15 thoughts on “Week 6 – Writing, Books, Literature (T1)”
Goh Xi Hsien
In “Writing restructures Consciousness,” Ong saw writing as a form of newly developed technology which utilizes external tools. He explained how writing has changed over history, where the original mode of communication was through speech. In our current society, as writing has been deeply internalized, it is hard to conceive of a world without written words. In addition, the internet would not have happened without text. How are we to Google without text? According to Ong, speech made it easy for instant clarifications should there be questions as opposed to speech, which does not allow for immediacy. On one hand, this placed responsibility on writers to make their text less confusing for the readers, due to the inability to convey tone, structure, or anything that orality is able to pass on to the audience. However, on the other hand, it also allows for readers to interpret a text however they want, which according to the Frankfurt School, is essential for critical thinking. The masses can understand the text in many different ways, where there is no one ideology to stick to, to absorb blindly and hence giving rise to critical thought.
Tham E-lyn
What intrigued me most was how Ong alluded writing to have a certain sense of magic and power. Since young, I’ve always been enthralled by the written word, it being able to take me places far beyond my imagination.
As Hoggart says, “Good literature recreates the experiential wholeness of life – the life of the emotions, the life of the mind, the individual life and the social life, the object-laden world”.
Ong claims that scraps of writing are also used as “magic amulets”, but they can be “valued simply because of the wonderful permanence they confer on words”.
As mentioned during lecture, text allows for a paper trail, contributing to the notion of materiality. Text allows for speech or thought to be materialised in black and white, creating a “permanence” that could otherwise never be conceived.
Yet, it is also acknowledged that writing introduces a sort of dependence, an inability to function without the written word. For example, with a written calendar, an individual is rid of the need to remember details of events in his head. Yet, without this calendar, the individual is crippled. Without this tangible object, the individual is unable to function.
Vivienne Khoo
Power relations is embedded throughout the different mediums through we communicate, be it text, books or literature.
Water Ong’s article discusses writing and that these texts have autonomous discourse detached from the author. In this way, it makes the text open to different interpretations and explanations. In his writing, Ong is arguing against Plato who dismisses writing as artificial and that it weakens the human’s capacity to think independently. This is made possible because individuals can now rely on the physical written records whenever they need instead of committing it to memory, writing has now become permanent. This is made even more salient by technological reproducibility that enables the text to be copied and distributed. This has is imperative to the formation of a “mass” as described by Adorno and Horkheimer. While Plato argues that the speech is closest to the soul and that writing is alienation from the essence Ong argues that sometimes an external resource is better able to help us express ourselves – such as in terms of emotions, through the aid of musical instruments.
Ong further highlights that there is a words embedded in a system of codes, such as grammar and that it is the structure of these codes that give meaning. More importantly, codification has allowed for the democratization of ideas which means that the creation of alphabets allowed for standardization and freedom for its use. Writing thus allows for better structure and its allows one to organize thoughts into a coherent manner.
Moving on to Chartier, he makes a similar argument to Ong. He touches on the form that the text comes in and how does it affect the readers perception of the text. Different layouts would create different experiences of reading. For example, reading a newspaper online does not give one the freedom of writing on it as and when we feel like it. The ability to zoom in and out to read the online version would feel comfortable to some but not to others. He also argues that print technology has made possible the concept of silent reading and distribution which is similar to Ong argument. However, with the advent of new media technologies, reading forms have changed to others like e-books, and hence I believe with the progress of time, more would evolve in relation to the culture of text and literature.
Ong Yan Ting
Today’s reading talked about writing as a technology. Writing in the past was considered to be something external, alien technology, similar to how many people view the computer today. It shows some kind of pattern about what people have interiorised at a particular time and what they consider to be external, such that in time to come the computer would have been interiorised to be taken for granted and there would be yet another technology that is being held in suspicion. In today’s world where writing is so interiorised, it is difficult to imagine a time in the past whereby written proof would be of lesser trust value than a person’s words, when writing was not accepted internally. Does this also shows the mediation of society, when in the past people accept each other’s words but in today’s world trust is based on physical written proof.
If speech occurs in a non-linear manner (random) and writing is generally linear, I feel that it might have changed to become more non-linear with the advance of technology. When word was written, it made sense to say that people would have to structure their thoughts before penning them down, but when text could be typed, it allows more freedom in structuring (or lack of) as people could just type things as they go and insert new thoughts at any point of time. Also, with instant communication over the Internet, many people do just type out what they feel and do not feel the need to structure their thoughts beforehand. “Think before you type” is the new “think before you speak” as they both give the impression of spontaneity and non-ordered thoughts.
Tiffany Goh
The three theorists this week- Chartier, Hoggart and Ong have analysed text in written form very technically. We begin by analysing what Ong has to say about writing as “autonomous discourse”, “death”, “magic and power” as well as “embodiment”. Writing creates an autonomous discourse simply because the text becomes detached from the authors. The onus of critical interpretation and analysis is on the text’s readers and this is similar to Chartier’s process of “actualization” which I will discuss later. Death is referred to as the degradation of memory. Our reliance on text is so heavy that our minds- lazy and attuned to the text’s accessibility no longer bothering to retain that much information any more. Text is also deemed magical and possesses power. The example given is the religious text which needs to be mediated by a religious “guru”. What we see here is a reverence for the text as a form of a Super being’s word and even when we take it out of a religious context, we witness how text can carry us through imaginary realms of fantasy and the like. Finally, writing embodies the process of writing itself- the physical action. What goes into the act of writing, be it the technology involved, the habits one undertakes in writing, etc. These are all considerations that contribute towards the meaning-making and delivery of the text.
