Back to Orality

Humanities and Social Science
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This is an interesting topic. I was recently questioning why I don’t read more often, especially fiction. Because for me, books are always better than movies. I think part of the issue is it is easier to watch something in 2 hours vs. commit to reading something that might take days.

But I also think this depends on the type of reading. For example, a novel may take days to read. But for news, I much prefer to read than to watch news shows. I find that I can read news faster than having to watch a show that includes stories I’m not interested in. News shows also require you to listen to people discuss the topic rather than just get to the point.

So, in some ways I read more and some ways I read less. As for the overall population, I think the shift to more orality is in part because it is easier to watch than read in most cases. But also, because it’s never been easier to preserve orality through recorded videos.

We most likely switched from oral knowledge to written knowledge because writing provided a way to save it and share it without someone having to hold all of it in their head.

As for your question, we aren’t going back to orality in its original form. I don’t think it is good or bad in general. I think it is humans using the tools that are available. I don’t think writing/reading will go away either. I think it will fluctuate between mediums based on which ones do the best job.

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YouTube is great for this kind of stuff, better by far than mere words. We are visual creatures.

Paul de Man comes to mind for me. The construction of a text allows for an arbitrary intensity of compression toward temporal depth. The text is an artifact, a machine. Imagine an imprisoned philosopher or novelist who has 50 years to compose a transmission of no more than 5000 words. It likely won’t be “jazz.” If the philosophy/novelist has “lots to stay,” the production will be saturated. The text could easily contain secret codes. What what Joyce have done with those 17 years if he were only allowed 100 pages for his “work in progress” ?

Great question ! We might think of text as a score. It comes fully to life when voiced. I typically “voice” the author I read in my imagination. The super-dense text mentioned above ( which could be a miniature Finnegans Wake ) could be extremely difficult to decide how to voice. The score will be hard to parse in terms of its “directedness” or feeling. Gadamer is great on this stuff.

Orality ( as voicing ) is primary. A return to “high” orality is great, but this “height” seems to depend on textuality as premeditation and loving revision. If I recall correctly, Milton composed Paradise Lost blind. His daughters would take down long passages that he had worked up in his memory. Is the essence of textuality the “harsh desire to endure” ? To chisel the score of a speech that should not be forgotten ?

I’m guessing that you — a fellow writer — are also sometimes torn between trying to say X better and moving on to discuss Y. Kant rushed the CPR because he was afraid he’d die without getting his system out. Norman Kemp Smith is great on this in the commentary he wrote before he went on to translate the book.

Have you seen Deadwood ? I should say: have you heard Deadwood ? Great script profoundly voiced.

That Ong book is great ! I found it in cheap paperback. It was very nice to see something like a “defense” of phonocentrism. But — as with Derrida — it’s not simply a matter of picking a side.

Just in case you ( or others ) haven’t seen this masterpiece of a lecture:

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As a member of Am HaSefer, people of the book, I can’t accept the lack of importance of the written word, as if it’s just one choice of many ways to communicate.

I’m sure there’s some neurological explanation or learning theory support for the intellectual gap between those who read and those who don’t. As in, there truly is a causal link between reading to your children and their future intellectual success.

We read and write in order to learn, without which we’d all be stupider.

What I find interesting is that I can’t watch videos more than a minute long, but I can read for extended lengths. I just can’t sit there and wait for whatever they have to say. In real life, I’m sort of the same way.

I also have a joke about orality and 5 minute videos that I’m too sophisticated to make.

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Interesting. I’ve never read much philosophy mainly because it’s abstruse and I don’t get much from it. Getting an inadequate reading of a complex text seems pointless and so I leave the hard graft of comprehension to the specialists. I wonder if this is just me being the contingent product of time, place and disposition. What you are drawn to seems to me to come down to how we construe value and/or pay off.

I read a fair few novels over the years, mainly 19th and mid 20th century - and thousands of essays. I still enjoy good writing in essay form. But I find the older I get, the less I am drawn to reading. It’s hard work and I’d rather see some YouTube lectures than have to manage slabs of tedious text. But I’m not looking for truth or studying for exams. I’m only wanting to get a taste of what’s out there in the marketplace of ideas.

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I do enjoy reading short stories and short story collections. I suppose they don’t take the same investment as a novel. I also think there is something to the visual aspect of a movie that might be more immersive or maybe just easier to get immersed.

