Dylan Lorio-MacNamara - "Writing Restructures Consciousness", thoughts

Reading Ong's book after Abram's felt a bit like switching from a graphic novel to the Wall Street Journal, BUT that is not to say that I didn't find Ong interesting or insightful. In fact, many of Ong's findings helped solidify my understanding of some of Abram's messages. I did find some interesting points of overlap that I think could be worthy of conversation. Particularly, Ong's section on writing as a technology. He first notes that because of the constraints of our historical position, writing has become "so deeply interiorized" in the way we perceive the world that it is "difficult to consider writing to be a technology" (81). However, he argues that writing facilitates the "reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present," and therefore should be classified as a technological tool. From there, he goes on to praise technologies as "not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness" (82), transformations which can be beneficial. According to Ong, part of how we extract benefits from our technologies is by interiorizing them, shaping the tools to ourselves.

This is where I think Ong and Abram might disagree. Ong claims that the alienation from natural millieu created by writing can be seen as a helpful step in our understanding of Nature and our place in it. Abram, on the other hand, might counter that while there may be some potential benefit to the abstraction, ultimately modern culture is likely to exploit the relationship between humanity and the natural world. In other words, the balance of power between literate human societies and the rest of the natural world is grossly unequal as a result of humanity's exploitative tendencies. This could stem from the practice of shaping our tools to ourselves that Ong describes. Abram might argue that the organization of our minds regarding tools becomes, over time, extrapolated out to our other faculties until we begin to seek to shape even the natural world to ourselves.

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