speech: godstuffs

Music: Haujobb: Freeze Frame Reality (1995)

Today, with Baby Jesús at my feet, I worked a bit more on my review essay. I thought Ong would be much easier to gloss than he turned out to be, a testament to the uniqueness of his thought. I started reading Ong for The Book; his sense of wonder and curiosity is infectious. Unlike McLuhan, who is a bit too Nietzschean for my tastes (in aphoristic style, in smugness, and so on), Ong has that "kid in God's Candy Store" sort of read---smart as hell, but still wide-eyed and immune to cynicism. As I wrote today, all I could think of is Tron and the evil MC's demand that prisoners give up their belief in their "Users." The Presence of the Word is really like Tron circa 1967. I'd say that in the essay, but I fear there's probably only a narrow window of generational consciousness that would register the reference. [sigh] I'm a 27-year-old trapped in a 34-year-old's body. Ong gives me the sense he felt the same way (a 40 year old in a 60-something body, you know, same dealie-O).

Have I ever mentioned that I have two more big-thingie-in-my-house wishes? In addition to my fortune teller Tara, I would like an old-fashioned jukebox (with bubbles) and a stand-up Tron coin-op video game for my living quarters. I suspect when I turn 45 I can make this a reality (much better than buying a sports car, no?). Nevertheless, here goes:

Speech: The Link Between Media Ecology and Religion

Because The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History precedes the more widely read Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by over a decade, it reflects a different focus and approach: whereas the latter is more programmatic and helped to found so-called Orality-Literacy studies, the former advances a more phenomenological understanding of the object of human speech that underwrites much of Ong's subsequent work.[1] Presence is a masterful expansion of a series of lectures delivered at Yale in 1964 into six, meaty, wide-ranging chapters that take up the human voice in respect to pre- and post-typographic economies, the "electronic age," sound, the sacred and the profane, world politics, and, of course, religious thought. Although Ong concedes to Heidegger that "language itself is at its deepest level not primarily . . . a system of sounds," the book opens with the argument that "communication, like knowledge itself, flowers in speech."[2] This is because, Ong suggests, "words are primarily spoken things" as well as the basic unit human communication. Later in the book the author reveals the reason why spoken words are considered the most fundamental unit of human communication is because sound as such connotes "presence":

Sound, bound to the present time by the fact that it exists only at the instant when it is going out of existence, advertises presentness. It heightens presence in the sense of the existential relationship of person to person (I am in your presence; you are present to me), with which our concept of present time (as against past an future) connects: present time is related to us as is a person whose presence we experience. It is "here." It envelops us. Even the voice of one dead, played from a recording, envelops us with his presence as no picture can.[3]

The example of the dead voice is crucial to Ong's argument because it underscores the significance of the perception and experience of presence, contrary to critics who have suggested his understanding of speech is "animistic."[4] The uncanny experience of feeling the presence of a dead person after hearing a recording of her voice does not necessarily mean a ghost has been conjured: "Presence does not irrupt into voice," clarifies Ong, voice "simply conveys presence as nothing else does."[5] He then traces the fate of this affect of interpersonal here-and-nowness through three stages of human technological development: the "unrecorded word" of oral culture; the "denatured word" of print and typology, and the electronic "sensorium" of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Readers are probably more familiar with Ong's interest with the advent of typography and the shift from an oral to written culture it (literally) marked, however, in addition to providing a frame for historical work, Ong's signature move in Presence is his elaboration of the concept of the "sensorium":

Sound and the word itself must be . . . considered in terms of the shifting relationships between the senses. These relationships must not be taken merely abstractly but in connection with various cultures. In this connection, it is useful to think of cultures in terms of the organization of the sensorium. By the sensorium we mean here the entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex. The differences in cultures [regarding notions of "taste" geographically and over time] we have just suggested can be thought of as differences in the sensorium, the organization of which is in part determined by culture while at the same time it makes culture.[6]

Much of Presence is dedicated to mapping changes in the sensorium through the examination of speaking and reading practices. For example, Ong relates an anecdote from the Middle Ages that he suggests indexes a shift from oral to writerly forms of thought: "Augustine makes special note of the fact that when he once dropped in on Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, he found Ambrose reading to himself without making a sound. Augustine's note shows that silent private reading was not entirely unknown, but it also shows that it was certainly singular and deserving of comment."[7] Presence is teaming with similar such anecdotes and stories as Ong trances the sensorium to the middle of the twentieth century, where he finally locates a "new orality" and organization of the senses hastened by "the present electronic media," which are "bringing the whole globe into continual contact with all of itself at once and thus tending to minimize ingroup feelings."[8] Perhaps in distinction from the central thrust of another book also published in 1967, Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle,[9] for Ong the shifting openness of people to exteriors, to the world outside and to foreign cultures (that which Ong's teacher Marshall McLuhan and co-author Quentin Fiore would dub the "global village"),10 was catalyzed by the telepresence of speech. Spectacle may represent one culture to the next, but because of the way in which speech alone conveys presence, it imbues cross or trans-group communication with a feeling of intimacy that no image possibly can.