For Chartier, the main take- away is the distinction between “readable space” and “actualization”. Readable space in his context, refers to texts in their “material and discursive forms”. To put simply, this is the text’s concrete literality- its layout and the way it is being presented. “Actualization” on the other hand, is the “concrete practices and interpretative procedures”. The precondition of this process, as De Certeau argued is the existence of a reader that constructs meaning to a text. It appears that actualization is an active process on the part of the text reader to create “modalities of reading” through embodied acts, spaces and habits. The element of subjective interpretation is evident and what Chartier is getting at is the detextualized study of text where we not only analyse the content of the text in itself. We have to delve beyond that and recognize the overarching experience of reading- from meaning-making to the presentation of the text. In contemporary times, the significance of technology and how it has changed the way in which an active agent reads a text is key. An example is my Asus Vivobook laptop which has the touchscreen feature and allows me to do my readings seamlessly with a touch of the finger. Reading no longer becomes a choppy and jerky experience which I used to have when I used a mouse scroller to navigate the pages of an online article. The feature also allows a realistic simulation of how it would be like to read a real book.
Elysia Lee
The 3 readings gave me a broader view on writing, reading and literature.
Walter Ong talks about writing as a form of technology, and compares it with speech. He notes that the “condition of words in a text is is quite different from their condition in spoken discourse”. This gets me thinking about the power that words have. Today, people are influenced by what they get from the media – be it verbally or visually. Yet on top of that, words are classified in terms of writing and speech. Different meanings can be derived from speech and writing. For writings, the content can be analysed and meaning can be derived – it is conscious. On the other hand, speech is impromptu and unconscious. Personally, I find that writing is more powerful than speech. This is because it can be kept materially in the forms of paper, books or digital media in ipads or smart phones. Writing is also timeless as it can be passed down generations. People can re-read them or expound on them. Speech, on the other hand, has its limitations. It can leave its impacts at a moment where the speech is presented, but may not be remembered, unless forms of recordings were made.
Chartier and Hoggart seems to be more similar in a sense that they emphasize not merely on the content of writing itself, but see it as a whole. It is also critical to not just focus the content of writing, and question the works of literature. This is because literature can also reflect the state of our society – what kind of literature do we consider as literature today? In our society where there is a diverse range of literature and mass culture is produced, not only should we analyse the texts alone in itself, but we should also look at the bigger picture of what the type of literature tell us about the society.
Rachel Ng
From the readings, it is gathered that meaning is not inherent in literature; the reader creates meaning and gives the text significance. The meaning of a text changes along with the readers according to each individual’s code of perception. Chartier puts across three contrasts that determine the way in which texts are read, and these include the competencies of readers in reading, the different instruments and procedures of interpretation, as well as the norms and conventions of reading. The reader has changed over the years as well.
In addition to that, writing, being something that an individual assigns meaning to, has mechanical reproducibility. Alphabetization through text allows for standardization and it allows people to be easily influenced because giving instructions is simplified when there is a basic language that everyone understands.
Writing also does indeed create individuality as in modern society, reading is something to be done by an individual. With the advent of technology, books can be easily downloaded with the click of a button, less people go to libraries to borrow books and electronic books are chosen over books in physical paperback form. All these discourage communication between individuals in the physical world and instead encourage individuality.
Writing, last but not least, is permanent and physical proof of a certain time in space.
Tan Yuan Ting
This week, it’s all about writing and text. Ong is concerned with writing and how it restructures consciousness, how is transforms human consciousness. Essentially, it has allowed individuals to “pen down” or structure our thoughts in a manner, whereby recollection is made easier through reference of what has been written down, amongst other things. In addition, writing or specifically, a book, relays an utterance from a source, the author, but the content of the book or the text remains unchallenged due to the linear function of the text. He talks about Plato who expresses that writing is, in summary, inhuman, degrading of memory, unresponsive and that it cannot defend itself.
It is inhuman the way where the thoughts of an individual, what goes through the mind, is being falsely established outside of it – much like, quote, a manufactured product, in the form of writing. Because, as earlier mentioned, writing allows for reference/recollection, he suggests that it will cause people to become forgetful, being wholly dependant on writings. Thirdly, he calls it unresponsive as, likewise mentioned before, of the “one-way communication” between the text and the reader. Rather of how writing cannot defend itself, it also cannot be truly challenged or questioned – I think this is largely related and self-explanatory, with its association with the third meaning, such that in challenging the text of what it says, the text itself cannot retort back in defence, much unlike accusing an individual face-to-face.
Yeow xinyin christy
Ong argues that writing detaches the author from the reader. A very good example he gave was that writing distances the knower and the known and hence there is a high degree of objectivity, which made science possible. He focused on the difference between oral rhetoric and text. Unlike the text, there is no way to erase or edit what has been spoken, which I find is really true. (What I am typing here that I feel is unsatisfactory can be edited or deleted as compared to the words uttered which will be remembered by people who heard me). He goes on to talk about the Greek alphabet which was democratizing and transformed the word from sound to sight.
As humans make the transition from an oral-aural based sensory world to a vision based one, it changes the nature of how humans process things. This promotes what he called the interiorization of thought which allows for analytical thinking and later, the development of an extensive vocabulary. His main point was that human beings ‘thought processes’ do not grow out naturally, but out of the powers as structured by the technology of writing.
