“Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought”, 1992 (; backlinks; similar):
…Here, then, are some of the ways in which writing separates or divides.
Writing separates the known from the knower. It promotes ‘objectivity’. (Knowledge itself is not object-like: it cannot be transferred from one person to another physically even in oral communication, face-to-face, or a fortiori in writing. I can only perform actions—produce words—which enable you to generate the knowledge in yourself.)
Whereas oral cultures tends to merge interpretation of data with the data themselves, writing separates interpretation from data. (Asked to repeat exactly what they have just said, persons from a primary oral Culture will often give an interpretation of what they originally said, insisting and clearly believing that the interpretation is exactly what they said in the first place.)
Writing distances the word from sound, reducing oral-aural evanescence to the seeming quiescence of visual space.
Whereas in oral communication the source (speaker) and the recipient (hearer) are necessarily present to one another, writing distances the source of the communication (the writer) from the recipient (the reader), both in time and space.
Writing distances the word from the plenum of existence. (The immediate context of spoken words is never simply other words.)
By distancing the word from the plenum of existence, from a holistic context made up mostly of non-verbal elements, writing enforces verbal precision of a sort unavailable in oral cultures.
Writing separates past from present. (Primary oral cultures tend to use the past to explain the present, dropping from memory what does not serve this purpose in one way or another, thus homogenizing the past with the present, or approximating past to present.)
…By freezing verbalization, writing creates a distanced past which is full of puzzles because it can refer to states of affairs no longer effectively imaginable or can use words no longer immediately meaningful to any living persons.
Writing separates ‘administration’—civil, religious, commercial, and other—from other types of social activities. (‘Administration’ is unknown in oral cultures, where leaders interact non-abstractly with the rest of society in tight-knit, often rhetorically controlled, configurations.)
Writing makes it possible to separate logic (thought-structure of discourse) from rhetoric (socially-effective discourse).
Writing separates academic learning (mathésis and mathéma) from wisdom (sophia), making possible the conveyance of highly organized abstract thought structures independently of their actual use or of their integration into the human lifeworld.
Writing can divide society by giving rise to a special kind of diglossia, splitting verbal communication between a ‘high’ language completely controlled by writing even though also widely spoken (Learned Latin in the European Middle Ages) and a ‘low’ language or ‘low’ languages controlled by speech to the exclusion of writing.
Writing differentiates grapholects, those ‘low’-language dialects which are taken over by writing and erected into national languages, from other dialects, making the grapholect a dialect of a completely different order of magnitude and effectiveness from the dialects that remain oral.
Writing divides or distances more evidently and effectively as its form becomes more abstract, which is to say more removed from the sound world into the space world of sight.
Perhaps the most momentous of all its diaeretic effects in the deep history of thought is the effect of writing when it separates being from time.
…The oral world as such distresses literates because sound is evanescent. Typically, literates want words and thoughts pinned down—though it is impossible to “pin down” an event. The mind trained in an oral culture does not feel the literate’s distress: it can operate with exquisite skill in the world of sounds, events, evanescences. How does it manage? Basically, in its noetic operations it uses formulaic structures and procedures that stick in the mind to complement and counteract the evanescent: proverbs and other fixed sayings—that is, standard, expected qualifiers (the sturdy oak, the brave warrior, wise Nestor, clever Odysseus), numerical sets (the 3 Graces, the 7 deadly sins, the 5 senses, and so on)—anything to make it easy to call back what Homer recognized were “winged words”.
Primary oral culture also keeps its thinking close to the human life world, personalizing things and issues, and storing knowledge in stories. Categories are unstable mnemonically. Stories you can remember. In its typical mindset, the oral sensibility is out to hold things together, to make and retain agglomerates, not to analyse (which means to take things apart)—although, since all thought is to some degree analytic, it does analyse to a degree. Pressed by the need to manage an always fugitive noetic universe, the oral world is basically conservative. Exploratory thinking is not unknown, but it is relatively rare, a luxury orality can little afford, for energies must be husbanded to keep on constant call the evanescent knowledge that the ages have so laboriously accumulated. Everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors. Otherwise these truths will escape, and culture will be back on square one, where it started before the ancestors got the truths from their ancestors.
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