The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.
Orality ties cultures together. The written word causes more introspective thinking, increasing individuality. Ong claims that although this is dividing it is uniting as well. Perhaps an extension of his argument that oral language awakens the self and then allows us to interact with others?
Marshal McLuhan, drawing on the work on Henri Bergson, sees even orality as a little more divisive.
Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech. (Understanding Media)
This collective unconscious sounds almost idyllic. How cruel of language to have separated us from it.
I've recently discovered the Radiolab podcasts. When I was listening to "Lucy" I got a glimpse of what McLuhan is talking about. At one point a man talks about a Bonobos making amends with him after biting him. The animal cried into his mouth. This image is so powerful. Clearly their interaction went far beyond words. Near the end of the show one of the women who works with the Bonobos says she thinks they do have a deeper connection, one that we have lost.
I've been chasing this idea that the spoken word is closer to meaning. Both Ong and McLuhan might agree with that. Both see communication technologies as slowly separating us from each other although they make different value judgements about those separations. But maybe real meaning can't be reached through language at all.
I've been thinking about how communication technologies distract us from the reality around us. And not just when we are using them. Our minds have been conditioned by constant exposure to communication media. We are introspective - often living in an interior world. We create elaborate daily and yearly schedules, the maintaining of which occupies a significant portion of our time. Think about that. We ignore the current reality to make sure that we'll be in the right spot at the right time at some point in the near or distant future. We don't know our way around our physical spaces thanks to sat nav (I'm sooooo guilty of this). And this is all not to mention the very obvious escapes from reality through books, television, and the Internet.
What would it be like to live an unmediated existence? An existence in which there is nothing to take the mind away from reality?
I am a hopeless cyborg, my identity almost inextricably intertwined with technology. The loss I would experience with the collapse of google docs alone would be akin to a lobotomy. But even so, I have been trying to be aware of reality. Not reality as shown to me by my media. Not the reality inside my mind. The actual reality all around me. This is challenging, since, as a graduate student, I spend hours a day on the computer, reading and writing. Sometimes that is my reality. And I stop and tell myself: This is reality. Me, in my workspace, in front of a computer. (The computer is part of reality, not a window into it.) And then there is the reality of walking outside. A human being, breathing the air, admiring the trees, and not thinking of anything else.
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