(1) literacy tends not to be additive rather than subordinative; instead, it tends toward subordinative structures and expressions;
(2) literacy tends not to be aggregative rather than analytic; instead, it tends toward the analytic;
(3) literacy tends not to be redundant or "copious"; instead, it tends to eschew redundancy or "copiousness";
(4) literacy tends not to be conservative or traditionalist; instead, it tends toward being inner-directed and individualistic;
(5) literacy tends not to be close to the human lifeworld; instead, it tends towards detachment from the human lifeworld;
(6) literacy tends not to be agonistically toned; instead, it tends toward being irenic;
(7) literacy tends not to be empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced; instead, it tends toward being objectively distanced;
(8) literacy tends not to be homeostatic; instead, it tends toward favoring change;
(9) literacy tends not to be situational rather than abstract; instead, it tends toward being abstract.
As we will see below, Professor Yeganeh's composite list of eleven characteristic somewhat resembles Ong's list of nine characteristics.
In any event, Professor Yeganeh's "purely conceptual approach" in his exciting forthcoming new article strikes me as being consistent with the spirit of Ong's relationist thesis in the "Preface" to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 9-13). In it, Ong says the following in the first sentence: "The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971)." He then discusses these two earlier volumes briefly.
Then Ong says, "The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (page 9-10; emphasis added).
Thus Ong himself claims (1) that his thesis is "sweeping" but (2) that the shifts do not "cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness" and (3) that the shifts are related to "major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness."
Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.
In my estimate, Ong implicitly also works with this relationist thesis in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press) - his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Ong's massively researched 1958 book, Marshall McLuhan worked up some examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press).
Next in Ong's 1977 "Preface," he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, "At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists - variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast - such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Tzvetan Todorov, not to mention Claude Levi-Strauss and certain cisatlantic critics such as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom, who are more or less in dialogue with these Europeans" (page 10).
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