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Transformations of the Word and Alienation Orality, Writing, and Disjuncture 1 Alienation, a favorite diagnosis variously applied to modem man's plight since at least Hegel and Feuerbach, has not been commonly thought of in terms of the technological history of the word, although some attention, more analytic than historical or clinical, has been given by structuralists to certain tensions attendant on writing.1 Yet it would appear that the technological inventions of writings, print, and electronic verbalization, in their historical effects, are connected with and have helped bring about a certain kind of alienation within the human lifeworld. This is not at all to say that these inventions have been simply destructive , but rather that they have restructured consciousness, affecting men's and women's presence to the world and to themselves and creating new interior distances within the psyche. 1. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), Pt. II, Ch. 1, "La Violence de la lettre: de Levi-Strauss a Rousseau." With work such as Derrida's, philosophy, which as a formal discipline depends on a certain interiorization of writing, becomes acutely and exquisitely aware of its own chirographic framework, but has not yet much attended to the orality out of which the chirographic has developed historically and in which it is always in some way embedded. It may be worth noting that Derrida's key distinction between difference and differance (his neologism) is not phonemic, but chirographic. For the distinction, see Jacques Derrida, "La Dilferance," in Theorie d'ensemble, ed. Phillippe Sollers et al. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968) . The proliferation of such terms in the work of Derrida, Roland Barthes, and other structuralists appears to register the sensibility fostered by an electronic noetic economy, a sensibility conditioned to work with massive accumulation of detailed information and rapid exchange of ideas-even though its chief focus of attention is chirographic (and typographic) . 18 Cleavage and Growth Primary orality, the orality of a culture which has never known writing, is in some ways conspicuously integrative. The psyche in a culture innocent of writing knows by a kind of empathetic identification of knower and known, in which the object of knowledge and the total being of the knower enter into a kind of fusion,2 in a way which literate cultures would typically find unsatisfyingly vague and garbled and somehow too intense and participatory. To personalities shaped by literacy, oral folk often appear curiously unprogramed, not set off against their physical environment, given simply to soaking up existence, unresponsive to abstract demands such as a "job" that entails commitment to routines organized in accordance with abstract clock time (as against human, or lived, "feIt," duration). This kind of reaction to "primitives" is commonplace in highly technologized cultures and hardly calls for documentation. With writing, the earlier noetic state undergoes a kind of cleavage, separating the knower from the external universe and then from himself.3 This separation makes possible both "art" (techne) in the ancient Greek sense of detached abstract analysis of human procedures, and science, or detached abstract analysis of the cosmos, but it does so at the price of splitting up the original unity of consciousness and in this sense alienating man from himself and his original lifeworld. The original unity was not by any means totally satisfactory, of course. It was destined to crumble, 2. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 169-190. Although studies of this depth have yet to be made for cultures other than that of ancient Greece, the noetic processes examined in minute detail by Havelock can be readily recognized in the heroic poetry of other oral cultures. See, for example, Daniel P. Kunene, Heroic Poetry of the Basotho (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Jeff Opland, "Imbongi Nezibongo: The Xhosa Tribal Poet and the Contemporary Poetic Tradition," PMLA, 90 (1975), 185-208. All primary oral cultures are more or less "heroic." Claude Levi-Strauss observes that "the savage mind totalizes"-The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 245: this "savage" mind is the functionally oral mind as against the literate. 3. Havelock, Preface to Plato, pp. 197-214, and 3-19, 254-278; Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). pp.22-35. Transformations of the Word 19 for man is programmed for alienation, more than any other being in the cosmos. Such programming gives mankind both...

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