Oral Traditions

Eidetic Images & Memory

2005-04-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Walter Ong, in his text Orality and Literature, talks about mnemonic formulas that early people used to be able to remember. This is what enabled the early rhapsodian's to "weave" or stitch( Ong 13) their songs (stories) together. Ong has much to say and alot of it was alright and, I guess, and it gave lead to Frances Yate's The Art of Memory and her exemplification of memory theaters. I personally found each of these texts to rather dry and long winded, but I learned many things from each. I guess learning, of some things, is not always that exciting.

However, my point is that each of these texts speaks about memory. Ong talks about how, in chapter two, "Homeric Greeks valued cliches because not only the poets but the entire oral noetic world or thought world relied upon the formulaic constitution of thought. In a oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formuliac thought patterns were esential for wisdom and effective administration"(Ong 23). In chapter three, Some Psychodynamics of Orality, Ong goes on to talk about how there are certain characteristics that are employed, or manipulated, to bring about "thought and Expression"(Ong 36) within oral cultures. Ong calls these mnemonic bases which help to enable the oral speaking culture to be able to remember their stories. Ong goes on to list nine characteristics that help to implement memory: additive rather than subordinative, aggregative rather than analytic, redundancy or copius, conservative or traditionalist, close to human life world, agonistically toned, participartory (audience), homeostatic, and situational. Furthermore, Ong says that to be able to remember and ground your thoughts in an oral culture, which did not yet have writing, one was to "think memorable thoughts...In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retreiving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns (Ong 34)"; hence, the nine characteristics.
Simialarily, Yates' The Art of Memory talks about in her first chapter "The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art Of Memory", which are De oratore, Ad C. Herennium libri IV, and Institution oratoria.

April 19th memory presentations

2005-04-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

Well once again everyone was totally amazing with their memory feats. Debbie was good with the Simpson characters. Juliet made everyone hungary, Jenny was awesome with the Dr.Zuess book, Josh, as usual singing, Opai and his poem, Ed Shanley (my Slavic rogue) with his German, Wow!, Jeremiah and his 50 top songs, Heathers list of albums, very good, Allison and the Rolling Stone memorization, gee, did I forget anyone? Oh yah! Kristi, Courtney, Brian, Hannah, Valerie, wow, Valerie you were great! I, on the other hand, do not have the ability to focus long enough to be able to do such wonderful and amazing memory feats. Dr. Sexson, you should be proud!!!!!! Peace Out, Cindy

Memory-Ideas and Thought

2005-04-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

http://www.memory-key.com/mnemonics/imagery.htm

Memory Guide > Mnemonics > The myth of imagery

images are effective to the extent that they link information
images are not inherently superior to words
bizarre images are not necessarily recalled better than common images
imagery is chiefly effective when used with an organizing structure
Most mnemonic strategies are based on imagery. There is no doubt that imagery can be an effective tool, but there is nothing particularly special about imagery. The advantage of imagery is that it provides an easy way of connecting information that is not otherwise readily connected. However, providing verbal links can be equally effective.
The critical element is that words or images provide a context which links the information. Thus, imagery is only effective when it is an interactive image — one which ties together one bit of information with another.
Visual imagery on its own is of limited value without an organizing structure, such as the method of loci or the pegword method (see list-learning mnemonics).It is usually emphasized that bizarre images are remembered much better, but there is no evidence for this. In many studies indeed, ordinary images are remembered slightly better. One of the problems is that people tend usually find it harder to create bizarre images. Unless you have a natural talent for thinking up bizarre images, it is probably not worth bothering about.
Further reading:
for a long, scholarly article on mental imagery, you can see the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/

