Orality and literacy

According to the widely accepted view, in early forms of human communities speech was the dominant medium of communication.¹⁶This chiefly means that in the initial versions of social organization the characteristics of the communities were developed through speech. Thus for example mythologies, which play a key role in the identity of communities, exist throughorality: knowledge of the characteristics, origin and history of the community exist in orally created, spread and preserved epics, mythical stories and legends. Of course, it is the macro communities that have myths and legends, but the oral forms of organizing communities have functioned and function mostly still today in other versions of communities (interpersonal, family, group, etc.). The characteristics of the dominating medium of communication are necessarily reflected in the culture of the given society, consequently, we talk about the culture of orality (and later, literacy). The reevaluation of cultural history from the point of view of the applied communication technology and medium is a regular topic of analysis since the 1960s (Havelock 1963; McLuhan 2001; Ong 1982; Nyíri – Szécsi 1998). For historical reasons, the questions of cultural memory, cultivating traditions and their propagation are in the center of the discussion (Havelock 1963; Nyíri 1989; 1993; 1994). In Hungary, after sporadic antecedents, Nyíri initiated research projects connected to the topic (Nyíri 1993; 2001a; 2001b; Nyíri – Szécsi 1998; Research Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences).

The most important characteristics of the culture of orality, which is based on the communicative monopoly of speech, aredynamismandvariability. The communities that can be developed through speech and the contents that can be communicated this way require permanent “maintenance” and demand the continuous activity of people (practicing, memorizing, reproduction) but they easily change and can be changed easily for this very reason. We could also say that the communities and the culture of orality behave as open communication systems, that is, the condition of their persistence is essentially permanent communication. The functioning of human memory regulates the frequency and methods of recall. Memory is supported by situations, manners of speech and rules of construction and behavior (rituals, rhythms, rhymes, roles, etc.). Memory itself is a dynamic, open system. The products stored in memory and reproduced again and again in communication processes (communities, knowledge and other cul-tural contents) do not have a very stable structure, meaning or value. All of them are very sensitive to the contexts of memory and reproductive practices. Context and situation sensitivity show the communicated contentclose to lifeand full of life, fitting into the life world of the participants of the process. Communities and cultural contents do not have some kind of “original” version which could be compared to the freshly created version and which, through its original nature, would “rule” the reproduced versions. In fact, there are no versions either, since each reproduction claims originality; that is, there is no reproduction in the strict sense, only production. Perhaps we could say that the “living” version dominates the “dead” one, thus for example a tradition can be “kept alive” or

16Here we ignore the practices of primeval communities. Their discussion (see chapter 3.2.3.) will complement the picture sketched here with a few further details.

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a community can be cultivated, “made alive”. The circumstances of orality and the European process of switching from orality to literacy are analyzed in detail by the excellent works of Havelock, Ong and Goody (Havelock 1963;

Havelock 1998; Ong 1982; Goody 1986; Goody 1998).

It is well-known that various versions of writing already appeared several thousand years ago (Kéki 2000; Flusser 1997; Vilém Flusser; 2001) but the first known versions of writing played a subordinated role for a long time, that is, they helped memory in the circumstances of orality, mostly in administrative and economical situations (Goody 1986; Assmann 1999). A significant change in this situation can be noticed from the 5^thcentury B.C. in Europe, when writing was also often used in other situations.¹⁷The process of the change can easily be seen in Plato’s activity. Plato wrote dialogues, that is, hewrote down speech. With this method, he made his views accepted both as belonging to orality and literacy. The solution chosen by Plato fits well into the process of the change in com-munication in philosophy in Athens: his teacher, Socrates, devoted to conversation, did not write down any of his ideas, but his student, Aristotle, as a follower of literacy, expressed his thoughts in written works, even collected books. His famous library consisted of nearly 400 scrolls. Of course, this was not only the case with philosophy, similar processes were taking place in other areas of culture. It is characteristic of the quick spreading of literacy that the collection of the library of Alexandria created in the 3^rdcentury B.C. exceeded half a million scrolls in one or two centuries. Writing appeared in interpersonal relationships as well: correspondence began. Nevertheless, the fact that writing gradually became more important did not take away the communicative importance of speech.