Chartier & Gonalez emphasized that a text does not exist except for a reader who gives it signification. This means that the interpretation of the text is not inherent within the text itself. The authors discussed how the publisher’s intent would alter the form of the text and hence the intention of the original creator. Just like like McLuhan, he stresses the importance of the form a text takes in the way it is “read.
Lee Cheong Khi
In his article, Hoggarts discusses the good in literature. He argues that literature “provides in its own right a form of distinctive knowledge about society.” It allows for readers to experience the “wholeness of life” with the inventions and imaginations in novels. Although he understands that literature cannot be measured objectively, there is a sense of meaning making in which readers carried out as they relate their own experiences to what they read. This brings him to the idea that viewers are capable of dissecting meanings in their own ways and does not necessarily have similar views on the same piece of literature. He feels that this is also the situation in mass media, where people are “highly selective” in their responses.
This reminds me of Hall’s idea of encoding and decoding as he maintains that people have the ability to decode in ways they deem appropriate, and does not necessarily mean that they would follow the dominant ideas that was disseminated to them initially. He then ends his article describing what constitutes great works of literature; the ones that allows humans to look beyond their material conditions and penetrates “into human experience”. As such, he holds a view rather similar view to the Frankfurt School theorists in which high art allows for critical thinking.
Liang Shi Jie
This week’s reading focuses on the medium that is written text, as it explores what social impacts on the reader the text has and how the shift with times have led to changes in the relations between reader and writer, based upon the changes to written text as a medium in itself.
Chartier starts by saying that “a text does not exist except for a reader who gives it significance”. This is due to his assertion that there are reading spaces within which text are discursive and ideal and actualization where they are put into concrete printed forms. He believes that form constitutes and for the most part produces the meaning for the text, much like how Mcluhan believes the medium is the message. In his discussion, there seems to be a distinction between the writer and their intended text and the text in the printed forms, subjected to the reader’s interpretation. To Chartier, there exist a triangle rather than a binary between the writer and the reader. He further breaks down the writer into a binary of text and book. Within these triangle, he then identifies three areas in which he feels the relations of written medium has changed.
Ong’s discussion takes a more contextual form, as it discusses the structures of writing and how it sets itself apart from other forms of media like the spoken. He says that writing is “context-free” and autonomous, and it thus affects and “restructures” our consciousness, more specifically heightening it as it places thoughts as external to ourselves. In its artificiality of being a manufactured product, he argues that writing puts distance between our thoughts and our natural position, thus enabling us to examine it with a higher level of objectivity. Another way this medium has changed our consciousness is that it moves speech from the oral-aural to that of vision, thus transforming thought in the process, due to the need for extra-textual context that is missing in written medium.
#MUHAMMAD RUSYDI BIN YA'AKUP#
Hoggart argues on the meaning making found in literature texts. The texts encompass much understanding that details the social life at that certain period of time. Interpretation of the text highlights people’s behavior to that time period ideology. Symbols and values are illustrated in such text by the use of certain dictions and narrative. Art is highlighted as meaning making “emerges out of its own violation” instead of documenting scene scientifically. He argued that mass art are not uniform but varied. And that hugh art is not a ‘liberation from oppression’ but merely a “profession”.
Hoggart touches on Stuart Hall’s concept of encoding and decoding, the agency of individuals to interpret the message differently from the intended purpose. The relations between the social actors and social objects is thus not as defined as a top-down approach in relaying
Chartier quotes de Certeau’s concepts of “space”, similar to Hoggart, it is in regards to meaning making. Space is the idea of a practice of consumption. By creating meaning with the use of symbols to interpret the space, there is agency and maneuverability of utilizing a certain area to the intended use,. Chartier argues that “reader able space” having the same interpretative elements as “space”.
Frances Tan Wei Ting
Ong’s article title is “Writing restructures consciousness”. The main argument he makes is that the act of writing and the symbols for writing enabled people to begin thinking abstractly and critically. ‘Context-free’ language or ‘autonomous’ discourse becomes possible, in which the text becomes embodied in material and detached from the author. The text then gains some “vatic” quality, as if endowed with some sort of divine authority that should not, and cannot (since there is no feedback channel), be questioned.
Ong compares the criticisms for writing with the criticisms for the computer: inhuman and manufactured products, destroys memories by increasing reliance, passivity and inability to aid deeper understanding of the messages other than that stated. Or as a leveler in which everyone becomes wise. He then deals with these in the rest of the article.
Other points that he makes:
• Circularity weakness in criticizing what technology does to the word. Reflexive intelligence
• Proximity and distance required for full understanding. Alienation is not always bad.
• Artificiality does not definitely mean dehumanizing.
• Aides-memoires record and represent things & utterances. Closing impact-intention gap of text.
• Writing transforms speech and thought from the oral-aural form to visual form. Even sound can be represented as a “thing”, and become manageable.
• Comparisons of various “writings”. Development from writing to lists to charts, and even use of neutral space. Adoption depending on fit with prior communication systems and skills
• Who can/should be literate? The nature of text as dangerous or having intrinsic religious value, or as a trade skill. The availability of suitable materials for scribal culture.
• Authentication mechanisms in texts in place of witnesses with collective oral testimony (public remembrance)
• Dating, in writing, enabling sense of being situated in abstract computed time.
• Drive to redundancy, to narrativise rather than mere juxtaposition. Backward scanning and possible distortions resulting from it.
• Writing as imitation thinking. Fictitious audience in a fictitious mood reading what is written by a fictitious writer. Writing also as seedbed of irony.
• Bricolage or patchworks in thought patterns. Corrections in oral performance may render speaker unconvincing but corrections in writing may not be as obvious.