Over the next decade, Ong recast the sensorium as an "ecological concern" that called attention to interactivity, to an emergent form of consciousness intercoursing with an increasingly electronically mediated environment. Attention to this congress

echoed earlier thinking culminating in Darwin's work, which has shown how species themselves . . . are not fixed but develop though natural selection brought about by open interaction between individuals and environment. The new philosophical attention to openness appears not unrelated to the opening of previously isolated human groups to one another fostered by electronic communications media, telephone, radio, and ultimately television.[11]

In other words, nascent in Ong's notion of the sensorium is a focus on what Neil Postman eventually termed "media ecology," defined as "the study of media as environments."[12] Although Ong's work bears the mark of bio-evolutionary thinking, we would be remiss to ignore the theological import of his thought. For Ong, the ways in which we listen with and through electronics---and by extension, the digital gadget---bears directly on our relation to God.

Ultimately the Presence of the Word is an evocation of God's presence, an attempt to show how the "modern means of communication . . . have annihilated time and space" in such a way that "man's word [,] . . . as a primary point of entry for the divine," has enlarged and intensified the feeling of God's here-and-nowness.[13] Although Ong admits that the human feeling of presence is nevertheless a perception, among a gathering of true-believers such perceptions in concert furnish "the matrix, the womb for his [Christ's] coming, as Mary once did."[14] At the conclusion of the book Ong warns such an auditory matrix can be lost to "visualism" if we are not careful, for we are already insensitive to the "auditory character of the word," a character which marks the specificity of human utterance.[15] Whether or not one believes in Deity, Ong's final remarks about the inherent mystery of the word are central for understanding not only why the fantasy of speech as "presence" has only intensified in our time (and perhaps why Weber's "secularization thesis" was misguided), but also why there has been a modest, contemporary revival of interest in the object of speech that runs counter to the misleading reduction of "word" to "sign":

In the strict sense, the word is not a sign at all. For to say it is a sign is to liken it to something in the field of vision. . . . The word cannot be seen, cannot be handed about, cannot be "broken" and reassembled. Neither can it be completely "defined." To want to define the word . . . is somehow to want to remove it . . . from its natural habitat and place it in a visual field. . . . the word remains for us at root a mystery, a datum in the sense-world existing in closest association with that other mystery which is understanding itself.[16]

The word denotes a blind spot that contemporary technologies of telepresence help to amplify but fail to capture, a blind spot that locates speech at the intersection of the human and the divine, a mysterious locality that both inspires and eludes. The word needs speech to animate it, and yet, as St. Augustine argues, when it is His Word the voice of enunciation, that specific, human medium of articulation-the Preacherman and the Revelator-should recede.[17] What is left is either that Absolute Presence of Plato or, as Mladen Dolar argues, just more and more of the blind spot, something that he designates as the topography of the "voice object."

From Word to Voice: Speech as the Object of the Subject

Dolar begins is psychoanalytic study, A Voice of Nothing More, by ridding himself of Ong's theological passion. The book opens with reference to Walter Benjamin's famous parable of the automaton and the dwarf in "On the Concept of History" in order to underscore the "implicitly teleology" of the voice made so explicit in Ong's work: the religious ambassador is really only the voice, while God is the word (logos).18 Dolar cites a passage from St. Augustine in which "the voice gradually loses its function as the soul progresses to Christ" in order to suggest that "there is only a small step from linguistics to theology."19 Dolar argues that we must break with the implicit "theology of the voice as the condition of revelation" in the opposite direction, from

the height of meaning back to what appeared to be mere means; to catch the voice as a blind spot of making sense, or as a cast-off of sense. We have to establish another framework than that which spontaneously imposes itself with the link between a certain understanding of linguistics, teleology, and theology.[20]

In a sense, Dolar then moves on to argue that what Ong specified as "the word" is really "the voice," or rather, something more in voice than voice which he terms the "voice object." Dolar compares "the word" and "God's Word" to the attempt of linguistics to avoid the voice object though semiology and phonology. Just as Augustine urged the eclipse of the voice of John the Baptist by God's Word, so too did Saussure and Jacobson jettison the voice object with the signifier and phoneme respectively. After the first chapter A Voice and Nothing More thus emerges as an attempt to recover the un-recoverable, something that human speech evokes yet which is beyond our ability to represent it, something that is conveyed by voice yet which is beyond meaning: the voice object.

So what is the voice object? [Stay tuned . . . er, read?]

Notes

[1] For an excellent overview of Ong's career vis-à-vis that of others associated with Media Ecology, see Lance Strate, "A Media Ecology Review." Communication Research Trends 23 (2004): 3-48.
[2] Ong, Presence, 2, 1.
[3] Ong, Presence, 101.
[4] U. Milo Kaufmann, review of The Presence of the Word by Walter J. Ong, S.J., Journal of Aesthetic Education 3 (1969): 162.
[5] Ong, Presence, 114.
[6] Ong, Presence, 6.
[7] Ong, Presence, 58.
[8] Ong, Presence, 301.
[9] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (New York: Zone Books, 1995).
[10] See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2005).
[11] Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 324.
[12] Strate, "Media Ecology," 4; also see Neil Postman, "The Reformed English Curriculum." High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in Secondary Education, edited by Alvin C. Eurich (New York: Pitman), 160-168. For exemplary rhetorical work conducted from a media ecology perspective, see Kenneth Rufo, "The Mirror in the Matrix of Media Ecology." Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2000): 117-140.
[13] Ong, Presence, 312-313.
[14] Ong, Presence, 311.
[15] Ong, Presence, 322-333.
[16] Ong, Presence, 323.
[17] See Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[18] See Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," translated by Harry Zohn. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 289.
[19] Dolar, A Voice, 16.
[20] Dolar, A Voice, 16.