The countless forms of communities, from everyday, family, religious, and various political communities to the community of theatre performances and the communities of education and teaching were still shaped with the help of speech. However, it quickly turned out that writing is not simply recorded language, and as a consequence of its different nature from speech, conflicts could appear between speech and writing.

Of course, among the differences between writing and speech the most important to mention is that written texts arerecorded. Writing can record and preserve the uttered words, but it can also produce texts of a very different nature than speech. This is because the way of thinking and the structure of the process of natural speech is neces-sarily rather complicated, since in natural speech (that is, when we do not speak as if we were reading out a written text) there are repetitions, leaps, skips, interruptions, and recurrences. Thus, the process of speech might show a complicated structure in an imagined syntactic or semantic space, while on the other hand, the structure of written texts is linear. Of course,linearityis not only a superficial feature of the written form but chiefly a constraint on writtenideas as regards their content. Thus, the structure of speech is linear only in exceptional cases; on the other hand, the structure of written texts is generally linear. The linear order of written texts is definitely connected to the peculiar circumstances of the development of writing. The “proper way” of thinking was revealed under the influence of the Eleatic School of philosophy in the 5^thcentury B.C., and the tradition oflogic, securing the con-sistent nature of thinking, came into existence. The linear order of written texts and the system of logical conclusions built on each other display a similar structure: the “logic” of written texts follows the traditional deductive rules of logic, or the other way round, since according to Havelock, it was actually the usage of the Greek alphabet that advanced the development of the “logical thinking” of the Greeks. The possible connection between the usage of writing and the development of logic is supported by the fact that written texts, in contrast with the continuity of speech, are divided into standard, easily identifiable units (though for example they use space only from the early middle ages). It follows from the fixed nature of written texts that it makes sense to talk about the concept of ori-ginality. Written texts can have original and derivative (copied, corrupted, corrected, changed etc.) versions. As a consequence, conflicts are not only generated between written and spoken texts, but between the written versions, giving work to philologists, technicians and businessmen.

Spoken words and their understanding are also context dependent. However, to a significant degree, written texts have acontext independentmeaning; more precisely, a text can be separated from the situation of writing and can be read in various situations and contexts. Another consequence of this is that as compared to “live” speech, written texts are “dead” or at least seemingly dead and are waiting for resurrection. While speech is a closed communication situation, writing is open: the speaker and his listener are the participants of the same situation but the author and his reader can be separated from each other (what is more, this is typically the case), and writing is “finished” by the reader, it is he who makes it a real written text. Writing that can be understood separately from the context of its creation (that is, the separation of the context of writing and reading) makes it possible to create abstract, context independent knowledge, and as a consequence, among other things, thedevelopment of scienceas well. It cannot be regarded as a coincidence at all that in the circumstances of orality, there were successful artistic, religious or even technological activities, but science did not develop. This is because these forms of activities are possible

17We will not discuss processes outside Europe here at all. For an orientation see websites on the history of communication [The Media History 1996; Fang 1996] and Márton Atilla Farkas’s interesting book [Farkas 2003].

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with the support of communication tied to a context, since situation dependent knowledge is sufficient for their success. Science however, – as we have tried to show earlier – works with situation independent knowledge.

Through using written texts, it became possible to transform knowledge between situations from a communication technological point of view, and Greek thinkers did use this possibility: scientific thought (and several scientific disciplines) started to develop intensely simultaneously with the development of literacy. The contemporary inter-connectedness of literacy and scientific thinking is well demonstrated by the creation and maintenance of the Museum and Library of Alexandria. What we would like to stress in connection with the functioning of the Museum and Library here is the significant, institutionalized interconnection between scientific work, writing, and reading.

