Oral, Textual, and Electronic Agoras: Correspondences
Some brief commentary on the last work of John Miles Foley
I’ll be perfectly honest: I’ve been quite hung over all day today, and for the last week I’ve been doing a bunch of social things, getting invited to dinners, attending little events, etc. etc., and so I haven’t been able to compose a good, solid piece of writing with a few original ideas. I intended to review the Anglo-Saxon literary scholar John Miles Foley’s last book before he died, Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (2012), but that’ll have to wait until next week. You know, I gotta say: being the kind of guy who “goes out” and “does things” — I simply wasn’t made for that lifestyle. It’s just not me!
Anyhow, in lieu of a full book review, I’d just like to present the reader with a few correspondences between the oral and electronic media realms that Foley left us with. I have several problems with his book, which I’ll discuss in broader detail at a later time, but these ideas are at least worth elucidating. After explaining them item by item, I’ll throw in a few of my own, which I consider just as important.
Genus and species: all three agoras are identified as having this quality. Foley simply means that the “genus” is the agora itself, while the “species” is the form of the message produced within it. So, for the oral agora, the species might be a spoken epic poem or Socratic dialectic. For the text agora, you’ve got books, leaflets, pamphlets, etc. For the electronic agora, maybe an audio file, an e-mail, a social media post, and so on. By the way, Foley likes the word “agora,” which basically means marketplace. Not a bad way of thinking about it.
Word-markets: again, this is indicated beneath all three agoras. The category seems less precise. In the electronic agora, Foley lists some social media platforms, which would seem to constitute real marketplaces in which a variety of forms can be expressed. But for the oral agora, he lists types of oral poems and incantations: Central Asian epic, Basque contest poetry, South African praise poetry, Serbian magic charms, and North American slam poetry. He seems to be talking about genres rather than real markets for the oral agora, but then again, the differences between a discarnate agora vs. a real-world one would seem to necessitate a difference in definition for “market.” For the textual agora, the “word-markets” he selects are media upon which people write: clay, papyrus, sheepskin, paper, and pixels. Foley, like McLuhan before him, isn’t really into fixed concepts. You can interpret the slipperiness of his terminology as an attempt to imitate the electronic/oral agoras that he’s so keen on.
Public, not proprietary: only under conditions of textuality can the concept of “intellectual property” make any real sense.
Evolutionary fallacy: Foley argues that the idea that “oral evolves to writing and writing evolves to the electric” is a fallacious one that belongs to what he calls “the ideology of the text.”
Five word-markets: see above.
No real authors: this is a solid point. Foley observes that in both the internet and the oral tradition, authorship is distributed. Borrowing, mixing, editing, and remixing are all common approaches in both agoras. The concept of “plagiarism” simply doesn’t exist in the oral world, and in the world of the internet it’s quite messy.
Five nonauthors: the word-markets of the electronic and oral agoras lack any real sense of authorship.
Sharing and reuse: more on his point about authorship.
Variation within limits: the oral and internet agoras rarely repeat an idea by saying it over again precisely as it was stated before (someone might argue that copypastas make an exception, but if anything, the humor of most pastas comes from the absurdity of their being copied, which if anything proves the point). Texts, however, rely on precision and verbatim restatement.
Analogy to language: language is a never-ending, evolutionary process. It is always changing in some way. The oral and internet agoras, then, work like language, in that the ideas they store are always being renewed constantly. The textual world, however, relies on fixity, which is antithetical to what language essentially is.
Recurrence, not repetition: probably Foley’s best point. Here, he sees differences across the agoras in the phenomenological experience of encountering an idea being stated again (interestingly, he doesn’t even talk about memes, which really bolster his point).
Built-in “copyright”: more on the meaning of authorship and intellectual property.
Survival of the fittest vs “fixed-est”: the oral and electronic agoras amount to self-sufficient ecologies which will decide as a whole unit which ideas, web sites, epic poems, incantations, etc. get to survive and which will disappear. In the textual agora, Foley seems to mean by “fixed-est” the single-authored works that will become canonized and be recognized for their wide applicability or universality even when expressed in a frozen state, unable to be updated or altered.
These ideas aren’t bad on the whole, though Foley’s main problem is in his selectivity. His job is to get you jazzed up about the internet. The book has an optimistic point of view; he doesn’t want to leave you with any misgivings about the future we’re headed towards.
