Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Oral Culture: Oral Culture as Antidote to Terror and Ennui

103 Oral Culture Or a l Cul t ur e a s Ant idot e t o Ter r or a nd Ennui Ma r k Fackl er This essay began to take shape on the night of Hollywood’s annual Academy Awards. Half the nation is in Los Angeles, via television, on stage with beautiful, talented people. It’s their conversation we listen to, their ritual of affirmation we hear, their stumbling thanks and scripted affection for nuanced sound engineering and whiz-bang special effects. We listeners, even if the spectacle is only ambiance, are part of the filmmaking family, whether we share their politics or like their looks. Our conversations tomorrow will be about them. We will remake our favorites in our own image through a million oral encounters on the Monday following. With James Carey’s ritual view as overlay, awards night—like the Superbowl, political primaries, or CBS’s launch of its anchor Katie Couric—becomes a cultural and personal marker, a moment of significance. Awards night is social reality in countless oral and mediated forms. Students of oral culture usually refer to Walter Ong as the subject’s patron expounder. Ong’s approach to orality was nearly reverential: life expressed itself in voice and sound, prior to sight and smell. His famous reference to buffalos—as dangerous when heard—evoked oral images of primal culture as surely as did his literary exposition of the Gospel of John’s “Word made flesh.” For Ong, sound was 104 Mark Fackler more than decibel or signal. Oral culture, whose communicators specialized in sound, emphasized poetry, agonistic confrontation, and memory. Ong’s Orality and Literacy (2002)drew distinctions between the modern West and an era before the mediated film image and rapid transportation. Ong described communities that rehearsed values in couplets (enchanting evening, healthy body) and songs thateveryonememorizedandsangascommunityrecreation.TheRomanpriestin Ong was not quick to separate pastoral insight from scholarship. Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988) elaborated on Ong’s distinction, generating in his work a reverence for the visual, but he too found succor in the Mass nearly every day of his adult life. McLuhan cited Jacques Ellul’s (1985)work on hearing and sight and their relation to social organization: “Images fall into a pattern with respect to each other, but sounds do not. Instead, sounds contradict each other and cancel each other. . . . I am listening to a Mozart concerto, and suddenly near me someone speaks. . . . Sounds produce incoherence. The noises I hear form no panorama of the world” (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 13). Harold Innis (1964, 105) sought a balance between sight and sound, reaching for appropriate extensions of time-biased and space-biased media: “In oral intercourse the eye, ear, and brain, the sense and the faculties act together in busy co-operation and rivalry, each eliciting, stimulating, and supplementing the other.” Not so for Jack Goody (1968), the esteemed British anthropologist, whose study of the influence of writing led him to seek a preserve for orality rather than to honor it as premier medium. Goody cites as a major influence for his work a dyslexic daughter who developed an early “aversion to school,” where reading and writing dominated the curriculum (Pallares-Burke 2003). Goody subsequently referred to writing as a technology of the intellect. Humans categorize and interact with the world based on syllogisms and listing behavior. Literacy enables humans to categorize and to interact with the world based on syllogisms and lists; oral culture does not. Goody’s research distinguished pristine oral culture from writing cultures with an oral component. In the former, being alone, eating alone, or communicating with oneself was regarded with suspicion, a prelude to nefarious activity, possibly witchcraft (Goody 2000, 24). Like Goody, Ong conducted much of his research on oral culture in West Africa, where communal life was a given and Western market efficiency never a serious barrier to people’s connecting by sound and gesture. “Sound unites groups of living beings as nothing else does,” wrote Ong (1967, 122)soon after colonial powers had vacated Africa and regional democracy took its first faltering steps. Ong recalled from one of his visits to Cameroon “the most exotic feature” of a tribal liturgy. It was not the setting, the homilies, or the vestments but the Or a l Cu l t u r e 105 oyenga, “the drawn-out, piercing shriek, . . . high-pitched, . . . sustained as long as breath...