The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (27 page)

What would be the primary information obtained by a hearer who heard those words spoken, in their original language and in the context where they might have been spoken? Probably something like: Ah, Grandfather is going to tell us a story about Coyote. Because “Coyote was going there” is a cultural signal, like “Once upon a time”: a ritual formula, the implications of which include the fact that a story’s about to be told, right here, right now; that it won’t be a factual story but will be myth, or true story; in this case a true story about Coyote. Not a coyote but Coyote. And Grandfather knows that we understand the signal, we understand what he’s saying when he says, “Coyote was going there,” because if he didn’t expect us to at least partly understand it, he wouldn’t or couldn’t say it.

In human conversation, in live, actual communication between or among human beings, everything “transmitted”—everything said—is shaped as it is spoken by actual or anticipated response.

Live, face-to-face human communication is intersubjective. Intersubjectivity involves a great deal more than the machine-mediated type of stimulus-response currently called “interactive.” It is not stimulus-response at all, not a mechanical alternation of precoded sending and receiving. Intersubjectivity is mutual. It is a
continuous interchange
between two consciousnesses. Instead of an alternation of roles between box A and box B, between active subject and passive object, it is a
continuous intersubjectivity that goes both ways all the time
.

“There is no adequate model in the physical universe for this operation of consciousness, which is distinctively human and which signals the capacity of human beings to form true communities.” So says Walter Ong, in
Orality and Literacy
.

My private model for intersubjectivity, or communication by speech, or conversation, is amoebas having sex. As you know, amoebas usually reproduce by just quietly going off in a corner and budding, dividing themselves into two amoebas; but sometimes conditions indicate that a little genetic swapping might improve the local crowd, and two of them get together, literally, and reach out to each other and meld their pseudopodia into a little tube or channel connecting them. Thus:

Then amoeba A and amoeba B exchange genetic “information,” that is, they literally give each other inner bits of their bodies, via a channel or bridge which is made out of outer bits of their bodies. They hang out for quite a while sending bits of themselves back and forth, mutually responding each to the other.

This is very similar to how people unite themselves and give each other parts of themselves—inner parts, mental not bodily parts—when they talk and listen. (You can see why I use amoeba sex not human sex as my analogy: in human hetero sex, the bits only go one way. Human hetero sex is more like a lecture than a conversation. Amoeba sex is truly mutual because amoebas have no gender and no hierarchy. I have no opinion on whether amoeba sex or human sex is more fun. We might have the edge, because we have nerve endings, but who knows?)

Two amoebas having sex, or two people talking, form a community of two. People are also able to form communities of many, through sending and receiving bits of ourselves and others back and forth continually—through, in other words, talking and listening. Talking and listening are ultimately the same thing.

It is literacy that confuses this whole issue of communication by language. I don’t want to get into what literacy does to the human mind, though I highly recommend Walter Ong’s books on the subject. All I want to emphasise at this point is that literacy is very recent, and still not at all universal. Most people during most of the history of mankind have been, and still are, oral/aural people: people who speak and listen. Most people, most of the time, do not put words in writing, do not read, are not read to. They speak and they listen to speech.

Long, long after we learned how to talk to each other, millennia or hundreds of millennia later, we learned to write down our words. That was only about thirty-five hundred years ago, in certain restricted parts of the world.

Writing existed for three millennia, important to powerful people, seemingly unimportant to most people. Its use and uses spread. Then came printing.

With printing, literacy quite soon developed from a special craft, useful to privileged men to increase their knowledge and power, into a basic tool, a necessity for ordinary existence for ordinary people, particularly if they were seeking not to be poor and powerless.

And so effective is printed writing as a tool that those of us who use it have tended to privilege it as the most valid form of human communication. Writing has changed us, the way all our tools change us, till we have come to take it for granted that speech doesn’t matter; words don’t count till they’re written down. “I give you my word” doesn’t count for much until I’ve signed the contract. And we judge an oral culture, a culture that does not use writing, as essentially inferior, calling it “primitive.”

Belief in the absolute superiority of literacy to orality is ingrained in us literates—not without cause. Illiterates in a literate culture are terribly disadvantaged. We have arranged our North American society over the last couple of centuries so that literacy is a basic requirement for full membership.