I however, have no problems doing exactly that. So here are a few of my own correspondences, some of which (though my no means all) may be a bit unsettling.
Agglomerative thinking - Divisive thinking - Agglomerative thinking
In hierarchical clustering, there are two types: agglomerative and divisive. Wikipedia defines them like so:
Agglomerative: This is a "bottom-up" approach: Each observation starts in its own cluster, and pairs of clusters are merged as one moves up the hierarchy.
Divisive: This is a "top-down" approach: All observations start in one cluster, and splits are performed recursively as one moves down the hierarchy.
In both the oral and online agoras, knowledge is collectively assembled through a process of induction. Only with writing do we get the possibility of more ambitious, analytical thought processes in which syllogistic logic can occur. Walter Ong discussed this decades ago, and people got offended by him saying that literate cultures are better at analyzing things. I don’t think anyone ever convincingly rebutted him.
Second-order observation - First-order observation - Second-order observation
According to the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, second-order observation is the process through which social systems construct a presentation of reality by observing other observations. He argues this is a defining characteristic of modernity. It is entirely possible that I have failed to understand Luhmann’s point, but I would suggest that while his concept is valuable (hence why I’m using it), he misconstrues media conditions throughout history. In oral cultures, truths are arrived at socially, and every crowd of people implies the observation of other observers. Only with the advent of writing, and particularly the printing press, does the reception of information become a more altogether private affair. Even if a published book is “someone else’s observations,” it is only those of one person, and typically someone striving for absolute objectivity, as if such a thing were possible. The world of the internet, with social media profiles, comments sections, and other curated collections of observations approximates conditions prior to the invention of literacy.
Agonism - Conciliation - Agonism
Again, this is a Walter Ong point, and probably one that offended some people, since I never see recent media ecology guys bring it up. But it strikes me as true, so much so as to be downright obvious. In both oral and internet agoras, one gets a lot of mileage out of absolutely wrecking the credibility of some opponent, real or imagined. In textual feuds carried out by people steeped in literacy, there is a pretense of at least contributing to the acquisition of knowledge by way of productive disagreement. With the internet, if you want to get big, it’s good to find an enemy and do your best to absolutely humiliate him.
High possibility of physical conflict - Diminished possibility - Marginal possibility
One of the most important consequences of a discarnate form of communication is one’s lack of physical accountability. In the age of print, enlightenment intellectuals would argue with each other in books, but they also would meet each other and discuss their ideas in coffee shops. In the world of the internet, it is increasingly common for people in the same field to never even meet once. When you consider this factor, along with the agonism that online communication favors, it is easy to understand why internet-based attacks are often done in a feminine manner, through slander, rumor, and gossip. The internet fosters psychically masculine ideas, but it somatically feminizes discourse.
No privacy - Privacy - No privacy (but with the illusion of privacy)
You wanna know who doesn’t have privacy? Illiterate cultures. Everything is done communally, pretty much. You wanna know who also doesn’t have privacy? You. You’re being spied on at all times, and your metadata is being collected by both corporations and the government. But it doesn’t feel that way. And beyond that dimension of privacy, the internet also gives us the illusion of being a “private individual” even when engaging in public affairs. This is why people speak candidly, even coarsely, even violently on social media platforms in which a bit more circumspection would be a good idea.
Memory preserved through formulae and rituals - pedagogy and canonization - ???
Here we are dealing with the subject of collective mnemotechnics. One of the more fascinating aspects of the internet is in the question of how online communities will preserve their own records and maintain their most important ideas. It is not yet altogether clear, either, though I suspect it will have to involve some combination of strategies from both oral and textual realms. But let me just briefly state the problem, which I’ve addressed in other works: the “world wide web” suggests a record of everything, ever. But if it contains records of everything, then this threatens the idea of collective identity, since remembering everything is akin to remembering essentially nothing. Memory has to keep some things at the forefront of consciousness while discarding others in order to have any real meaning; it is inherently hierarchical. And yet, the internet promotes identitarian thought at the same time. It is a global village, and a tribal village. Therefore, the topic of memory is absolutely paramount for determining which “tribes” will succeed in their aims (whether control and dominance, mere survival, or whatever else).
That’s it for now.
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