14 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2019
    1. no material difference

      Or nothing but material difference (paper) between them ;)

      Like kmurphy1, I was thinking Ong would likely disagree on this matter, but Astell does make room for their differences as "talents which do not always meet." For all the functional differences (oral vs pen and paper, intangible vs tangible), does Astell see them both as means of communication and therefore only different in those functions?

    2. I have made no distinction in what has been said between Speaking and Writing, because tho they are talenL'i which do not always meet, yet >"'1•""�� there is no material difference between 'cm.

      I think Ong would take issue with the notion that there is no "material difference" between speaking and writing. Writing is a "technology" so to speak, and thus presents itself differently than mere thought through speaking. One can go back and edit writing, whereas orality is not so easily done.

  2. Jan 2019
    1. xcessive power granted tolanguage to determine what is rea


    2. How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?

      I have never thought of the idea of trusting language. What would walter ong think?

    1. writing about oneself appears clearly in its relationship of complementarity with reclusion

      Ong argues that writing in general (not just self-reflective writing) is isolating. In his "Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought," he says, "Writing is diaeretic. It divides and distances, and it divides and distances all sorts of things in all sorts of ways," one of which is the way the writer becomes reclusive and divided from the world when caught up in the act of thinking and writing.

  3. May 2017
    1. nstead, women helped put the low, vernacular languages in competition with the high language

      Two things: first, in other writings by Ong where he uses this situation, he cites the loss of Roman baby talk, a purely oral, mostly feminine form of the language that we have forever lost to history. Second, this also reminds me of Nina Baym's "Melodramas of Beset Manhood," and her assertion of the male "literature" and female "best seller" and how historically they've been opposed.

  4. Apr 2017
    1. WALTER 1. ONG, SJ

      Former SLU faculty and a really remarkable guy. I've been trawling through the archives and interviewing former colleagues and students of Ong for an ongoing project, and I'm continuously struck by the personality that comes across. You don't really see it in his published works, but his lectures have these corny, not-really-a-joke jokes ("it's agreed that these epic poems were either written by Homer, or by another man of the same name") in them. Also, this essay is a good example of him touching on history, archaeology, musicology, ancient Greek, and a bit of Freud, so if you're like me and a hugely disorganized mess of interests, Ong's a lot of fun.

      Seriously, if you get the chance, check out the archives, digitized or the whole thing. You can find his poetry from before the US entered WW2 all the way to discussions about flame wars in the early 90s.

    1. rather than, for instance, a telephone conversation, in which the in-terlocutors' contexts are not simply present to one another)

      I feel that Ong addresses this, though? He draws a lot from McLuhan's point that fascism emerged from radio broadcasts, and while skimming my Ong books, I'm not finding much on the telephone, he certainly looks at technologically-mediated orality as something distinct from the usual paradigm?

  5. Mar 2017
    1. Writing, he claims, is prior to speech-not historically, of course, but conceptually, in that writing shows more clearly than speech does how language is different from what it sup-posedly represents.

      I have never been able to reconcile this with Ong's approach, that even writing involves sounding words out in your head. The text here is making it out that Derrida's only using it as an example, that both are equally at a remove, which, fair enough, but I'm not seeing how writing has primacy over speech. Bail me out here, y'all.

    1. pend also for their effectiveness upon the purely technical means of communica-tion, which can either aid the utterance or hamper it. For a "good" rhetoric neglect

      "A script in the sense of true writing, as understood here, does not consist of mere pictures, of representations of things, but is a representation of an utterance, of words that someone says or is imagined to say."




  6. Feb 2017
    1. that writers cannot address an actual audience, but rather project the kind of audience that will be receptive to their work. Reading thus involves a kind of ne-gotiation between the actual reader and the role that the author projects for the ideal reader.

      Hmmmm, so how would this apply to our hostile audiences from two weeks ago? Those were audiences for oral arguments, rather than readers, but presumably the relationship would be similar. Essentially, I suppose I am asking what Ong would say in response to an author who is deliberately writing to an unreceptive audience.

    1. Men preach a creed; women will declare ,1 life. Men deal in formulas, women in focts

      I've been toiling away in the online Ong Archives, and this seems to really call for a pairing. I'm wary to commit to it, because I have no idea about the sort of literacies and its gender divide at the time, but the division of facts from lived experience is something Ong points to as part of the shift from manuscript to print culture. Still, with women barred from much of academia, most of their written life would logically come from novels and letters more than textbooks and manuals.