Mental ImageryMental imagery (sometimes colloquially called visualization, or "seeing in the mind's eye") is experience that resembles perceptual experience, but which occurs in the absence of the appropriate stimuli for the relevant perception (cf. Finke, 1989; McKellar, 1957). Very often these experiences are understood by their subjects as echoes or reconstructions of actual perceptual experiences from their past; at other times they may seem to anticipate possible, often desired or feared, future experiences. Thus imagery has often been believed to play a very large, even pivotal, role in both memory (Yates, 1966; Paivio, 1986) and motivation (McMahon, 1973). It is also commonly believed to be centrally involved in visuo-spatial reasoning and inventive or creative thought. Indeed, it has usually been regarded as crucial for all thought processes, although, during the 20th century in particular, this has been called into question.
1. Terminological and Definitional Problems
2. Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Imagery [not yet available]
3. The Eclipse of Imagery in Scientific Psychology
3.1 Founders of Experimental Psychology: Wilhelm Wundt and William James
3.2 Edward B. Titchener: The Complete Iconophile
3.3 The Perky Experiment
3.4 The Imageless Thought Controversy
3.5 European Responses: Jaensch, Freud, and Gestalt Psychology
3.6 The American Response: Behaviorist Iconophobia (and Motor Theories of Imagery)
4. Imagery in Cognitive Science [not yet available]
Bibliography
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
1. Terminological and Definitional ProblemsWe have defined mental imagery as a form of experience, but, of course, evidence for the occurrence of any experience is necessarily subjective. Because of this, some authors, most notably the arch-behaviorist J.B. Watson (1913a), have cast doubt on the scientific status and even the existence of imagery. However, if imagery serves certain functions in our mental life (as suggested above) then perhaps some objective validation and study of it might be possible through the study of the performance of these functions. In the light of this, some authors (notably the psychologist Stephen Kosslyn, who is probably the most influential contemporary imagery theorist) prefer an alternative definition of "imagery" to that given above. Instead of understanding it primarily as a sort of experience, they prefer to view the term as referring to the particular type of cognitive process or "underlying representation" (Kosslyn, 1983) that is involved in these functions. These representations or processes are generally understood to be such that their presence or activity can (but need not always) be consciously experienced as imagery in our original sense.
However, characterizing imagery in this way (as explanans rather than explanandum) begs important questions about the nature of the mind and about the causes of imagery experiences (conceivably they are not experiences of cognitive processes or underlying representations). On the other hand, it should be admitted that defining imagery as a form of experience, is also problematic, and might deflect attention away from the possibility that importantly similar underlying representations or mechanisms may be operative both when we experience imagery and during certain unconscious mental processes (some evidence suggests that this is so). To avoid such problems we might replace "imagery" with some special jargon: we could speak of "quasi-perceptual experiences" on the one hand and "image representations (or processes)" on the other. However, this is not an established convention, and using these terms exclusively throughout this entry would seriously complicate discussion of the views of those thinkers (probably the vast majority) who fail to disentangle these notions. Thus, the (more or less) ordinary language term "imagery" will continue to be used where appropriate.
But our initial definition of "imagery" may well be thought unsatisfactory even in its own terms. Not only does it duck the difficult task of specifying what dimensions and degrees of similarity to perception are necessary for an experience to count as imagery; it also elides the controversial question of whether imagery is a sui generis phenomenon, conceptually quite distinct from true perceptual experience despite the surface resemblance, or whether it is more appropriately regarded as lying at one end of a continuum stretching from ordinary veridical perception at one end, to ‘pure’ imagery, where the character of the experience seems to be quite independent of any current stimulus input, at the other. In between would come cases, often held to be due to the effects of imagination, where the character of the experience seems to be only partially determined by the character of the current stimulus: both mistaken or illusive perception and non-deceptive seeing as (such as seeing the notorious duck-rabbit figure as a duck [or rabbit], or, for example, "seeing" the shapes of animals, or whatever, in the clouds or constellations). Many philosophers and cognitive theorists implicitly take this line, treating percepts as, essentially, special cases of imagery, differing only in causal history and, perhaps, "vivacity". For example: for Descartes (in the Treatise on Man) both images and percepts are ultimately embodied as pictures picked out on the surface of the pineal gland by the flow of animal spirits; for Kosslyn (1994) both are depictive representations in the brain's "visual buffer"; for Hinton (1979) both are "structural descriptions" in working memory. However, other theorists (e.g. Sartre, 1936) try to draw a sharp conceptual and phenomenological distinction between perceptual and imaginal experience.
