Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" (1986)

So I'm off to grad school again - a really exciting program at the University of Michigan - and I'm trying to background read a bit on the academic side of the discipline.  I picked up a copy of Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Cushman and a few others (2001).  I'm really just trying to keep track of my thoughts here, while consistently looking for a way to link the theory with actual daily practice.  

Ong's meat and potatoes . . . 

           Ong’s guiding principal is that there is an objective difference in the language practices of cultures that have writing and those that do not.  These differences cause cognitive changes to occur, suggesting that cultures with writing and cultures without writing have an epistemological incompatibility.  Writing is used in its noun form here because, for Ong, it is always a thing, never an action.  Therefore, it is the existence of writing that changes the shape of a social mind, not the action of inscribing that leads individual minds to conclusions.  Neither does he suggest that the cumulative action of many members of a culture might shape the way that ideas are formed, understood, or critiqued.  Instead, it is a society’s (and particularly a society’s language’s) interaction with the existence of concrete texts that shapes the way the mind works.  To be general, because Ong is very general, this tendency can be seen in the tendency for oral cultures to do things like speak in parables, truisms, rhythmic structures, and in ways that preserve and conserve knowledges.  Literate cultures, on the other hand, can develop things like formal logic because of the ability to move forward and backward in time over the course of a text.  He also argues that it is the existence of writing that makes it necessary or even possible to use words to describe other words (suggesting that Derrida’s whole bit about deferment is pinned on the existence of writing and not on something innate to language). 

            So essentially, this is a socio-psychological argument akin to Fredric Jameson’s work in The Political Unconscious and afterward: the dialectic between social formations and forms of expression are clearly outlined although without explicitly recognizing the relationship to means of production.  Without going too far into it, the development of abstract logics along with the development of writing seems also to mirror the abstraction of social relations as civilizations grow.  To speak in known truisms that were remembered as the roots of a stable community was no longer really an option, since the spatial abstraction that writing enables was necessitated by the greater spatial division between individuals as trade and divisions of labor flourished. 

            It is with this in mind that Ong’s slightly mechanistic title falls short, at least insofar as Writing does not act as a unified subject on thought, the passive object.  The idea that, for instance, “writing separates interpretation from data” misses the point that the rise of writing in the particular cognitive form it took might have come along with the administrative need to distinguish explication and elaboration from utterances -or in the terms used in today’s hegemonic corporate-style models of running things, analysis from the hard numbers (25).

A little Ong in the room . . .

            In the actual practice of teaching students to write, Ong’s essay is useful though.  In the past year, I have been adapting ideas from Judith Hochman’s expository writing pedagogy.  One of the important things I’ve taken from her work (which, I manipulate very freely – I don’t even know if anything I do still resembles her actual recommendations) is the way that writing helps students to structure thoughts.  We have experimented with conjunctions and subordinators in an effort to summarize in a way that actually thinks through the implications of the text, rather than just retelling a story.  Hochman suggests a “because-but-so” sentence formula as one way to help students structure their thoughts in writing.  These three words necessitate the inclusion of a cause, a complication, and an outcome or conclusion.  Therefore, the shaping of a student’s understanding of the text and a response to it comes in a dialectic of reading and writing in these particular forms. 

            Clearly, Ong’s text is talking about a more socio-cultural level (almost sub-species level, if I get a little cynical) when he talks about the way that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word” (23).  His is a societal transformation, one that occurs at the level of grammar and syntax.  While I don’t disagree beyond the dialectical complications I’ve already mentioned, I find it hard to work this into day to day practice, even on a conceptual level for myself.  It is only at the individual level (albeit in a microsociety of a class full of individuals) that I can think through Ong’s notion of writing structuring thought, and Hochman’s method is the closest I can get to imagining that working in actual lesson.