…Jay-Z doesn’t write his raps down. W.W.O.S. (What Would Ong Say)? Backing up though: W.D.O.S. (What Did Ong Say)? And off we go! At the risk of focusing on minutia, what’s the difference between:
What Did Ong Say? vs. What Does Ong Say?
Which is more appropriate? He obviously said it already — copyright 1982 – but maybe it’d be better to suggest that he never said any of it. Maybe he’s still saying it – rather – given the nature of text – rather – given the nature of books – perhaps it’s all perpetually being said, suggesting a relationship between writing and “loop()” – or whatever. This dilemma – if we can call it a dilemma – is, to my understanding, the Written Word: Ong’s notion of “residue.” It would seem that with writing, we get our first real external hard drive, so to speak. Writing as technology. Take this claim for example:
“Oral tradition has no residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.”
What’s Ong’s definition of residue then? What kind of residue? Something here kind of smacks of the tautological – that is to say (and mind you I haven’t actually said a word of this): when Ong claims that oral tradition has no residue, it seems as though he’s just equating residue with the written word, like saying “oral tradition has no written word.” But how does he account for the residue of human memory? Certainly these often-told stories are told often because people have reason to remember them. & here the word meme comes to mind. I guess I’d argue that there is a kind of residue at work in the oral tradition – there’s a sort of intertextuality (without textuality) at work via the human brain – via memory. Therein lies the residue. The story is a collection of data; the data is stored in the brain. And, like the telephone game, the data gets manipulated; it eventually proffers a new story – kind of like cell division. Writing it down just moves files to the external hard drive. Alexander Pope put a lot of files on the Western world’s external hard drive. They’re still there. They proffered more and more files, for better or worse. This reminds me of a Jed Rasula quote from “Statement on Reading in Writing” (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, 1978):
“If all writing were to cease right now, the fantastic load of the already-written would be more than sufficient to sponsor a new race of genius speakers and rhetoricians and conversationalists. I think we’re at a point where we can actually say (probably we’re the first people in history to get to this point) that there exists enough writing already.”
And yet it would seem that we’re still not totally over 18th century notions of originality, like “original” in the Alexander Pope sense. Shakespeare’s a good point of departure here. So is modern copyright law. So is Walt Disney. {RIP a mixtape manifesto is a movie not without problems, but it makes some great/relevant points} But back to Shakespeare. Shakespeare wasn’t original; there’s a source text to almost every plot; look it up. Here’s an example from the introduction to some edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen:
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean dramatization of a medieval English tale based on an Italian romance version of a Latin epic about one of the oldest and most tragic Greek legends.
Telephone game. So W.W.A.P.S (What Would Alexander Pope Say) about all this? About Shakespeare’s originality??? Well, here’s a clip from the introduction to The Works of Shakespeare, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols. (London, 1725):
“If ever any Author deserved the name of an Original, it was Shakespeare.”
Obviously (& without parsing semantics) Billy Shakespeare was indeed very original, nobody’s denying that – but somehow this brings me to Kenneth Goldsmith. Not only has he published a book called Day, where he copied word for word an entire NY Times (cover-to-cover), but he’s also the author of Soliloquy, a written record of every word he spoke in a week. What Would Ong Say? But one more point about Shakespeare, a question: is a play an oral performance? If yes, then how do we account for its reliance on the script/text? I’ll end where I began, with Jay-Z, one of America’s preeminent griots, so to speak. He doesn’t write anything down; he listens to the beat over and over, formulating his verses in his head; then, in one take (legend has it), he spits out a complete verse – no writing, no reading from a script. If the oral tradition according to Ong relies on a sort of relationship between orator and audience, then who is Jay-Z’s audience? If we say it’s the people in the studio (presumably his entourage, producer, and sound engineer), then what of the fact that he’s inside a sound booth? That is to say: nobody hears his actual “oral performance”; what they hear is the microphone feed coming through the speakers in the room they’re presumably in; you know, the one with the soundboard. Are they still his audience in the Ong-sense? We can picture the Western ethnographer, wearing headphones, holding the boom mic, capturing an oral culture’s oral culture, turning their sound into our text. & one more thing – to make mention of the Oliver Laric piece I linked at the top of this long, meandering collection of sentences and fragments. Not to jump too far ahead but this is where I think we’re going with all this: the notion of the new orality, a technologically-driven audio-visual kind of chimera, Virilio’s dromophere in motion. In many ways, it would seem that we’re seeing a reversion to the tenets of Ong’s oral cultures: the now, the present: in our case, the instantaneous.