After literacy made the transformation of knowledge between situations possible, the whole status of culture essen-tially changed. The forms of the preservation of culture which developed in the circumstances of orality (e.g. the memorizing and performance of epics, legends, and rhymes) were gradually pushed into the background and to the periphery by written culture and the operation of “cultural memory” based on writing. The appearance and the spreading of the locations, practices, and practitioners of reading and writing had countless cultural and social consequences (Havelock 1963; Havelock 1998; Goody 1986; Goody – Watt 1998; Assmann 1999; Cavallo – Chartier 2000; Manguel 2001) and became a determining factor of “Western” culture.

From a communicative point of view, it is an important feature of writing that the role of the mouth and the ears is taken over by the hands and the eyes (McLuhan 2001). It is characteristic of all writing that it replaces the tem-poral“extendedness” of speech with “spatial” representation. A mutual conversion takes place between temporal and spatial aspects in the process of writing and reading as well, even if we talk about silent reading. Such conversion makes the crossing of the temporal boundaries of communication easier, and in a certain sense, it makes it possible for us to communicate (and create a community) with people of the past and the future. The spatial nature of writing draws our attention to its representative nature. Various writing systems (e.g. Egyptian or Chinese ideo-graphic writing) often keep a close connection with apicturerepresentation; moreover, they often abstracted the signs of syllables and alphabets from certain picture representations (Flusser 1997; Vilém Flusser 2001; Kéki 2000;

Farkas 2003). Of course, the letters of developed writing systems are forms of representation abstract to such a degree that they no longer mean anything more than the given letter for the users of the letters (and as a matter of fact, they must not mean anything more for the sake of their appropriate functionality), but the whole of a written text still bears a certain picture nature (sometimes they speak about “written form”). Taking into account the picture nature of writing can be observed in a wide range of areas, from graphology to typography.

We could also consider recording speech in a written form as a certain kind of “digitalizing” of the spoken word.

Consequently, we can consider reading as the analogization of writing, that is, both versions of the analog-digital conversion occur during reading and writing. It is definitely the case in the sense that speech uses physical properties of the articulation of the sounds (pitch, length, their harmonic overtones) in the production of the spoken text, therefore in the spirit of what we said above, it uses “analog encoding”, in contrast with written text, where the communicated content is “encoded” through ordered series of a limited number of visual signs created for this purpose.¹⁸The natural conditions of producing and understanding speech coded in an analog way are given for all people, and we learn the way to use our naturally given abilities from the communities that raise us. In contrast, writing and reading operates different groups of our naturally given abilities. Furthermore, it requires necessarily

“materialized” tools as well: writing requires writing implements, and reading the written text. The “tool demanding”

nature of writing and reading, and their dependence on tool use take the learning of writing and reading out of the scope of natural communities, and eventually lead to the development of independent institutional systems (clerks, clerics, teachers, books, libraries, presses, etc.). The production of written texts with the help of manual means – similarly to other handicraft techniques – did not develop very intensely (for example, the invention of the pencil in the 16^thcentury was followed by the invention of the rubber only two hundred years later). Though the society-transforming role of writing is powerful, it is significantly limited. Thus for example in Europe – as a result of the lack of the prevalence of writing and reading – it only involved a quite narrow circle until the 13^thcentury, and it accelerated only after writing and reading “left” monasteries (Hajnal 1998). The social cultural changes generated by literacy unfolded in their full depth only with the technological production of written texts, that is, after the

“invention” and spread of printing.

18On one occasion I participated in a late evening conversation with Bogdán Zaválnij and his friends where the discussion was precisely about this. The debating parties could not agree in the question whether writing itself can already be regarded as the “digitalization” of speech, or it is only justifiable to use the concept of digitalization in case ofprinting, which uses replaceable letters. I cannot remember which of the debating partners defended a view at the time which is the closest to the approach presented here.

Communication in the late modern age