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A book review of “Reading Matters” by Joel Harforff.

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No longer mere receivers, readers became arbiters, increasingly apt to determine the contours and content of their own understanding. Silent, scholastic reading, argues Halldorf, “enabled a more subversive inner life….Readers could explore ideas outside the mainstream.” Private reading created more space for dissent, heresy, eroticism, radicalism, even revolution.

— Reading: The Quietest Way To Disobey

And this is surely one of the things we want to maintain. But:

Still, Halldorf rejects any sort of linear liberation story. Technological developments expand possibilities; they don’t dictate outcomes.

Which allows for the return to orality, agreeing that what we take for granted was never destined to be and is not now destined to continue.

The other thing I found interesting in the review was the idea that print can be used for good or for ill, for liberation or for domination:

Just as screens can be used for deep reading or doomscrolling, our tools can be put to different ends. Print and private reading allowed people like Martin Luther to break with Catholic authority. But print also allowed the Catholic Church to standardize and enforce doctrine, and Calvin’s Geneva demanded people think and do just as John Calvin desired.

Books could free an individual, but print culture also enabled the rise of bureaucracy and the nation-state. “As information technology advances, so, too, does the capacity for control,” says Halldorf.

I feel like resisting this apparently obvious observation. Rather than opposed uses of the same neutral tool, I think it’s more like different effects of the same use.

The Soviet mass literacy campaign took the country from around 20% to around 100% literacy in 50 years. It’s obvious that in this context, the ability to read was potentially liberating—the appetite for and exposure to subversive ideas grew, despite the censors—but was also a means to deliver propaganda more directly and comprehensively.

Another example: translating scripture into the vernacular liberated readers from the church hierarchy and at the same time imposed a new standardized dogma. It also created the modern moral conscience: reading the word for yourself gave you an inner judge. You could condemn the church with that, but it also became the new church authority, internalized.

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Yeah, I think this is because there’s more passivity in watching the video, whereas reading is active. I mean, this feels like the reason—when you get fed up with the 10 minute introduction, you feel bored and like your time is being wasted: you are being talked at, and reading is more like being talked to (or with).

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This brings up another issue, which is legalistic. We write to document and preserve. Orality is by its nature informal and imprecise. To use the US Constitution as an example, the words were debated and voted on, so each word now closely analyzed if we wish to understand its meaning. We don’t just try to best remember. As with any agreement we say “get it in writing” to assure it’s accurately preserved.

Religious literature provides another obvious example of the primacy of the written word over the remembered tradition.

The rigorous study within the Jewish tradition that became available through the creation of the those yeshivot in the late 1700s was a direct response to fears of loss of culture through assimilation. The yeshiva culture exploded post holocaust for that reason as well, now with far greater urgency. That is to say, they bought forth their documented beliefs and made sure it be read and remembered as a defense to loss of culture.

But I don’t necessarily divide the world here into two sorts of documents of the holy and the mundane because that’d be likely arbitrary. All that we write serves to preserve.

But so does the theater and the cinema and YouTube and TikTok you could say, each also preserving through the permanence of the recording. I suppose Braveheart, The Fiddler on the Roof, Gone with the Wind and others have played their role in tradition preservation (along with tradition modification through interpretation, which is always the case regardless of medium).

I’m arguing in a circle I suppose because the counter I just proposed has validity. There does seem though like something remains regarding the holding of the written words before us as if objects for analysis that evades those comprised just of breath. Maybe with enough thought I can nail this down, but it seems I’m suggesting an ontological and not just format distinction, a reification, as if the word as thing matters, heightened by its visible presence and somehow better available for the microscope.

Maybe there’s something to what I’m going on about, or maybe it ends in incoheremce.

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That happens when you are large and contain multitudes.

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A small addition to your topic: I’d like to highlight one more aspect.

I came across this article:

I won’t vouch for the accuracy of the information, but the underlying idea is significant:

“Project Panama” was an attempt to scan—destructively—every book in the world.
The company bought up millions of new and used books.
The book spines were sliced ​​off using a hydraulic cutter.
The pages were fed through industrial high-speed scanners.
The paper originals were subsequently discarded or destroyed.
This scanning process was intended to facilitate machine learning for AI.