• Different codes for dealing with the familiar and the unfamiliar.
• Grapholect enabling easy contact with others and their thoughts, sharing consciousness, helping to explain.
• What rhetoric is. Sound-sight split of Latin. Translation as transformation.
• Changes in textbooks and education.
Chartier and Gonzalez look at the task of the historian to “reconstruct the variations that differentiate the “readable space” and those which govern the circumstances of their “actualization”. This can be done through looking at the analyses of texts, the history of the objects and forms that carry out the circulation of writing, and the practices which provide differentiated usages and meanings of these objects and forms of writing. They critically analyze the ways in which “reading” and “literacies” were previously measured/understood and suggest modifications. One interesting way of thinking about the issue is through a triangle of text, book and reader.
Some points that they make:
• Fundamental oppositions in reading: Oral articulation vs. visual reading, intensive vs. extensive reading, private vs. collective spheres of reading
• “Reading is never totally constrained and that it cannot be recursively deduced from the texts to which is is applied”
• “Tactics of readers, infiltrating the “special space” produced by the the strategies of writing, obey certain rules, logic and models”
• Communities of readers as interpretive communities
• Material forms affect meaning
• Locate social differences more in real practices than in statistical distributions.
Hoggarts talks about literature and literary criticism as a way for understanding society. What literature supposedly does: “recreates the wholeness of life” (interpenetrating components), “re-creates the immediacy of life” (what is and was is particular historical and moral contexts understood in one moment) and gives a pattern behind the details. However, literature in the form of novels, are “inventions, fabrications and imaginings… [their content] have no representative significance or meaningful other reference”. It is difficult to “distinguish between elements peculiar to the author, those that are part of his artistic strategy, and those that are representative, that hint at changes in society, in assumptions, in the sense of available audiences”. Hence, what literature contains is a different form of knowledge from the usual objective and empirical knowledge. It is knowledge to be found from the “work of art in itself” from the social structures which create the medium, the medium’s material, its intended purpose, and rhetoric (qualities of style that assist persuasion within the relations between writer and reader). It is the bringing-forth of “one’s humanity and one’s relations to the world outside man” that literature provides, beyond ideas of manipulation (Frankfurt School) and pure social constructionism. It is against efforts of simplifying the triangle of relations mentioned by Chartier and Gonzalez. Hoggarts also looks compares the poet and the novelist – different media and the producers of their content can differ (reminds me of McLuhan).
What are the methods of looking at media? Sometimes, old ways do not work that well. The readings point out weaknesses in commonly used methods and essentially recommend that we look at media by deeper and more complex understanding of the triangle of relations (text, book, reader), the social conditions of production, the producers, rhetoric (content) and structure of medium.
Khrisha Chatterji
This week’s readings by Chartier, Ong and Hoggart focus on text. It explains how text changed the way people did things. For example, it was mentioned that scholars used to be assessed based on the way they were able to back their theories up orally but now assessment comes in the form of writing. Also, how texts sort of showed the way for women to enter academia, etc.
In the past, it was not a simple task to persuade and convince people that writing was better than oral methods. This is because people had to learn a new technique to communicate which requires a lot of time and effort. Writing and reading was initially for the elite of society. He gave the example of Chinese characters and how no one is capable enough to know all the words in the dictionary because there were just too many characters. In order to master the language, one had to have the time to learn and only the upper class people in society had the luxury of time to do so. Then there was an invention of the alphabet that allowed for a democratization of language as it enabled the masses to learn a language through translating sounds in word forms like the Greek language and Korean language.
People were also very skeptical of written texts and documents because they had no way of verifying the reliability of the text. This is unlike oral methods whereby listeners could question the speaker there and then.
The way people react to the text could be different also because they have different interpretations for the same text. I think it was mentioned that texts stay the same generations after generations but the people reading them have gone through a lot of changes through the generations leading them to have different interpretations of the text due to the differences in the way they lived their lives.
Writing is a skill and a technique for communicating. It expresses the writer’s views and analyses of his life experience which can be shared with readers of his work. Then again, the book that one reads may not solely be about what the author wrote about. Publishers can also affect the reading experience through the editing of the book or the content and deciding how the book should be printed, etc. These affect the reader’s experience of reading the book and may not be the end result that the author had hoped for.
Annabel Su
The readings this week attempt to uncover the history, purpose and pros and cons of the written text that were explored throughout time and space.
Ong, a prominent figure in this area of research posited that through the development of literacy, challenges were presented not just for the Greeks of antiquity but also for those dwelling in the current epoch of technology. Writing developed the idea of mediation, which essentially played a role in determining and shaping the constitution of communication. To Ong, one critical characteristic that distinguishes written communication from oral communication is that writing forms an independent discourse that can be understood on its own and does not connote the author’s intent, whatever it may be. Therefore, for a culture entrenched in oral communication, writing is a nemesis that begins to erode speech’s authenticity in which passivity was downplayed. Essentially, the thought processes of humans do not result from natural powers but are carved out of powers that have been structured both directly and indirectly by writing technology.
Running along the same vein as Ong, Hoggart maintains that literature did more for society than it was given credit for. It allowed for individuals to look at ‘long-term movements below the surface detail; an ability to unite dissimilars, to reveal a pattern out of mass and mess’ through the examination of myth, symbol and thematic patterns. In essence, literature ‘assumes the possibility and the worthwhileness of communication with other human beings.’
Chartier in his article also expresses similar views of literature as that of Ong and Hoggart. Chartier posits that writing played a transformative role in changing the modes of social interaction while permitting new ways of thinking and modifying power relations. He also maintains that there is a need to understand that some texts are open to a wide range of comprehension.
