Practice and Performance of Scholarship: On Media Technology in the Trans[4]mission of Walter Ongs World

Patricia Sullivan Talk at College Composition and Communication Conference, St. Louis, March 2012 Im departing from my normal helter skelter CCCC talking from a set of ppt slides mode today, as Im here to honor Fr. Walter Ong of the Society of Jesus in the city that was his home base for many years of his life.

I will read a portion from a larger project on the knowledge-making processes evidenced through Ong work, one which focuses -- because his corpus is so vast-on an area of keen interest to us here at CCCC. Indeed, Ong himself considered the study of the evolution of communications media and forms of communication central to his scholarly identity as a cultural historian. So, Well take him at his word.

As a reward for your patience with my clumsy reading, Ill seed in a couple treats.

[your handout includes a list of takeaways related to the larger paper, todays talk focuses on 1 and 3]

TAKEAWAY 1: Because early on he was aware that the late print culture
would not sustain itself (at least in the ways it had been handed down to the 20th c),

Ong actively experimented with knowledge transmission technologies (seeking new mediations for the work of making knowledge)

Thus, I work with Ongs scholarly processes as a way to better understand how knowledge was made in his world. Walter Ong was a sensible Missouri boy at heart, never straying from the states motto Show me. Yet, he also was an erudite global scholar who wrote in multiple languages and could have posed for a poster of what it meant to be a renaissance twentieth century scholar. How did he make sense of those identities. . . I contend that his processes helped him. . . . they accommodated both Ong the scholar and Ong a practical person who found himself thinking about how the seismic changes to how we communicate impact how and what we come to know. . . The second Ong was fed by a healthy thirst for experimentation with media technologies. . . the former drew on centuries of Jesuitical scholarly discipline.

[play media audio :40] this one from an exchange about the process of an interview

Interestingly in the larger interview, Ong rather than the interviewer, is ever alert to the technical details of the recording which itself was to be the basis of a printed piece. He asks about the questions had he received before the meeting, and mic levels at the start. After the first set of questions, Ong has the interviewer check to see if the tape is recording properly, and you heard the exchange that would deliver a copy (Transcription) to Ong for review.. At that time, April of 1975, everyone who was using

recording technology had a working knowledge of it because it was difficult to record at all, and to produce a recording of quality without a studio was quite hard.

Ongs interest in the HOW of emerging publication processes that lean on newer technologies than print and capture the attention of more senses than sight are reflected in this exchange. Unsurprisingly,

As early as 1960, Ong had featured this interest in Wired for Sound when he wrote : Probably a great many things are stirring; but it is certain that many of them can be summed up by saying we are leaving the Gutenberg era behind us. . . HE ALSO SAID THERE.. . .The present swing is to oral forms in communication, with radio, television (oral in its commitments as compared to typography). public address and inter-com systems, or voice recordings (to replace or supplement shorthand, longhand, typing, and print). As a result of this swing, older relationships are undergoing a profound, if not often perceptible, realignment (246).]

And he, throughout his career, was atuned to this realignment. ever on alert for HOW such realignments would be happening.

So, in a number of his later interviews that resulted in printed pieces, he deployed electronic recording at an early stage (and forged for himself) a process for achieving a more WITH IT voice. In this general time Rolling Stone was popularizing a magazine format that had both interviewer/ee to sound informal and off the cuff. Intrigued, Ong

set out to make and notice how one might use recording technology and writing in concert to achieve his version of informal print.

Ong talks about the results of this process work both in the pamphlet Why Talk (1973) and in his College English article about that project Media Transformations: The Talked Book.

The senses always were central to his scholarship. Ong evidenced an enduring fascination with the sense knowledge, and particularly HOW sight and sound differed in their relationships to knowledge making. Paul Soukup in his search for the religious groundings of Ongs work points out that Ongs first key insight into communication came with his framing device for his dissertation, namely that Ramus visual decision trees shifted the roles of rhetoric and dialectic in education and sharply contrasted visual systems of knowledge (out of the Greek and Latin tradition) with aural systems of knowledge found in the Hebrew scriptures (Soukup, 2006, 180).

These sound-sight RELATIONSHIPS jack his work into a myriad of contrasts that criss-crossed it through his publishing life, and Soukup quite rightly sees it as SCHOLARLY insight derived through framing and contrasting. . . between the visual and aural SYSTEMS OF KNOWLEDGE.

