October 27th, 2010
I contend that we do not now know Isocrates’ rhetorical theories well enough, because we have not understood classical Greek rhetoric and writing practices for our electrified time. (33)
Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. The MIT Press, 1999.
In this Chapter 2 of Electric Rhetoric, Welch argues that the classical rhetoric set forth by interpretations of Aristotle and Plato is “categorical and highly ordered” (p. 33) and does not account for our “electrified time.” While it may be categorical and ordered, that helps for classification. She also contends that Isocrates’ rhetoric is by nature misogynistic and exclusionist. While this may be true, that was an unfortunate condition of the period. Applied today, Aristotelian and Platonic rhetorical theory need not be exclusionist or misogynist. This is a point Welch understands well, as she goes to great lengths to vindicate Isocrates’ rhetoric and find application for it in the “next rhetoric” (Chapter 4) that she proposes.
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October 26th, 2010
Electronic technologies have led to electronic consciousness, an awareness or mentalité that now changes literacy but in no way diminishes it. (104)
Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. The MIT Press, 1999.
Welch begins this work noting that computer screens dominate the workplace and other key places in our daily lives, and this was published in 1999. Today, we interact with screens even more so with touch-screen payment systems, watches, menus, and of course our cell-phones, which now perform virtually any online task we desire. She goes on to discuss how the use of video is used in many beneficial ways, exampling its use in the medical industry. These conditions of our current use of the internet, static and interactive screens, and video have created a literacy that previous generations did not posses. It is important, here to define literacy for this discussion and to clarify that it does not merely refer to an ability to read and write or to simply understand the technology. Welch defines literacy as follows: Read the rest of this entry »
October 24th, 2010
[C]ultures which do not reduce words to space but know them only as oral-aural phenomena, in actuality or in the imagination, naturally regard words as more powerful than do literate cultures” (112).
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
That words are powerful is a common idea, meaning that words can hurt, words bring knowledge, words bring action, etc. However, for early man and oral cultures, words actually bring physical power.
It is a commonplace that early man, strongly if by no means exclusively oral-aural, experiences words–which for him typically are spoken words–as powerful, effective, of a piece with other actuality far more than later visualist man is likely to do. A word is a real happening, indeed a happening par excellence. (111).
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October 23rd, 2010
Spoken words are events, engaged in time and indeed in the present. Plato’s ideas were the polar opposite: not events at all, but motionless “objective” existence, impersonal, and out of time. (34).
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
While I have written in the past on Plato’s view and detailed various arguments from The Phaedrus, it is worth again addressing here, since Ong discusses it in this text. What we get from Plato is, essentially, a solid commitment to the spoken word and a strong aversion to the written word, believing it an approximation of the spoken word, which is actually an approximation of thought. He did write down certain things, such as some of Socrates’ teachings. However, the style was very unlike that of oral, and he strongly affirmed that “one cannot not put what is really essential to wisdom in writing, for this is to falsify it, and noting in The Phaedrus (274) that writing serves merely recall, not memory or wisdom” (55). Read the rest of this entry »
October 21st, 2010
Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. The Terry Lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.
As I’ve noted many times through this blog, I am not suggesting through my focus on this unique form of aural/visual communication that we are on some track to return to the oral. This could never happen; we cannot unknown what we know. (Actually, the OVC does not even suggest that, since it uses text as well as audio/video.) Ong also notes that there is no way we are returning to an earlier oral-aural world. “There is no return to the past. The successive verbal media do not abolish one another but overlie one another” (9). This point relates to remediation (see Bolter and Grusin) and the discussion of new media finding origins in earlier media. Additionally, oral-aural cultures had very different thought processes and relations to communication, time, and memory to which we could not return having the innumerable recorded artifacts and the recording mindset that we do in this era. Read the rest of this entry »