Hence, literature as argued by the writers, is quintessential in unveiling the human consciousness and leaving it to the possibility of being processed by all human beings.
In “Writing restructures Consciousness,” Ong saw writing as a form of newly developed technology which utilizes external tools. He explained how writing has changed over history, where the original mode of communication was through speech. In our current society, as writing has been deeply internalized, it is hard to conceive of a world without written words. In addition, the internet would not have happened without text. How are we to Google without text? According to Ong, speech made it easy for instant clarifications should there be questions as opposed to speech, which does not allow for immediacy. On one hand, this placed responsibility on writers to make their text less confusing for the readers, due to the inability to convey tone, structure, or anything that orality is able to pass on to the audience. However, on the other hand, it also allows for readers to interpret a text however they want, which according to the Frankfurt School, is essential for critical thinking. The masses can understand the text in many different ways, where there is no one ideology to stick to, to absorb blindly and hence giving rise to critical thought.
What intrigued me most was how Ong alluded writing to have a certain sense of magic and power. Since young, I’ve always been enthralled by the written word, it being able to take me places far beyond my imagination.
As Hoggart says, “Good literature recreates the experiential wholeness of life – the life of the emotions, the life of the mind, the individual life and the social life, the object-laden world”.
Ong claims that scraps of writing are also used as “magic amulets”, but they can be “valued simply because of the wonderful permanence they confer on words”.
As mentioned during lecture, text allows for a paper trail, contributing to the notion of materiality. Text allows for speech or thought to be materialised in black and white, creating a “permanence” that could otherwise never be conceived.
Yet, it is also acknowledged that writing introduces a sort of dependence, an inability to function without the written word. For example, with a written calendar, an individual is rid of the need to remember details of events in his head. Yet, without this calendar, the individual is crippled. Without this tangible object, the individual is unable to function.
Power relations is embedded throughout the different mediums through we communicate, be it text, books or literature.
Water Ong’s article discusses writing and that these texts have autonomous discourse detached from the author. In this way, it makes the text open to different interpretations and explanations. In his writing, Ong is arguing against Plato who dismisses writing as artificial and that it weakens the human’s capacity to think independently. This is made possible because individuals can now rely on the physical written records whenever they need instead of committing it to memory, writing has now become permanent. This is made even more salient by technological reproducibility that enables the text to be copied and distributed. This has is imperative to the formation of a “mass” as described by Adorno and Horkheimer. While Plato argues that the speech is closest to the soul and that writing is alienation from the essence Ong argues that sometimes an external resource is better able to help us express ourselves – such as in terms of emotions, through the aid of musical instruments.
Ong further highlights that there is a words embedded in a system of codes, such as grammar and that it is the structure of these codes that give meaning. More importantly, codification has allowed for the democratization of ideas which means that the creation of alphabets allowed for standardization and freedom for its use. Writing thus allows for better structure and its allows one to organize thoughts into a coherent manner.
Moving on to Chartier, he makes a similar argument to Ong. He touches on the form that the text comes in and how does it affect the readers perception of the text. Different layouts would create different experiences of reading. For example, reading a newspaper online does not give one the freedom of writing on it as and when we feel like it. The ability to zoom in and out to read the online version would feel comfortable to some but not to others. He also argues that print technology has made possible the concept of silent reading and distribution which is similar to Ong argument. However, with the advent of new media technologies, reading forms have changed to others like e-books, and hence I believe with the progress of time, more would evolve in relation to the culture of text and literature.
Today’s reading talked about writing as a technology. Writing in the past was considered to be something external, alien technology, similar to how many people view the computer today. It shows some kind of pattern about what people have interiorised at a particular time and what they consider to be external, such that in time to come the computer would have been interiorised to be taken for granted and there would be yet another technology that is being held in suspicion. In today’s world where writing is so interiorised, it is difficult to imagine a time in the past whereby written proof would be of lesser trust value than a person’s words, when writing was not accepted internally. Does this also shows the mediation of society, when in the past people accept each other’s words but in today’s world trust is based on physical written proof.
If speech occurs in a non-linear manner (random) and writing is generally linear, I feel that it might have changed to become more non-linear with the advance of technology. When word was written, it made sense to say that people would have to structure their thoughts before penning them down, but when text could be typed, it allows more freedom in structuring (or lack of) as people could just type things as they go and insert new thoughts at any point of time. Also, with instant communication over the Internet, many people do just type out what they feel and do not feel the need to structure their thoughts beforehand. “Think before you type” is the new “think before you speak” as they both give the impression of spontaneity and non-ordered thoughts.
The three theorists this week- Chartier, Hoggart and Ong have analysed text in written form very technically. We begin by analysing what Ong has to say about writing as “autonomous discourse”, “death”, “magic and power” as well as “embodiment”. Writing creates an autonomous discourse simply because the text becomes detached from the authors. The onus of critical interpretation and analysis is on the text’s readers and this is similar to Chartier’s process of “actualization” which I will discuss later. Death is referred to as the degradation of memory. Our reliance on text is so heavy that our minds- lazy and attuned to the text’s accessibility no longer bothering to retain that much information any more. Text is also deemed magical and possesses power. The example given is the religious text which needs to be mediated by a religious “guru”. What we see here is a reverence for the text as a form of a Super being’s word and even when we take it out of a religious context, we witness how text can carry us through imaginary realms of fantasy and the like. Finally, writing embodies the process of writing itself- the physical action. What goes into the act of writing, be it the technology involved, the habits one undertakes in writing, etc. These are all considerations that contribute towards the meaning-making and delivery of the text.