At first glance, it all seems perfectly legal: the purchaser buys the books and, as the new owner, has the right to do whatever they please with them. But here is the crucial point. A book—in its physical form, whether good or bad—contains specific information. We can open the book and access that information at any time. If that source disappears (for whatever reason), the very evidence of something vanishes along with it. In digital form, any information can be altered at the discretion of its current owner, and such changes can be made without leaving a trace.

A book is more than just a bound stack of paper; it is a cultural artifact. Consider this: today, one could gather all the ancient statues from around the world, scan them (in high fidelity), and present them in a digital museum. Art would become more accessible to the masses—but what if the statues themselves were destroyed because they were deemed unnecessary?

From a legal (or moral) standpoint, we view an object in terms of ownership rights: whoever owns it determines its fate.

But here is what could happen: by losing books as physical evidence, those who do not own them lose the ability to verify authenticity. What if the owner of a digital copy wants to alter the source material, while the paper copy is lost forever?

Take a print run of 10,000 copies distributed among various owners; it functions as a physical analogue to a blockchain. To rewrite history or alter a paragraph in a paper edition of 1984, one would have to physically seize or modify books in thousands of homes simultaneously (which is impossible). Paper is a distributed, immutable artifact.

If the paper original is destroyed during “destructive scanning,” the very possibility of cross-verification vanishes. Consequently, the owner of the digital copy (assuming the paper ones are gone) gains unfettered power to interpret and rewrite the content.

Of course, I view these events from my own perspective (and with my own particular quirks). But here is my point: ownership of an object is not the same as control over the record it bears. It seems the philosophical essence of property rights requires re-examination in the current context.

Returning to your original topic, I would conclude that perhaps the worst thing our generation could do is abandon paper books and let them fall into oblivion.

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Interesting. Some good points on ownership vs. control of the record, but the risk is only real if it concerns the texts that people actually still read and cite, not for the great majority of paper books, which are probably of no value to anyone. If you go round any used bookshop or charity shop you see hundreds of such books, like a how-to giude for Windows Me or a diet book from the 1980s.

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Of course, this isn’t about preserving absolutely everything. On the other hand, whenever we talk about regulation, we inevitably have to draw lines regarding what is worth preserving and what isn’t. This is a never-ending debate. Take, for instance, the birch-bark letters from the 11th and 12th centuries—personal correspondence that held little value at the time. Today, however, they allow us to reconstruct the relationships between people of that era and establish the context for various events.

Yet, it is not so much these distinctions that worry me, but rather two other aspects.

  1. By abandoning paper, we risk losing the record as a physical artifact.

  2. A record could fall into the hands of someone who might interpret the “spirit” (or context) of events however they please.

And there is something else. The information provided gives no clue as to why exactly they need all these books and texts. Perhaps the goal is to train AI models to speak coherently, or maybe—by analyzing such vast quantities of text—developers are searching for hidden patterns in human thought. After all, even a book on using Windows 95 was written by a human with a clear, meaningful intent. Who knows?

Nevertheless, I hope that humans will not lose—at least not entirely—the ability to think and analyze texts independently by ceding this function to AI. In this regard, the preservation of paper-based literature is crucial.

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It is an interesting and fruitful thesis, but I would point to two differences. First, you speak about “losing it the moment the voice stops,” and yet your YouTube example shows that the “orality” you speak of does not lack the quality of persistence. That’s an interesting difference, especially as it relates to memory and recall.

Second, if we compare ancient orality to modern orality, there is a difference in how the “specialist enclave” relates to orality. In the ancient world orality was self-perpetuating and did not rely upon a specialist enclave (of the literate). But in the modern world, orality depends upon the specialist enclave insofar as things like YouTube and voice recognition presuppose written communication, especially in the form of written computer code. Similarly, the potency of AI is based on the large amount of written inputs that have been fed to it, at least at present. I’m not sure neo-orality will ever free itself from this dependency.

The second difference is particularly interesting because it subordinates the orality of the masses to the specialist enclave. Think, for example, of the literate engineer who modifies a search algorithm, thereby altering the oral media that are readily available to the masses. Ancient orality found its apogee in story telling, religion, myth, and cultural memory. It’s not clear how modern orality will be altered by the technocratic dependency.

(Incidentally, I think the return to orality could have been predicted in retrospect simply in virtue of the facts that 1) speaking is more basic to human life than writing, and 2) technological progress makes things easier. Thus, under the cultural value which prioritizes the propagation of information to individuals, speech will be preferred to writing wherever possible, and technology makes it much more possible.)

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