INTRODUCTION

My talk proceeds from the assumption that Western culture can be conceived as a historical sequel of modes of managing verbalization, script, imaging and knowledge of any kind. Primary orality which operated without the aid of writing, has shaped human history longer than any other medium. Chirography, a product of the explosive invention of the alphabet, has furnished the medium for intellectual activities for approximately 6,000 years in the West. Typography, which has dominated Western culture for only five hundred years, rapidly eclipsed chirography by virtue of artificially constructed pieces of metallic types. The electronic media, finally, implement high-speed powers of computation and simulation, which transcend typographically conceived notions of time and space, and usher in the so-called global information culture.

We concede a degree of fictionality to this fourfold media typology because in ordinary media life these modes of communication run together and manifest themselves in mutual reabsorptions as well as mutual deconstructions. The dynamics of media interfaces vary considerably, and as a rule are intellectually challenging to grasp.

Homer and Primary Orality

Apart from the Bible, no other literature in the West is revered quite in the same sense as foundational and indeed canonical, as the monumental Homeric epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad. A vast body of humanistic scholarship has grown around these epics which stand rather like erratic boulders at the dawn of Greek civilization.

In the 18th and 19th century, Homeric scholarship was roughly divided into two camps: the analysts and the unitarians. In reflecting on the compositional genesis of these epics, the analysts assumed a lengthy period of textual developments, entailing editorial processes, revisions, interpolations--in short, literary processes that appeared to represent the work of many writers and editors.

While the analysts thus deprived readers of Homer as a single, literary sterling genius, the unitarians defended the essential unity of the epics which, they argued, was such that it could only be attributable to the individual craftsmanship and authorship of the poetic intelligence of a single authorial personality, called Homer.

If the analysts represented the philological, textual, typographical rationality of 19th and 20th century humanistic scholarship, the unitarians' theory, on the other hand, was predicated on modernity's lofty and Romantic estimation of the individual and individual acts of poetic genius.

In the 20th century a new school of scholarly thought challenged what were perceived to be the cultural premises underlying the theories of both the analysts and the unitarians. Deep reflection on Homer's metered language discovered repetitious and formulaic patterns. Individual words, phrases, clauses and sometimes whole lines are repeated, sometimes in verbatim form, but more often with variations. Groups of words are employed under the same metrical conditions to express given ideas. In addition to formulaic regularity, one discovered considerable standardization of themes. The representation of battles, weddings, sieges, capture of cities, rescue missions, disguise and deception themes, etc. betray unmistakable narrative redundancy.

In different words, Homeric language is characterized by a sense of predictability, and Homer was not an original, but rather a traditional poet. And 'traditional' meant that Homer had recourse to preformulated, prefabricated building blocks as he relied on recurring patterns. This formulaic and thematic packaging of language, it was further argued, was designed to appeal to mind and memory, and had come into existence under the pressures of oral compositioning and performance.

By taking the force of the medium seriously, scholars had reconceptualized Homer and the Homeric epics. As literature, the Odyssey and the Iliad had been in the making for centuries by way of oral performance. These epics, it was now suggested, did not have a single author in the modernist, Romantic sense. Nor were they the products of elaborate textual manipulations. Rather, Homer was the beneficiary of centuries of traditional, oral compositioning and performance. His "originality" lies entirely within his tradition. "Originality," therefore, does not suggest the modern notion of a departure from tradition as a breakthrough toward new ides, but rather in the sense of utilizing the highest potential of a millennial legacy of oral traditioning.

Plato Caught Between Orality and Scribality

In a remarkable book, Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock, a distinguished classicist, interpreted Plato in the context of media dynamics. The focal point of his study was an item of considerable embarrassment to the aesthetic sensibilities of humanists: Plato's repudiation of the poets and the poetic experience in books 2, 3, 5 and especially 10 of the Republic. Why are the poets to be banished from the ideal state, as Plato envisions it?