For Chartier, the main take- away is the distinction between “readable space” and “actualization”. Readable space in his context, refers to texts in their “material and discursive forms”. To put simply, this is the text’s concrete literality- its layout and the way it is being presented. “Actualization” on the other hand, is the “concrete practices and interpretative procedures”. The precondition of this process, as De Certeau argued is the existence of a reader that constructs meaning to a text. It appears that actualization is an active process on the part of the text reader to create “modalities of reading” through embodied acts, spaces and habits. The element of subjective interpretation is evident and what Chartier is getting at is the detextualized study of text where we not only analyse the content of the text in itself. We have to delve beyond that and recognize the overarching experience of reading- from meaning-making to the presentation of the text. In contemporary times, the significance of technology and how it has changed the way in which an active agent reads a text is key. An example is my Asus Vivobook laptop which has the touchscreen feature and allows me to do my readings seamlessly with a touch of the finger. Reading no longer becomes a choppy and jerky experience which I used to have when I used a mouse scroller to navigate the pages of an online article. The feature also allows a realistic simulation of how it would be like to read a real book.
The 3 readings gave me a broader view on writing, reading and literature.
Walter Ong talks about writing as a form of technology, and compares it with speech. He notes that the “condition of words in a text is is quite different from their condition in spoken discourse”. This gets me thinking about the power that words have. Today, people are influenced by what they get from the media – be it verbally or visually. Yet on top of that, words are classified in terms of writing and speech. Different meanings can be derived from speech and writing. For writings, the content can be analysed and meaning can be derived – it is conscious. On the other hand, speech is impromptu and unconscious. Personally, I find that writing is more powerful than speech. This is because it can be kept materially in the forms of paper, books or digital media in ipads or smart phones. Writing is also timeless as it can be passed down generations. People can re-read them or expound on them. Speech, on the other hand, has its limitations. It can leave its impacts at a moment where the speech is presented, but may not be remembered, unless forms of recordings were made.
Chartier and Hoggart seems to be more similar in a sense that they emphasize not merely on the content of writing itself, but see it as a whole. It is also critical to not just focus the content of writing, and question the works of literature. This is because literature can also reflect the state of our society – what kind of literature do we consider as literature today? In our society where there is a diverse range of literature and mass culture is produced, not only should we analyse the texts alone in itself, but we should also look at the bigger picture of what the type of literature tell us about the society.
From the readings, it is gathered that meaning is not inherent in literature; the reader creates meaning and gives the text significance. The meaning of a text changes along with the readers according to each individual’s code of perception. Chartier puts across three contrasts that determine the way in which texts are read, and these include the competencies of readers in reading, the different instruments and procedures of interpretation, as well as the norms and conventions of reading. The reader has changed over the years as well.
In addition to that, writing, being something that an individual assigns meaning to, has mechanical reproducibility. Alphabetization through text allows for standardization and it allows people to be easily influenced because giving instructions is simplified when there is a basic language that everyone understands.
Writing also does indeed create individuality as in modern society, reading is something to be done by an individual. With the advent of technology, books can be easily downloaded with the click of a button, less people go to libraries to borrow books and electronic books are chosen over books in physical paperback form. All these discourage communication between individuals in the physical world and instead encourage individuality.
Writing, last but not least, is permanent and physical proof of a certain time in space.
This week, it’s all about writing and text. Ong is concerned with writing and how it restructures consciousness, how is transforms human consciousness. Essentially, it has allowed individuals to “pen down” or structure our thoughts in a manner, whereby recollection is made easier through reference of what has been written down, amongst other things. In addition, writing or specifically, a book, relays an utterance from a source, the author, but the content of the book or the text remains unchallenged due to the linear function of the text. He talks about Plato who expresses that writing is, in summary, inhuman, degrading of memory, unresponsive and that it cannot defend itself.
It is inhuman the way where the thoughts of an individual, what goes through the mind, is being falsely established outside of it – much like, quote, a manufactured product, in the form of writing. Because, as earlier mentioned, writing allows for reference/recollection, he suggests that it will cause people to become forgetful, being wholly dependant on writings. Thirdly, he calls it unresponsive as, likewise mentioned before, of the “one-way communication” between the text and the reader. Rather of how writing cannot defend itself, it also cannot be truly challenged or questioned – I think this is largely related and self-explanatory, with its association with the third meaning, such that in challenging the text of what it says, the text itself cannot retort back in defence, much unlike accusing an individual face-to-face.
Ong argues that writing detaches the author from the reader. A very good example he gave was that writing distances the knower and the known and hence there is a high degree of objectivity, which made science possible. He focused on the difference between oral rhetoric and text. Unlike the text, there is no way to erase or edit what has been spoken, which I find is really true. (What I am typing here that I feel is unsatisfactory can be edited or deleted as compared to the words uttered which will be remembered by people who heard me). He goes on to talk about the Greek alphabet which was democratizing and transformed the word from sound to sight.
As humans make the transition from an oral-aural based sensory world to a vision based one, it changes the nature of how humans process things. This promotes what he called the interiorization of thought which allows for analytical thinking and later, the development of an extensive vocabulary. His main point was that human beings ‘thought processes’ do not grow out naturally, but out of the powers as structured by the technology of writing.
Chartier & Gonalez emphasized that a text does not exist except for a reader who gives it signification. This means that the interpretation of the text is not inherent within the text itself. The authors discussed how the publisher’s intent would alter the form of the text and hence the intention of the original creator. Just like like McLuhan, he stresses the importance of the form a text takes in the way it is “read.