If we compare literate and nonliterate societies, it appears that literate societies are
powerful
in ways nonliterate societies aren’t. Literate culture is
durable
in ways nonliterate culture is not. And literate people may have more
breadth
and
variety
of knowledge that nonliterate people. They are better informed. They are not necessarily wiser. Literacy does not make people good, intelligent, or wise. Literate societies are superior in some ways to nonliterate societies, but literate people are not superior to oral people.

What do anthropologists, who ought to know better, mean when they speak of “the primitive mind,” or
La Pensée Sauvage
(how should Lévi-Strauss’s title be translated—“How Savages Think”?)—What is a “savage,” what does “primitive” mean? Almost inevitably it means “preliterate.” “Primitives” are people who haven’t learned to write—yet. They can only talk. They are therefore inferior to anthropologists and others who can read and can write.

And indeed literacy confers such power on its owners that they can
dominate illiterates, as the literate priestly and noble castes dominated illiterate medieval Europe; as literate men dominated women as long as women were kept illiterate; as literate businessmen dominate illiterate inner-city people; as English-literate corporations dominate illiterate or non-English-literate workers. If might makes right, orality is wrong.

These days, not only do we have literacy to confuse this whole issue of human communication by language, we also have what Ong calls “secondary orality.”

Primary orality refers to people who talk but don’t write—all the people we refer to as primitive, illiterate, preliterate, and so on. Secondary orality comes long after literacy, and derives from it. It is less than a hundred years old. Secondary orality is radio, TV, recordings, and such: in general, what we call “the media.”

A good deal of media presentation has a script and is therefore primarily written and secondarily oral; but these days, its most meaningful distinction from primary orality is that the speaker has
no present audience
.

If instead of writing this, I were giving a speech, your being in the same room listening to me would be a necessary condition of my talking. That’s primary orality: a
relationship
of speaker and listeners.

President Lincoln stands up and begins, “Fourscore and seven years ago,” to a crowd of more or less interested people at Gettysburg. His voice (said to have been rather thin and soft) makes a relationship between him and them, establishing community. Primary orality.

Grandfather tells a Coyote tale to a circle of grown-ups and kids on a winter evening. The story affirms and explains their community as a people and among other living beings. Primary orality.

The anchorman on the six o’clock news stares out of the box, not at us, because he can’t see us, because we aren’t where he is, or even when he is; he is in Washington, D.C., two hours ago, reading what he says off a running tape. He can’t see us or hear us, nor can we see or
hear him. We see and hear an image, a simulacrum of him. There is no relationship between us and him. There is no interchange, no mutuality, between us and him. There is no intersubjectivity. His communication goes one way and stops there. We receive it, if we choose to. Our behavior, even our presence or absence, makes absolutely no difference to what he says or how he says it. If nobody was listening he would not know it and would go right on talking exactly the same way (until his sponsors found out, eventually, from the Nielsen ratings, and fired him). Secondary orality.

I read this speech into a recorder and it is taped; you buy it and listen to it. You hear the sound of my voice, but we have no actual relationship, any more than we would if you were reading the piece in print. Secondary orality.

Like the telephone, private writing, the personal letter, the private e-mail, is direct communication—conversation—mediated by technology. Amoeba A extends a pseudopodium and sends little bits of itself out to a distant amoeba B, who incorporates the material sent out and may respond to it. The telephone made immediate conversation at a distance possible; in written letters, there is an interval between messages; e-mail allows both interval and immediate exchange.

My model of printed public writing and of secondary orality is a box A shooting information out into a putative spacetime that may or may not contain many box Bs to receive it—maybe nobody—possibly an Audience of Millions (see
figure 3
).

Conversation is a mutual exchange or interchange of acts. Transmission via print and the media is one-way; its mutuality is merely virtual or hopeful.

Yet local, immediate community can be built upon both literacy and secondary orality. Schools and colleges are centers of the printed word, whether on paper or electronic, and are genuine if limited communities. Bible-study groups, reading clubs, fan clubs, are small printed-word-centered subcommunities, where, as in colleges, people talk about what they read. Newspapers and magazines create and foster opinion groups and facilitate communities based on information, such as sports fans comparing scores.