But in the absence of consensus about such issues, or about the underlying mechanisms and the psychological functions of imagery, our initial rough characterization is probably about the best we can do without begging important questions. Perhaps it is sufficient. Imagery is a common, everyday phenomenon that is indicated by a whole range of colloquial expressions: "having a picture in the head", "picturing", "visualizing", "having/seeing a mental image/picture", "seeing in the mind's eye", and, in some contexts, simply "imagining". Although a small percentage of people seem inclined to deny ever experiencing it, for the vast majority of us, our imagery, like our consciousness itself, is something with which we seem to be thoroughly familiar and intimate.
However, the term "mental imagery", and all the colloquial equivalents mentioned above, may be potentially misleading in itself. For one thing, all these expressions suggest, more or less strongly, a purely visual phenomenon. In fact, most discussions of imagery, in the past and today, have indeed focused upon the visual mode. Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that other modes of quasi-perceptual experience are just as common and important (Newton, 1982), and "imagery" has come to be the accepted scientific term for referring to them too: interesting studies of "auditory imagery", "kinaesthetic imagery", "haptic (touch) imagery", and so forth, can be found in the contemporary psychological literature.
A related, and perhaps a more serious problem with the term "imagery" and with most of the colloquial alternatives is that they strongly suggest that the phenomenon involves some sort of picture (the image) entering into or being created in the mind. Indeed, this theoretical story seems to have gone virtually unquestioned during past ages (which may explain how the terminology in question became entrenched), and probably remains the majority, lay and expert, view today. Nevertheless, during this century it has come under strong challenge, and can no longer be regarded as uncontroversial. The confusions arising from this (as well as the other ambiguities of the term "imagery" that we have mentioned) continue to bedevil discussions of the topic. In particular, people who deny the existence of mental pictures seem frequently to be misunderstood as (implausibly) denying the occurrence of quasi-perceptual experiences, and in some cases they may themselves come to believe that the first denial commits them to the second (Thomas, 1989). Indeed, there is some reason to think (although it is certainly not established) that that minority of people (about 10% of the population by some estimates) who deny ever experiencing imagery, or who deny that it plays any significant role in their mental lives, may simply be understanding the terminology in a somewhat idiosyncratic fashion: what they intend to deny may not be so much that they have quasi-perceptual experience, but, rather, that what they do have is predominantly visual, or that it involves inner pictures, or that it resembles perceptual experience to the extent that they (perhaps wrongly) understand other people to be claiming for their imagery (or some combination of these claims). This is a theoretically important issue because if it is true that some people really do not experience any imagery then imagery (understood as experience rather than representation) cannot play the vital role in mental life that has very often been attributed to it.
On a more consensual note, with only rare exceptions (e.g. Wright, 1983) nearly all serious discussions of imagery take it for granted (explicitly or implicitly) that it exhibits intentionality (i.e. imagery is normally of something or other, in the same sense that perception is perception of something), and that it is, for the most part, subject to conscious control. Although images often come into the mind unbidden, and sometimes it is hard to shake off unwanted imagery (say, of the horrible accident that one cannot get out of one's mind) in general one can conjure-up, manipulate, and dismiss images at will. In this regard, imagery appears as an unequivocally mental phenomenon, quite distinct from other quasi-perceptual experiences, such as after-images and phosphenes (Oster, 1970), that are not subject to direct conscious control, and which are probably best explained in straightforwardly physiological terms. It is also distinguished from cognitive and representational, but nevertheless unconscious and automatic functions such as the postulated high capacity but very short term visual memory store known as "iconic memory" (Neisser, 1967). On the other hand, so called eidetic imagery, if, indeed, it exists at all as a distinct phenomenon (see Haber, 1979, and the appended commentaries), is probably best understood as a species of mental imagery proper, despite the fact that it is characterized by a vividness, detailed articulation, and stability that far exceed what most normal subjects seem to want to claim for their imagery experiences.