In his article, Hoggarts discusses the good in literature. He argues that literature “provides in its own right a form of distinctive knowledge about society.” It allows for readers to experience the “wholeness of life” with the inventions and imaginations in novels. Although he understands that literature cannot be measured objectively, there is a sense of meaning making in which readers carried out as they relate their own experiences to what they read. This brings him to the idea that viewers are capable of dissecting meanings in their own ways and does not necessarily have similar views on the same piece of literature. He feels that this is also the situation in mass media, where people are “highly selective” in their responses.
This reminds me of Hall’s idea of encoding and decoding as he maintains that people have the ability to decode in ways they deem appropriate, and does not necessarily mean that they would follow the dominant ideas that was disseminated to them initially. He then ends his article describing what constitutes great works of literature; the ones that allows humans to look beyond their material conditions and penetrates “into human experience”. As such, he holds a view rather similar view to the Frankfurt School theorists in which high art allows for critical thinking.
This week’s reading focuses on the medium that is written text, as it explores what social impacts on the reader the text has and how the shift with times have led to changes in the relations between reader and writer, based upon the changes to written text as a medium in itself.
Chartier starts by saying that “a text does not exist except for a reader who gives it significance”. This is due to his assertion that there are reading spaces within which text are discursive and ideal and actualization where they are put into concrete printed forms. He believes that form constitutes and for the most part produces the meaning for the text, much like how Mcluhan believes the medium is the message. In his discussion, there seems to be a distinction between the writer and their intended text and the text in the printed forms, subjected to the reader’s interpretation. To Chartier, there exist a triangle rather than a binary between the writer and the reader. He further breaks down the writer into a binary of text and book. Within these triangle, he then identifies three areas in which he feels the relations of written medium has changed.
Ong’s discussion takes a more contextual form, as it discusses the structures of writing and how it sets itself apart from other forms of media like the spoken. He says that writing is “context-free” and autonomous, and it thus affects and “restructures” our consciousness, more specifically heightening it as it places thoughts as external to ourselves. In its artificiality of being a manufactured product, he argues that writing puts distance between our thoughts and our natural position, thus enabling us to examine it with a higher level of objectivity. Another way this medium has changed our consciousness is that it moves speech from the oral-aural to that of vision, thus transforming thought in the process, due to the need for extra-textual context that is missing in written medium.
Hoggart argues on the meaning making found in literature texts. The texts encompass much understanding that details the social life at that certain period of time. Interpretation of the text highlights people’s behavior to that time period ideology. Symbols and values are illustrated in such text by the use of certain dictions and narrative. Art is highlighted as meaning making “emerges out of its own violation” instead of documenting scene scientifically. He argued that mass art are not uniform but varied. And that hugh art is not a ‘liberation from oppression’ but merely a “profession”.
Hoggart touches on Stuart Hall’s concept of encoding and decoding, the agency of individuals to interpret the message differently from the intended purpose. The relations between the social actors and social objects is thus not as defined as a top-down approach in relaying
Chartier quotes de Certeau’s concepts of “space”, similar to Hoggart, it is in regards to meaning making. Space is the idea of a practice of consumption. By creating meaning with the use of symbols to interpret the space, there is agency and maneuverability of utilizing a certain area to the intended use,. Chartier argues that “reader able space” having the same interpretative elements as “space”.
Ong’s article title is “Writing restructures consciousness”. The main argument he makes is that the act of writing and the symbols for writing enabled people to begin thinking abstractly and critically. ‘Context-free’ language or ‘autonomous’ discourse becomes possible, in which the text becomes embodied in material and detached from the author. The text then gains some “vatic” quality, as if endowed with some sort of divine authority that should not, and cannot (since there is no feedback channel), be questioned.
Ong compares the criticisms for writing with the criticisms for the computer: inhuman and manufactured products, destroys memories by increasing reliance, passivity and inability to aid deeper understanding of the messages other than that stated. Or as a leveler in which everyone becomes wise. He then deals with these in the rest of the article.
Other points that he makes:
• Circularity weakness in criticizing what technology does to the word. Reflexive intelligence
• Proximity and distance required for full understanding. Alienation is not always bad.
• Artificiality does not definitely mean dehumanizing.
• Aides-memoires record and represent things & utterances. Closing impact-intention gap of text.
• Writing transforms speech and thought from the oral-aural form to visual form. Even sound can be represented as a “thing”, and become manageable.
• Comparisons of various “writings”. Development from writing to lists to charts, and even use of neutral space. Adoption depending on fit with prior communication systems and skills
• Who can/should be literate? The nature of text as dangerous or having intrinsic religious value, or as a trade skill. The availability of suitable materials for scribal culture.
• Authentication mechanisms in texts in place of witnesses with collective oral testimony (public remembrance)
• Dating, in writing, enabling sense of being situated in abstract computed time.
• Drive to redundancy, to narrativise rather than mere juxtaposition. Backward scanning and possible distortions resulting from it.
• Writing as imitation thinking. Fictitious audience in a fictitious mood reading what is written by a fictitious writer. Writing also as seedbed of irony.
• Bricolage or patchworks in thought patterns. Corrections in oral performance may render speaker unconvincing but corrections in writing may not be as obvious.
• Different codes for dealing with the familiar and the unfamiliar.
• Grapholect enabling easy contact with others and their thoughts, sharing consciousness, helping to explain.
• What rhetoric is. Sound-sight split of Latin. Translation as transformation.