When we think of poetry, Havelock explains, we must not view it in the modern sense as an art form that engages the creative, imaginative faculties. Quite the opposite: the poets in ancient civilization were the collectors and transmitters of oral tradition. To all practical purposes, in Greece they were the ones who performed the Homeric epics, along with many other genres, such as tragedies and comedies. They did not invent tradition, they preserved it. In this oral culture, the poets functioned as a kind of social encyclopedia, or cultural memory, constituting the educational norm, content and institution in ancient Greece. Learning in this cultural context was essentially a process of recapitulation. Operating exclusively in the oral medium, the poets articulated information in rhythmic fashion; the ears of hearers were bombarded with vocal, instrumental and altogether rhythmic patterns. The impact on the audience was hypnotic and created an electric atmosphere, appealing to hearers' emotions, making them wallow in suffering and pleasure.

The problem with the poets, as Plato saw it, was that they repeated the same information over and over again. Repetition, a primary vehicle for all oral traditioning, was now declared intellectually unproductive. The close interaction of speaker, message and audience helped preserve tradition and sustain group identity, but it was detrimental to thinking. The poets, our primary educational authorities, have seduced our young people into habits of irrationality, whereas true education, Plato argues, emancipates our young from psychosomatic hysteria, from sensory indulgence in pain and pleasure, and, last not least, from oral collectivity and repetitiveness. Don't revel in tribal lore, but distance yourself from it; don't imitate what others say, but reflect on it. Don't sink your personality into beauty, bathing yourself in the sensory experience of shapeliness, delicacy, brilliance, but rather stand apart from beauty, examine it, and define the essence of beauty.

Havelock is of the opinion that Plato's state of mind is unthinkable without the stimulus of writing and reading. Because with writing the ephemeral, invisible nature of orality is - in a process of extraordinary abstraction - metamorphosed into an alphabetized series of visible, recordable signs. Writing also distances the author from direct audience response and responsibilities: the author writes in the absence of readers and hearers. And the laborious process of handwriting slows down mental processes, encouraging thought and reflectiveness.

It follows that the Platonic drive toward abstraction and the thing per se represents a new type of mental activity not entirely plausible without the effects of the alphabetization of the Greek language and the introduction of literacy. From a media perspective, therefore, Plato's ban on the poets marks a revolt of the new literate mentality against the oral hegemony of the poets. Education is centrally involved in the media conflict. More than that, as far as Plato was concerned, what is at stake is precisely our educational institution and processes.

In other places of his writing, however, Plato bemoans the destructive effects of writing. When, in the Phaedrus, he argues that writing undermines memory, he reasons very much like an oral traditionalist who is keenly aware of the vital significance of memory in oral culture. With writing, he further worries, words have fallen silent as they were extricated from a living matrix and frozen into still life. Finally, authors cannot defend themselves vis-à-vis their readers who can now read and interpret the authors' writings as they (the readers) see fit. Here the argument basically is that with writing we do not achieve control over our thought, but we lose control of language and thought.

From the media perspective, the key to Plato is that he is caught between the old and the new medium. He is polemically obsessed with the whole apparatus of the oral, poetic system of education. But he cannot bring himself to embrace the new educational values philosophically, because he is still too much in the grip of the old system to fully appreciate the fuller implications of the chirographic culture. In attacking the oral, poetic enterprise on the one hand, and the defects of writing on the other, he represents the media tensions of his time or, if you will, the cultural schizophrenia of the oral/literate dilemma.

In Praise of rhetoric

Because for us the words 'rhetoric' and 'rhetorical' have largely a negative connotation, the significance of the art of speech and persuasion in Western culture prior to the invention of print is difficult to understand. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of rhetoric in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the 4th century BCE Aristotle wrote his Ars Rhetorica, capitalizing on centuries of experience with the spoken word, memory, and oral compositioning. In the 1st century BCE Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote a study De Oratore, a comprehensive treatment of the practical and theoretical aspects of speech and oral communication. After Cicero, the most celebrated theoretician of rhetoric was Quintilian, born in Spain, a citizen of the Roman Empire, who occupied an academic chair in rheoric that was funded by the Emperor Vespasian. His classic work is the Institutio Oratoria which, along with Aristotle's Ars Rhetorica and Cicero's De Oratore, exercised enormous influence upon Western culture far into the 16th century.

