Reading as Conversion

In the Week two assigned readings, Walter Ong discusses Primary Orality, that is orality in cultures who have no written language, and literacy. A key moment Ong discussed was the time aroudn 700 BC when the Greeks were developing an alphabet, and thus the majority of their culture over the next three hundred years transferred from an oral culture to a literate culture.

In chapter two Ong was discussing how before the widespread use of literacy in the Greek culture, there was a heavy dependence on cliches and repetitive, formulaic structures. This was a product of the lack of writing system. When Ong says that "words are residue" (chapter 1, p. 11), it means that words are left over from the creation of a work. "When all that exists of [an oral story] is the potential for human beings to tell it" (11). So without any residue, or left over writings to use, a poet has to memorize his works. Memorizing in verbatim every single work one makes is extremely difficult, so repetitive structures and cliches were used as mnemonics to help keep their works in circulation in their oral culture.

In later millenia, this use of cliches and formulaic structures was heavily criticized and forsaken. In chapter 2 Ong cites several examples of literary critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century detesting Homeric poetry for its use of cliches and predictable metrical structure. Their whole language system was different as it included a well-established literary system. I see the advent of literacy and written language as remediation over primary oral cultures. The way written language restructures our thought and the function of our speech, the way we have moved away from formulaic and cliched thinking into a much larger and more diverse way of speaking, that is remediation.

One thing that interested me intensely in chapter one was the idea of reading. What reading is is to take this remediated form of language- writing, and convert it into sound- or oral language. This new, literate way we use language still has to be converted back to our primary modeling system. It's still remediation because writing language instead of composing it orally restructures the way we think and changes the messages we are trying to communicate, and is a secondary modeling system. What we ultimately convert back into sound- the carrier of our primary modeling system, is a different message than if the secondary modeling system never existed.