It may also be worth pointing out that mental imagery should be distinguished from "imagery" as the term has come to be used in a literary context, where it seems to refer to a linguistic trope that employs highly concrete, perceptually specific language in order to evoke certain emotions or otherwise convey some more abstract and elusive underlying sense. Very likely, literary imagery originally got its name from a supposed power of the words in question to induce mental imagery in a reader, and some contemporary literary critics defend such an interpretation (Esrock, 1994; Scarry, 1999), but it is surely not the case that the expression is now universally, or even generally, understood this way.
3. The Eclipse of Imagery in Scientific Psychology
For the late 19th century researchers who established psychology as an empirical scientific discipline, mental images (usually, in English, referred to as ideas) held just the same central place in the explanation of cognition that they had held for philosophical psychologists of earlier times. However, developments within psychology at the beginning of the 20th century began to cast doubt on this long established consensus. A group of psychologists working in Würzburg, Germany claimed to have found empirical evidence for conscious thought contents that were not imaginal or perceptual in character. Their results were challenged on several grounds, and were certainly never definitively established. Nevertheless, the bitter dispute that ensued, the so called imageless thought controversy, had a profound effect on the development of psychology as a science (and, I would argue, on philosophy also). Most psychologists became, in effect, profoundly disillusioned with the notion of mental imagery, and either avoided seriously considering the topic, treated it dismissively, or, in some extreme cases, denied the existence of the phenomenon outright. These attitudes noticeably influenced other disciplines, including philosophy. Although the psychological study of imagery revived with the rise of cognitivism in the 1960s and 70s, when new experimental techniques were developed that enabled a truly experimental study of the phenomenon, current views about, and attitudes towards, mental imagery cannot be properly understood without an awareness of this history, versions of which, of varying degrees of accuracy, have passed into the folklore of psychology.
3.1 Founders of Experimental Psychology: Wilhelm Wundt and William James
When psychology first began to emerge as an experimental science, in the philosophy departments of the German universities in the late 19th century, the central role of imagery in mental life was not in question. Wilhelm Wundt, acclaimed "the father of experimental psychology", established the first psychological research and teaching laboratory in the Leipzig Philosophy Department in around 1876 (Fancher, 1996). He regarded his psychology as a branch of philosophy, an attempt to apply the experimental method of natural science (particularly, the physiology of Helmholtz) to essentially philosophical problems concerning the nature of mind and its metaphysical status. This view of the subject persisted, in Germany, at least until the Nazi era. Wundt's research program aimed to investigate the "elements of consciousness," and the laws governing the combination of these elements (Wundt, 1912). Although his theoretical system made a place for emotional feelings as one class of element, in practice the main focus of Wundt's experimentally based research program was on the elements of sensation and their compounding into ideas. As has been the case in the empiricist philosophical tradition, these ideas were conceived of as, to all intents and purposes, mental images. Indeed, Wundt insists, much in the spirit of Hume, that there is no fundamental difference in kind between the ideas arising directly from perception and "memory images" (Wundt, 1912). Thus, Wundtian experimental psychology was largely a study of cognitive processes, and, for him (and most of his numerous students and imitators), the mental image (under the rubric idea) played essentially the same crucial, representational role in cognition that it had played for most of his philosophical predecessors.