As far as the Western educational history was concerned, rhetoric was an essential part of the undergraduate curriculum throughout late antiquity and up until modernity. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric constituted the three subjects of the trivium, comprising four years of undergraduate studies; and music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy were subjects of the so-called quadrivium, the four years following the trivium.

Rhetoric, and its implementation in Western culture, displayed intensely theoretical and intensely practical features. Theoretically, it grew into something of a science of speech. Aristotle's Ars Rhetorica is one of the driest, dullest works ever written in the field of communication theory. Conceived strictly from the perspective of a formalistic logic, it developed a taxonomy of speech forms, defining with tedious precision tropes such as metaphor and allegory, simile and figure, syllogism and analogy, subsuming under rhetoric a whole range of features that today would be classified under literary criticism, philosophy, linguistics, hermeneutics, cognitive sciences, and even psychology.

On the other hand, rhetoric was a public, civic and educational issue of the very first order. You could not move ahead in the world, get a job and earn a living, without intricate knowledge of speech, of modes of argumentation, of the inducement of emotional states in hearers, of the retention of words and images in memory, and, above all, of mental compositioning and oral performance. If you wanted to embark upon a career as a politician, a civil servant, a laywer, a writer, a physician, a philosopher, a priest, an academician, etc., you had to have a basic training in rhetoric. Rhetoric was one of the most consequential and serious of all academic subjects and of all human activities.

The theoretical preoccupation with rhetoric in Western culture commenced in the Hellenistic age, roughly from the fourth and third century BCE to the second century CE. It was precisely the period where Greco-Roman culture engaged in an extraordinary flurry of literary activity. Not until the 16th century, spurred on by typographic technology, would the West again produce written compositions with such intensity and of such quantity. The point is that the flourishing medium of chirography, far from marginalizing orality, in fact reinforced theoretical reflection on it, shaping rhetoric into a unified theory of communication, cognition and action.

I am showing you a reproduction of an oil painting, produced by a Valentin de Boulogne dated roughly around 1600. The painting is entitled 'Saint Paul writing his Epistles.' The apostle is sitting at a desk, with quill in hand which he dips into an inkwell, surrounded by books, manuscripts, and a note book, all of which he consults in composing his letter. The picture was produced approximately 150 years after the publication of the Gutenberg Bible. It is an unmistakable example of a reproduction of the media situation as it presented itself around 1600. Paul is a writer, who compares different texts--one of them being a printed text (presumably the Hebrew Bible)--in order to produce his own text. This is how the typographic imagination, a thoroughly literary, text-centered imagination, conceived of the composition of the Pauline letters: texts grow out of other texts! The only concession to the ancient setting is a scroll in the right corner of the table. It requires a strenuous act of historical imagination to remember that the Paul of the first century did not write but dictate his letters, that all his writings, including the most intricate theological argumentations in Galatians and Romans, were mentally composed, and that large segments of his arguments are structured in keeping with the conventions of Hellenistic-Jewish rhetoric. The painting succeeded in displacing Paul's oral, rhetorical, scribal culture with the exclusively literary, textual, typographical media culture of the 16th century, and it did so around the same time when rhetoric was eliminated from the curriculum at most European universities.

Memory and manuscript

In looking at medieval manuscripts, one cannot help but be struck by the calligraphic virtuosity to which the ancient art and craft of handwriting had been advanced. So impressed were Gutenberg and other early printers with medieval chirography that they examined its handwritten characters using them as models for the production of metal types. So print-like is the appearance of many manuscripts of the high Middle Ages that we tend to forget that they are the products of hard, physical labor. By later typographical standards, writing one letter after the next, and word after word, was exceedingly tedious and slow work, and the time spent on completing a manuscript of average length was inordinate. For this reason also handwritten books were expensive and treasured objects: "In 1331 King Edward III paid the equivalent of 80 oxen for an illuminated volume; in 1057 Diemude of Wessobrunn (a nun) traded a Bible she penned for a farm; in the eleventh or twelfth century a book was traded for a vineyard; in the ninth century, a book was traded for enough land for eight families" (Enos: 122).

