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Life Arts    H4'ed 1/30/19

Walter J. Ong's Thought in Relation to Michel Foucault's Thought (REVIEW ESSAY)

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On page 46, Gutting points out that Foucault rejects "typically vague and general causes the invention of printing, the rise of the bourgeoisie." But hold onto that wording "vague and general causes" until you read what Foucault comes up with as a supposed alternative.

But this specific wording sounds to me like a reference to Jurgen Habermas' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Square: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated from the German by Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (MIT Press, 1989; orig. German ed. 1962 the same year in which the Canadian Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) published his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man [University of Toronto Press, 1962]).

Now, in the spirit of killing two birds with one stone, the British literary critic Frank Kermode killed, figuratively speaking, both McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Ong's 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, in his (Kermode's) lengthy and snide review of Ong's book in the New York Review of Books (dated March 14, 1968, pages 22-26). As far as I know, no scholar of comparable stature has published a positive review of comparable length about Ong's 1967 book.

Perhaps I should point out here that McLuhan in his 1962 book, at times, sounds alarmist but Ong, as far as I know, never sounds alarmist. However, I should also point out here that the alarmist note in McLuhan's 1962 book should be connected with the alarmist note in Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, mentioned above. But McLuhan understands that he is deeply invested in the historically conditioned values and practices of print culture in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s. In contrast, Bloom is not aware that the values and practices of print culture are waning and that a new constellation of values and practices is emerging under the influence of what Ong refers to as secondary oral culture.

In any event, on page 50, Gutting says that "Foucault's basic insight [is] that changes in thought are not due to thought itself, suggesting that when thoughts change the causes are social forces [plural] that control the behavior of the individuals."

I told you to wait for it. So the vague and general causes of "social forces [plural] that control the behavior of individuals" is an acceptable formulation.

But the "typically vague and general causes [such as] the invention of printing [and] the rise of the bourgeoisie" (page 46) are not acceptable formulations.

Now, neither Ong nor McLuhan uses Marxist terminology such as Habermas' terminology about the bourgeois.

Now, as a thought experiment, we might imagine stripping Ong's 1977 statement of his thesis of his terminology about primary orality and writing and print and secondary orality. If we were to do this, could we say that Ong's thesis can be paraphrased as saying that "changes in thought are not due to thought itself, suggesting that when thoughts change the causes are social forces [plural] that control the behavior of individuals"?

Now, if were to say that this is one possible paraphrase of Ong's basic thesis, then we would also say that his specifications about primary orality and writing and print and secondary orality further modify what otherwise would be the vague and general causes of "social forces [plural] that control the behavior of individuals."

But, as noted, Gutting tells us that this was only the first discovery that Foucault made after he had published his book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences in French in 1966 (English translation, 1970), but before he had published his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in French in 1975 (English translation, 1977).

Now, I received the following clarification from Gary Gutting: "MF's idea is that the causes of social changes are a multiple of small events e.g., a new way of teaching spelling, a change in how people dress, a new way of designing furniture various technical innovations would fit in here too" presumably including the technical innovations of the development of phonetic alphabetic writing as exemplified in the Hebrew Bible, the development of vowelized alphabetic writing in ancient Greece, and of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1450s.

I was happy to receive this clarification from him, because he does not say this explicitly on page 46 in his 2005 short book.

ONG'S THOUGHT IN RELATION TO FOUCAULT'S

Now, in Gutting's 2005 short book, he explains Foucault's terminology about archaeology and genealogy (esp. pages 53 and 60). According to Gutting, children are usually "initiated into the rudiments of mathematical, historical, and moral knowledge" through training and guidance in education (page 53). "As we grow up, a certain amount of what we have been taught becomes subject to reflective assessment, but certainly much of what we believe remains the result of social conditioning. Such examples, of course, are on the level of conscious knowledge of individuals (connaissance, in Foucault's terminology), where as Foucault is concerned with the underlying archaeological structures of knowledge (savoir). But the principle is the same in both cases: the mere fact that a cognitive state is an effect of power does not exclude it from the realm of knowledge. Power and knowledge are logically compatible" (page 53).

Now, Ong frequently refers to "the level of conscious knowledge of individuals (connaissance, in Foucault's terminology)." See, for example, Ong's book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1977) and Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. Of course, there is nothing surprising about this.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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