• Changes in textbooks and education.
Chartier and Gonzalez look at the task of the historian to “reconstruct the variations that differentiate the “readable space” and those which govern the circumstances of their “actualization”. This can be done through looking at the analyses of texts, the history of the objects and forms that carry out the circulation of writing, and the practices which provide differentiated usages and meanings of these objects and forms of writing. They critically analyze the ways in which “reading” and “literacies” were previously measured/understood and suggest modifications. One interesting way of thinking about the issue is through a triangle of text, book and reader.
Some points that they make:
• Fundamental oppositions in reading: Oral articulation vs. visual reading, intensive vs. extensive reading, private vs. collective spheres of reading
• “Reading is never totally constrained and that it cannot be recursively deduced from the texts to which is is applied”
• “Tactics of readers, infiltrating the “special space” produced by the the strategies of writing, obey certain rules, logic and models”
• Communities of readers as interpretive communities
• Material forms affect meaning
• Locate social differences more in real practices than in statistical distributions.
Hoggarts talks about literature and literary criticism as a way for understanding society. What literature supposedly does: “recreates the wholeness of life” (interpenetrating components), “re-creates the immediacy of life” (what is and was is particular historical and moral contexts understood in one moment) and gives a pattern behind the details. However, literature in the form of novels, are “inventions, fabrications and imaginings… [their content] have no representative significance or meaningful other reference”. It is difficult to “distinguish between elements peculiar to the author, those that are part of his artistic strategy, and those that are representative, that hint at changes in society, in assumptions, in the sense of available audiences”. Hence, what literature contains is a different form of knowledge from the usual objective and empirical knowledge. It is knowledge to be found from the “work of art in itself” from the social structures which create the medium, the medium’s material, its intended purpose, and rhetoric (qualities of style that assist persuasion within the relations between writer and reader). It is the bringing-forth of “one’s humanity and one’s relations to the world outside man” that literature provides, beyond ideas of manipulation (Frankfurt School) and pure social constructionism. It is against efforts of simplifying the triangle of relations mentioned by Chartier and Gonzalez. Hoggarts also looks compares the poet and the novelist – different media and the producers of their content can differ (reminds me of McLuhan).
What are the methods of looking at media? Sometimes, old ways do not work that well. The readings point out weaknesses in commonly used methods and essentially recommend that we look at media by deeper and more complex understanding of the triangle of relations (text, book, reader), the social conditions of production, the producers, rhetoric (content) and structure of medium.
This week’s readings by Chartier, Ong and Hoggart focus on text. It explains how text changed the way people did things. For example, it was mentioned that scholars used to be assessed based on the way they were able to back their theories up orally but now assessment comes in the form of writing. Also, how texts sort of showed the way for women to enter academia, etc.
In the past, it was not a simple task to persuade and convince people that writing was better than oral methods. This is because people had to learn a new technique to communicate which requires a lot of time and effort. Writing and reading was initially for the elite of society. He gave the example of Chinese characters and how no one is capable enough to know all the words in the dictionary because there were just too many characters. In order to master the language, one had to have the time to learn and only the upper class people in society had the luxury of time to do so. Then there was an invention of the alphabet that allowed for a democratization of language as it enabled the masses to learn a language through translating sounds in word forms like the Greek language and Korean language.
People were also very skeptical of written texts and documents because they had no way of verifying the reliability of the text. This is unlike oral methods whereby listeners could question the speaker there and then.
The way people react to the text could be different also because they have different interpretations for the same text. I think it was mentioned that texts stay the same generations after generations but the people reading them have gone through a lot of changes through the generations leading them to have different interpretations of the text due to the differences in the way they lived their lives.
Writing is a skill and a technique for communicating. It expresses the writer’s views and analyses of his life experience which can be shared with readers of his work. Then again, the book that one reads may not solely be about what the author wrote about. Publishers can also affect the reading experience through the editing of the book or the content and deciding how the book should be printed, etc. These affect the reader’s experience of reading the book and may not be the end result that the author had hoped for.
The readings this week attempt to uncover the history, purpose and pros and cons of the written text that were explored throughout time and space.
Ong, a prominent figure in this area of research posited that through the development of literacy, challenges were presented not just for the Greeks of antiquity but also for those dwelling in the current epoch of technology. Writing developed the idea of mediation, which essentially played a role in determining and shaping the constitution of communication. To Ong, one critical characteristic that distinguishes written communication from oral communication is that writing forms an independent discourse that can be understood on its own and does not connote the author’s intent, whatever it may be. Therefore, for a culture entrenched in oral communication, writing is a nemesis that begins to erode speech’s authenticity in which passivity was downplayed. Essentially, the thought processes of humans do not result from natural powers but are carved out of powers that have been structured both directly and indirectly by writing technology.
Running along the same vein as Ong, Hoggart maintains that literature did more for society than it was given credit for. It allowed for individuals to look at ‘long-term movements below the surface detail; an ability to unite dissimilars, to reveal a pattern out of mass and mess’ through the examination of myth, symbol and thematic patterns. In essence, literature ‘assumes the possibility and the worthwhileness of communication with other human beings.’
Chartier in his article also expresses similar views of literature as that of Ong and Hoggart. Chartier posits that writing played a transformative role in changing the modes of social interaction while permitting new ways of thinking and modifying power relations. He also maintains that there is a need to understand that some texts are open to a wide range of comprehension.
Hence, literature as argued by the writers, is quintessential in unveiling the human consciousness and leaving it to the possibility of being processed by all human beings.