Medieval chirography is not directly translatable into literacy in the modern sense, if by the latter we mean the combined skills of reading and writing. The copying of already existent manuscripts aside, the manufacture of new texts usually was the result of a division of labor. There was the dictator who is the intellectual initiator of a text and himself/herself frequently unable to write. (Charlemagne, for example, did not know how to read or write). Secondly there was the scriptor who takes dictation but may not necessarily have an intellectual grasp of what he is writing down. Literacy and authorship in the modern sense is virtually nonexistent in medieval manuscript culture. Who is the author of the book of Genesis or the Gospel of Matthew is a question informed by modern, typographical sensibilities, but entirely unanswerable in the context of ancient media realities.

Medieval scribality progressively explored the spatial potentials of the writing surface. Initially no spaces, or only minimal spaces, were placed between words, clauses and sentences. Prior to Charlemagne (742?-814), moreover, there were no periods, commas, or semicolons. Reading as we practice it was therefore difficult because there were no visual aids to inform readers where words began and where they ended. In the absence, or near-absence, of spaces and punctuation marks, it was only in reading aloud that one could perceive individual words, clauses, and sense units. When one remembers that new texts were dictated, e. g., spoken aloud, to scribal experts, only to be recycled back into orality by so-called readers , we realize that both at the end of production and at the end of consumption medieval manuscripts functioned in an oral matrix.

Ancient and most medieval Bibles did not have chapter and verse divisions. It was only around 1200 that the first chapter divisions were introduced into biblical manuscripts, and around 1500 that biblical texts were atomized into individually numbered verses. Neither the ancient rabbis nor Augustine, neither Maimonides nor Thomas Aquinas ever cited the Bible the way typographic folks do. How did they quote? They cited from memory! Here is how Peter Brown, the eminent historian of late antiquity, described Augustine (354-430): "On the shelves, in the little cupboards that were the book-cases of Late Roman men, there lay ninety-three of his own works, made up of two hundred and thirty-two little books, sheafs of his letters, and, perhaps, covers crammed with anthologies of his sermons, taken down by stenographers of his admirers" (428). But, and this is the crucial point, the man who produced and surrounded himself with a steady flood of books, was throughout his life convinced that the quality of his intellect was intricately related to the powers of memory. Says Brown: "His memory, trained on classical texts, was phenomenally active. In one sermon, he could move through the whole Bible, from Paul to Genesis and back again, via the Psalms, piling half-verse on half-verse" (254). His undiminished enthusiasm for and cultivation of memory was not only compatible with, but, in his mind, essential for the retention of knowledge, the powers of mental compositioning, and, in the end, the quality of his thought. Memory and manuscript interacted in ways we can hardly imagine today.

In spite of their commitment to the world of living speech and rhetoric, medieval chirographic culture heavily contributed to the development of the reasoning faculties, for logic has a history. The connections with writing and reasoning are manifold, yet difficult to document. Spoken words are time-bound, because they exist invisibly only at the moment of utterance. Written words are space-bound, because they exist visibly on material surfaces. The shift from speech to writing entails both visualization and the spatialization of language. The alphabetic representation, this "ruthlessly efficient reducer of sound to space" (Ong: 100), renders language visually accessible on spatial surfaces furnished by stone, papyrus, leather, parchment, or paper. Jointly, visualization and spatial organization bestow a sense of objectivity upon language which it does not have in speaking culture. Standing on its own, as it were, the written text brings both alienation from the oral biosphere and the potential for detachment, retrospectivity, the and visual objectification - all elements that are indispensable to the civilizing process. But the gradual drift toward in- creasingly textualized mental processes also exacts the price of alienation from the oral biosphere, and a loss of vital com-ponents of the sensorium, above all of the powers of memory. Thus chirography restructured consciousness, but it did so by keeping life at arm's length.

