Print Locks Words in Space
While Ong's book focuses primarily on the shift from orality to writing, print demands attention because it both reinforces and transforms writing's effects on thought. The shift from oral to written speech is essentially a shift from sound to visual space, and print's effects on visual space illuminate its relationship not only to writing but also to the orality still residual in manuscript culture.
The crucial development in the global history of printing was alphabetic letterpress print in fifteenth-century Europe. While humans had been printing designs from carved surfaces for millennia, and East Asian cultures had printed texts from wood blocks since the seventh or eighth century, alphabetic letterpress print—in which each letter is cast on a separate piece of metal type—marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity.
The printed book was the first assembly line: a technique producing identical complex objects from replaceable parts. The industrial revolution of the late 1700s applied to other manufacturing the techniques printers had worked with for three hundred years.
Manuscript culture in the West remained always marginally oral. Through the Renaissance, the oration remained the implicit paradigm for all discourse. Written material was subsidiary to hearing in ways that now seem bizarre: even financial accounts were checked aurally as late as the twelfth century in England—the word "audit" derives from hearing. Manuscripts were not easy to read by later typographic standards; readers tended to commit what they found to memory and commonly vocalised even when reading alone.
Eventually print replaced hearing-dominance with sight-dominance. Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Control of position is everything in print—composing type consists in positioning pre-formed elements. Printed texts look machine-made because they are; typographic control impresses by its tidiness and inevitability rather than by the ornamental calligraphy of manuscripts. Printed texts are far easier to read, enabling rapid silent reading that changes the relationship between reader and authorial voice.
Indexes, Title Pages, and Exactly Repeatable Statements
Print embedded the word in space in several distinctive ways.
Indexes. While manuscripts can theoretically be indexed, they rarely are because two copies never correspond page for page. Early indexes were crude and often misunderstood—sometimes an index made for one manuscript was appended without change to another with different pagination. The term "index" itself reveals the transition: originally "index locorum," index of places, referring to the rhetorical "places" or headings where arguments could be found. In the printed book, vague psychic "places" became physically and visibly localised.
Title pages. Each copy in a printed edition was physically identical—not merely saying the same thing but being duplicates as objects. This invited lettered labels. Title pages are new with print. Manuscript culture catalogued books by their "incipit," the first words of the text—referring to the Lord's Prayer as the "Our Father" evinces residual orality. Homer would hardly have begun a recitation by announcing "The Iliad."
Exactly repeatable visual statements. Print enabled precise technical illustrations that made modern science possible. Hand-done technical drawings deteriorate in manuscript copying because even skilled artists miss the point of illustrations outside their expertise—a sprig of white clover copied by artists unfamiliar with the plant can end up looking like asparagus. What is distinctive of modern science is the conjuncture of exact observation with exact verbalisation: precisely worded descriptions of carefully observed complex objects. Technical prints and technical verbalisation reinforced each other.
Typographic space. Print controlled not only what words were put down but their exact spatial relationships, making "white space" meaningful. Poets from George Herbert through Laurence Sterne and E.E. Cummings have exploited this. Cummings's grasshopper poem scatters letters across the page in ways impossible to read aloud yet that cannot be appropriated without awareness of verbal sound.
The Sense of Closure
Print encourages a powerful sense of closure—that what is found in a text has been finalised, has reached a state of completion. Print encloses thought in thousands of copies of exactly the same visual and physical consistency. Once type is locked up or a plate made, the text resists changes.
Manuscripts, with their marginal glosses that often got worked into subsequent copies, remained in dialogue with the world outside their borders. Print's sense of closure is at times grossly physical: newspapers fill their pages with "fillers" and justify all lines to the same width, as if physical completeness implied intellectual completeness.
Print makes for more tightly closed verbal art forms, especially in narrative. Until print, the only linearly plotted lengthy story line was drama. With print, tight plotting extends to the novel and reaches its peak in the detective story—full closure achieved inside one character's mind first (Sherlock Holmes figured it out before anyone else) and then diffused to reader and other characters. The oral narrator's protagonist, distinguished for external exploits, has been replaced by the interior consciousness of the typographic protagonist.
Print also raises the modern issue of intertextuality. Manuscript culture took intertextuality for granted, deliberately creating texts from other texts and sharing common formulas and themes. Print culture tends to feel a work as "closed," giving birth to romantic notions of "originality" and "creativity" that set individual works apart. When doctrines of intertextuality arose to counteract this isolationist aesthetics, they came as a shock. Modern writers, agonisingly aware of literary history, suffer what Harold Bloom called "the anxiety of influence." Manuscript and oral cultures had few such anxieties.
Secondary Orality
Ong's framework does not end with the triumph of literacy. He identified a "secondary orality"—the electronic transformation of verbal expression through telephone, radio, television, and sound recording—that shares striking features with primary orality while differing fundamentally in its dependence on writing.
Secondary orality exhibits participatory mystique, communal sense, concentration on the present moment, even use of formulas. It generates group consciousness for immeasurably larger groups than primary oral culture—McLuhan's "global village." But we are group-minded self-consciously and programmatically. Where primary orality promotes spontaneity because analytic reflectiveness is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spontaneity because we have analytically decided it is a good thing. "We plan our happenings carefully to be sure that they are thoroughly spontaneous."
Ong contrasted the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858—speakers facing each other in scorching sun before crowds of 12,000-15,000, speaking for hours without amplification in an additive, redundant, highly agonistic style—with modern televised debates where the audience is absent, candidates make short presentations in tight booths, and any agonistic edge is deliberately dulled. The old-style oratory coming from primary orality is gone forever. Electronic media do not tolerate shows of open antagonism; despite their cultivated air of spontaneity, they are totally dominated by print's heritage of closure.
The Evolution of Consciousness
Ong closed his book with reflections on the evolution of consciousness. Since Hegel, awareness has grown that human consciousness evolves. This evolution is marked by growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual as distanced—though not separated—from communal structures. Self-consciousness is coextensive with humanity, but reflectiveness and articulateness about the self take time to grow.
The highly interiorised stages of consciousness that distance individuals from unconscious immersion in communal structures are stages consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between orality (which all are born into) and writing (which no one is born into) touches the depths of the psyche. The oral word first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, first divides subject from predicate, and ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons.
Writing is consciousness-raising.
All religious traditions have remote origins in the oral past and make much of the spoken word, yet major world religions have been interiorised by development of sacred texts. In Christian teaching, the Second Person of the Godhead is known as the Word of God—God the Father utters or speaks His Word; He does not inscribe him. Yet Christianity also presents the written word of God, the Bible. How these two senses of God's "word" relate to one another and to human beings in history is a question more focused today than ever before.
Ong concluded: "Orality-literacy dynamics enter integrally into the modern evolution of consciousness toward both greater interiorisation and greater openness."