Yes, systematic scholarly work was a hallmark of his projects. But, importantly to the Ramus project and to all of his media work, Sound was recognized here as a legitimated source of scholarly knowledge. The point of interest here is that he worked his

fascination with senses and their attendant media inside his scholarly disciplines, but as we see above in his interviewing process work he also trusted his own know how when it intruded on those practices, and more often than we might expect, I think, his insistence on the HOW delivered for him. . . . in insights. . . the scholarly coin of the realm.

TAKEAWAY 3: Ongs approach to scholarly knowledge making can be revealed through his own classroom performance and practices because he was teaching to mold scholars

[here i talk about the poetry crit class I took from him when I was a soph at SLU. at that time in the early 70s poetry crit was new critical in its discipline and most did not teach beyond the edges of the page. . . the meaning of the poem was there, in the poem. Ong took a slightly different tack.]

Fr. Walter Ong was a scholar who taught with the purpose of molding scholars. Even when I encountered him as a seasoned teacher in an age of pedagogical looseness, he maintained a scholarly classroom: he started each class with a prayer, read a joke he had typed onto a notecard that by then had yellowed with age, and proceeded to lecture on the derivations of the key words in a poem he assigned for parsing. Each week we wrote a one-page paper, and all of the undergrads fell prey to his favorite first scholarly lesson i.e., going over the space limit. After the prayer and joke, he began the second week by the holding up a paper that had missed the (length) mark, detaching the pages beyond the first, and while they fluttered to the floor, he read aloud the partial sentence at the end of the first page commenting, How curious that this author chose to end his

paper on such a note. After a few weeks we were tested on the 30 or so page glossary of aesthetic and rhetorical terms in Understanding Poetry, and then were expected to start using a more sophisticated vocabulary in our oral and written performance of poetic critique.

Along the way, Fr. Ong would blend tenets and arguments surrounding new criticism into his lectures, and at the end of the course we were retested on the glossary and tested on our reading of about 25 representative works in new critical theory he had assigned along the way.

This class, aimed at undergraduate juniors and seniors, was one of performance and practice. You always knew what to expect, and you felt like you were shown a bear. . . but taught how to eat him, one bite at a time. Fr. Ong routinized the practice of literary criticism at the same time as he introduced and insisted we use the tools. But, more importantly he went beyond new critical practice of the day, first by filling his class sessions with talk of words and their histories both inside and outside the poems under review. These words werent just flat on the printed page; they had a long and sometimes vexed lives outside the particular poem. And second through his insistence that we read Richards, Brooks, Abrams, Warren, Frye, Wellek and so on, to help us stretch beyond and beneath current dogma about how to parse a poem. In doing so, he also helped us glimpse that feeling so important to a young scholari.e., that I actually have earned a small bit of knowledge. In his way he was showing us how to gain a scholarly process and the voice that accompanies it.

Not that long before he taught the poetry criticism class I have just glossed, Ong wrote to Walker Gibson and included a discussion of what he had learned from Marshall McLuhan who had taught his poetry criticism class at SLU in 1941 saying, Mcluhan has influenced me, I believe, in a way most persons would never advert to, that is, in my class room performance, particularly in my practice of reading from and commenting on (unidentified) students papers.1 (April 14, 1969, Ong Archives at SLU)

You can hardly not notice that 1) Ongs teaching was something he thought about and valued, 2) he used the word performance in connection with the daily classroom, and 3) he credited McLuhans influence on moves that now were central to his TEACHING practice. Both teaching and scholarship were practices and performances that were learned. . . in part . . . in the classroom itself.

PLAY AUDIO Today, Ive talked about Fr. Ongs practice in early stages of building a printed interview through both writing and electronically recorded exchange and about his performance routines in an undergraduate classroom. The first displays his atunement to the details needed to successfully deploy a recording that captures an informal discussion which later would be transcribed and edited. Ong believed the recording injected some treasured essences of sound -- vitality, off-the-cuffness, informality, and so on into what could have been a quite dry piece. That it made the writing more like
1

dated April 14, 1969. In the Ong Archives at St. Louis University Library. Digital version retrieved 1.6.12: <http://slulink.slu.edu/special/digital/ong/published/correspondence1.pdf>

talking. So, gradually he built a routine that delivered this talked book or in this case talked article

The second displays his classroom performance, as remembered by me, though I consulted my notes from that class in order to focus on the routines of it. And, actually, I realized as I sifted through that material, that many of my scholarly habits took shape in that classroom.

Thank you, Fr. Ong.