As is well known, the professional language of Western scientists and theologians in the Middle Ages was Latin. Some-where between the 7th and 1Oth centuries Latin diversified into ethnic Latin which gradually developed into the so-called Romance languages of Italian, French, Spanish, Rumanian, Portugese, etc. Notwithstanding this development, written Latin continued to be the language of the intellectuals. But theirs was a Latin that became increasingly alienated from the way people actually spoke; no longer immediately accountable to the needs and dictates of the ethnic vernaculars, it operated as a kind of "cool medium," chirographically controlled in a linguistic deep freeze. It was precisely this Latin, distanced from the oral, human lifeworld and strenuously subjected to the requirements of the chirographic medium, that served the needs of the rising scientific consciousness of a Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and many others. And it was this same Latin that served the needs of medieval theologians, above all the scholasticism of a Thomas Aquinas and its nomina- list offspring of William of Ockham. Extreme rationality, latinity and chirography entered into a covenant to produce a sum-mation of medieval Christianity, and, in the case of Ockham, to preparation of the way toward modernity.

The high-tech of the fifteenth century

The invention of letterpress printing was the high-tech of the fifteenth century. Print's cumulative effects on every aspect of human thought and activity were such that one may view it as the defining event in the shift from medieval to modern consciousness. In media perspectives, writing already is a technology when compared with orality. Print further technologized language in designing a thoroughly artificial and metallically constructed alphabet.

At the heart of the invention lay not the principle of the printing press itself, but the casting of movable types from metal. The idea of the movable type was to produce rectangular metal blocks for each of the lower and upper case letters of the alphabet, for combinations of letters, punctuation marks, and for additional notations some of which had been in use for centuries. As to size, a single lettertype had to be cast to a thousandth of an inch lest the lines turned out to be uneven. The process of typesetting entailed the placement of characters, one at a time, into a tray that was adjustable to the desired length of lines. All margins were justified and all spaces between words in one line equidistant. Subsequently, the lines of a page or column were placed into a wooden galley which was soaked with ink. The actual process of printing was executed by transferring by pressure the design of the letters in the galley upon impressionable surfaces of paper or parchment.

Between 1452 and 1455 Johannes Gutenberg produced the first printed Bible, universally known as the Gutenberg Bible. It is widely regarded as the first machine-made book in the West. It is not immediately obvious why Gutenberg selected a book as monumental in scope as the Bible to implement a printing technology that was still in its infancy. At first glance, print's pragmatic effects of duplication point to the propagation of faith as his principal objective. But many arguments speak against it. Would he cast close to 300 different characters if mass distribution was his primary goal? The casting of the lettertypes was labor-intensive, and hiked up the price of the final product. Moreover, the project as not a commissioned work, and required a vast capital investment. In fact, with printing capitalism and entrepreneurship entered communications history with a vengeance. The investments were enormous, and so were the risks. The print Bible brought its master no profit whatsoever. As is well known, he died a poor man, involved in lawsuits and unable to pay back his debts. Latin, the language of Gutenberg's Bible, moreover, was no longer marketable. Very few people could actually read his Bible.

Gutenberg Bible: Page from Genesis	Gutenberg Bible: Page from Psalms	Gutenberg Bible: Page from Lamentations

To the viewer the Gutenberg Bible's most striking feature was sameness and proportionality. Prior to the invention of printing, sameness in the sense of complete identity had never been experienced. No jar was like the other, and no two manuscripts were ever quite alike. The copies of Gutenberg's Bible represented stunning models of sameness. Nothing quite like it had ever been experienced in Western history of communications. In itself, each copy was a masterpiece in proportionality. By virtue of unprecedented spatial organization and finality of precision it expressed a sense of almost unearthly beauty. Aesthetics must have been uppermost in the mind of Gutenberg. His masterpiece fulfilled existing standards of beauty, the hallmark of which was a harmoniously proportioned relationship of all internal parts.

