{"id":4681,"date":"2017-11-21T11:17:41","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T08:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=4681"},"modified":"2017-11-21T11:17:41","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T08:17:41","slug":"w-ong-the-interiority-and-centering-action-of-sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/4681\/w-ong-the-interiority-and-centering-action-of-sound\/","title":{"rendered":"W. Ong, The interiority and centering action of sound"},"content":{"rendered":"

From: W. Ong, Orality and Literacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence. This centering effect of sound is what high-fidelity sound reproduction exploits with intense sophistication.<\/p>\n

You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight. By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart (Descartes\u2019 campaigning for clarity and distinctness registered an intensification of vision in the human sensorium\u2014 Ong 1967b, pp. 63, 221). The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together. Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness.<\/p>\n

The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says \u2018I\u2019 means something different by it from what every other person means. What is \u2018I\u2019 to me is only \u2018you\u2019 to you. And this \u2018I\u2019 incorporates experience into itself by \u2018getting it all together\u2019. Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony. Without harmony, an interior condition, the psyche is in bad health.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that the concepts interior and exterior are not mathematical concepts and cannot be differentiated mathematically. They are existentially grounded concepts, based on experience of one\u2019s own body, which is both inside me (I do not ask you to stop kicking my body but to stop kicking me) and outside me (I feel myself as in some sense inside my body).<\/p>\n

The body is a frontier between myself and everything else. What we mean by \u2018interior\u2019 and \u2018exterior\u2019 can be conveyed only by reference to experience of bodiliness. Attempted definitions of \u2018interior\u2019 and \u2018exterior\u2019 are inevitably tautological: \u2018interior\u2019 is defined by \u2018in\u2019, which is defined by \u2018between\u2019, which is defined by \u2018inside\u2019, and so on round and round the tautological circle.<\/p>\n

The same is true with \u2018exterior\u2019. When we speak of interior and exterior, even in the case of physical objects, we are referring to our own sense of ourselves: I am inside here and everything else is outside. By interior and exterior we point to our own experience of bodiliness (Ong 1967b, pp. 117\u201322, 1 76\u20139, 228, 231) and analyze other objects by reference to this experience. In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of such a text, the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings\u2019 feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life.<\/p>\n

The centering action of sound (the field of sound is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man\u2019s sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world (Eliade 1958, pp. 231\u20135, etc.). Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or \u2018world\u2019, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be \u2018explored\u2019.<\/p>\n

The ancient oral world knew few \u2018explorers\u2019, though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims. It will be seen that most of the characteristics of orally based thought and expression discussed earlier in this chapter relate intimately to the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of sound as perceived by human beings.<\/p>\n

A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies (which would come with the inscribed, visualized word: vision is a dissecting sense). It is consonant also with the conservative holism (the homeostatic present that must be kept intact, the formulary expressions that must be kept intact), with situational thinking (again holistic, with human action at the center) rather than abstract thinking, with a certain humanistic organization of knowledge around the actions of human and anthropomorphic beings, interiorized persons, rather than around impersonal things.<\/p>\n

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From: W. Ong, Orality and Literacy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From: W. Ong, Orality and Literacy. Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,46],"tags":[5652,5708,3044,5761,503,7855,7854,2315],"class_list":["post-4681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-philosophy","tag-anthropology","tag-cognition","tag-consciousness","tag-humanity","tag-knowledge","tag-ong","tag-sound","tag-vision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}