, they came into being between the period when writing was interiorized in the psyche sufficiently to affect thought processes and personality structures and the period when print and print technology and further affected thought process and personality structures. Fourth, they were all sex-linked languages, used only by males with mostly negligible exceptions (the few women writers in Classical Chinese appear to have been perhaps slightly less negligible than women writers in the other learned languages). Fifth, these learned languages are all, in one way or another, either disappearing from use or regaining status as mother tongues: the age of chirographically distanced, exclusively learned languages is over with, across the globe” (page 29).
He goes on to suggest that such learned languages provided a certain level of alienation from the human life-world, allowing ordinary emotions and preoccupations to be held at a distance, replaced by formal rhetorical devices that in the West gradually evolved from medieval scholasticism into the discourse communities of modern experimental and observational science which, again, are usually esoteric and exclusive.
Ong’s comments on “distance” in language and its impact on thought also reminds me of science historian Carolyn Merchant’s view in her 1980 The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution that the influential imagery of 17th century natural philosopher Francis Bacon in describing how science should best be advanced “treats nature as a female to be tortured through mechanical inventions and strongly suggests the interrogations of the witch trials and the mechanical devices used to torture witches.” Merchant made the case that such alienation from the earlier Renaissance view of “Mother Nature” was central to the Scientific Revolution, in which women often bore the brunt of novel, “experimental” practices in medicine and science, for example, as male physicians replaced female midwives and cases of childbed fever increased correspondingly with such “interventions.”
Although there has been considerable debate as to what Bacon actually meant as of course he wrote in Latin (he used the Latin word “vexatio” and his translators have had differing interpretations of what this may have implied in the context of experimentation), this pre-modern perspective was one of the foundations on which modern science was built, along with the exploitation of natural resources (and people) through trade on which capitalism was built, as Merchant also argues.
However, Ong’s optimism about the demise of “chirographically distanced, exclusively learned languages” probably doesn’t apply to scientific language, even as the alienated view of nature as an “other” rather than as a “mother” is gradually losing its hold in a more ecologically-informed world in which we are seeing the effects of such “”vexation” of the planet on which we live.
Verba Volant, Scripta Manent.
Keywords In and Out of Context 