Hardly any single aspect of Western culture has remained unaffected by the print revolution. In conclusion, I will single out three: religion, education, and politics.

Martin Luther was born into the initial phase of the new medium age, and the Reformation is unthinkable without the invention of printing. It was the first Western revolution that benefited directly from the print medium, and at its center stood the technologically transformed Bible. Luther was not only conscious of the new medium, but he embraced it wholeheartedly. He was keenly aware of the propagandistic, social, and educational advantages of print technology, and had nothing but complementary things to say about it. Catholic authorities were far more reticent because they sensed-rightly--that the new medium had it within its powers to undermine traditional authority. On his part, Luther used the print medium deliberately as a catalyst of change, and shamelessly in his polemics against Church authority.

Thanks to the masterful study by Walter Ong on Petrus Ramus we are well informed about the changes in the 16th century French University system. Pierre de la Ramee (1515-1572), a French humanist and philosopher, and thousands of his followers across central and northwest Europe, disestablished the old, oral world of discourse and rhetoric in favor of a new seemingly quiescent world of thought. Knowledge was in textbook fashion presented by way of definitions and divisions, leading to still further definitions and more divisions, until every last particle of knowledge had been categorized, dissected, and intellectually located. To accomplish this massive quantification of knowledge Ramus designed dichotomized outlines, charts, and tables that showed exactly how all data were organized and where in the system they were located. Ong points out a striking resemblance of Ramus' binary, dichotomized charts with digital computer programs. Some of these quantifying drives Ramus inherited from medieval logic, especially from scholasticism, but his relentless diagrammatization and geometrization of knowledge is likely to be the result of the pressures of typography. For it is the printed page that creates the illusion that knowledge can be closed off in a world of its own, spatialized, linearized, objectified, definitively relegated to visual surfaces, and subject to diagrammatic, geometrical analyses.

No medium escapes the law of unintended consequences, and the print medium was not the unmixed blessing that many of its inventors and promoters had envisioned. As the print Bible was disseminated among a steadily growing readership, it was also exposed to unprecedented scrutiny. Inevitably, scriptural discrepancies and contradictions came to light. Notwithstanding its typographical orderliness, the Bible's content, ever more widely publicized, became a bone of fierce contention. But whereas in chirographic culture, theological controversies had been limited to a circle of few, in print culture they were publicized across regional and national boundaries. In this way, print culture marketed dissension and deepened disagreements. Moreover, the vernacular translations of the Bible, dispersed under the auspices of print, strengthened ethnicity--for better and for worse. While the print medium gave momentum to national languages and identities, it also helped draw new lines of religious and national divisions, and strongly enhanced Catholic-Protestant polarities which should result in the Thirty Years War that devastated Europe. This is a major thesis Elizabeth Eisenstein argued in her monumental, two-volume work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: print was a major contributor to the dissolution of Latin Christianity and the fragmentation of Europe into competing national states.

References

Peter Brown. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.

Mary Carruthers. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Janet Coleman. Ancient and Medieval Memories. Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Richard L. Enos, ed. Oral and Written Communication. Historical Approaches. Written Communication Annual, Vol. 4. Newbury Park/London/New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990.

Lucien Febvre et Henri-Jean Martin. L'Apparition du Livre. Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1958.

Eric Havelock. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Belknap Press, 1963.

Michael Giesecke. Der Buchdruck in der fruehen Neuzeit. Eine historische Fallstudie ueber die Durschsetzung neuer Informa-Tions- und Kommunikationstechnologien. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1994.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. Materialitaet der Kommunikation. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 750. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1988.

Werner H. Kelber. The Oral and the Written Gospel. The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Foreword by Walter J. Ong. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983. Translation into French: Tradition Orale et Ecriture, Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1990. Reprint with new Introduction, Indiana Univ. Press, 1997.

Albert B. Lord. The Singer of Tales. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Walter Ong. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.

Brian Stock. The Implications of Literacy. Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Frances A. Yates. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

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