Wundt's American counterpart, and contemporary, William James, took a not dissimilar view, although he was careful to acknowledge that in some people the "thought stuff," as he called it, might consist not so much of visual imagery as of imagery of other modes, especially the "verbal images" of inner speech (James, 1890 ch. 18). In his textbook The Principles of Psychology (1890) James has much that is insightful to say about psychological processes in general, and about the role of imagery in them in particular, but, although he carried out experimental demonstrations in his psychology teaching at Harvard, James had little interest in the actual pursuit of experimental research, and established no graduate teaching program in experimental psychology (Fancher, 1996). Thus, despite the lucidity of his justly famous text, and the wide readership it has continued to find, his direct influence on the disciplinary development of scientific psychology, even in his native America, probably never equaled that of Wundt (or even lesser German pioneers, such as G.E. Müller), who trained many Americans (as well as many Germans, and students of other nationalities) in the techniques of experimental research. Just around this time, when psychology was the latest intellectual fashion, the American Universities were undergoing a tremendous expansion. Thus many of these students were able to return from Germany to the United States to found experimental psychology teaching programs of their own. It was because of this, much more than the intellectual influence of James, that, well before it grew into a dominant world power and achieved its current leadership in the sciences generally, the U.S.A. quickly grew to rival, and eventually surpass, Germany's initial preeminence in scientific psychology.
Although psychologists of this era have often been portrayed (notably by Boring (1950)) as using an introspective methodology, in fact Wundt, in particular, was very sensitive to standard criticisms of introspection, such as the contention that the very attempt to observe our own mental activities will itself alter them. He thus limited its use to situations where he was satisfied that the causes of the relevant mental events, the experimental stimuli, could be strictly controlled and the results shown to be replicable, with any introspective reports being made unreflectively, as soon as the relevant content appeared in the mind (Mischel, 1970; Danziger, 1980). Wundt's research did not rely upon discursive descriptions of mental contents. An "introspective" report in his laboratory might typically have involved no more than indicating the moment when a certain sensation entered consciousness, or saying whether a musical tone seemed higher or lower than the one presented just before. Such "introspective reports" differ little from the sorts of responses that might be called for in a modern cognitive psychology experiment. Wundt's methodological discipline meant that the data collected in his laboratory were primarily such things as reaction times or discrimination thresholds, rather than discursive introspective reports; it also meant, in practice, that his experiments were restricted almost entirely to the study of "lower" psychological processes, principally sensation and perception. Thus, although Wundt did hold that "higher" mental process, such as thought and memory, depended largely upon mental images (including verbal imagery, silent speech), in practice his experimental work did little directly to illuminate these. "Higher" mental processes, for Wundt, were best investigated non-experimentally, via a methodology that he called völkerpsychologie, a hermeneutic study of cultural products to which he devoted much of his later career, but which never achieved anything like the influence of his experimentally based work.
3.2 Edward B. Titchener: The Complete Iconophile
An Englishman, Edward B. Titchener, became one of Wundt's most influential students. After graduate studies with Wundt, Titchener moved to the United States and became professor of Psychology at Cornell, where, as well as being responsible for translating many of the more experimentally oriented works of Wundt into English, he established a successful graduate school and a vigorous research program (Tweney, 1987). Despite the fact that Wundt's and Titchener's philosophical and theoretical views, and their scientific methodologies, differed in important ways (Leahey, 1981), Titchener, much more than most of his American born colleagues, shared Wundt's vision of psychology as a pure science, with essentially philosophical rather than pragmatic ends, and he gained the reputation of being Wundt's leading disciple and representative in the English speaking world. However, he had no interest in his master's völkerpsychologie. Titchener had been deeply influenced by positivist optimism as to the scope of science, and he hoped to study even the "higher" thought processes experimentally (Danziger, 1979, 1980). Thus he attempted to push the method of controlled laboratory introspection far beyond the bounds that Wundt had so carefully set for it.
Titchener appears to have been both a particularly vivid imager, and a firm believer in imagery's cognitive importance. He had studied British Empiricist philosophy whilst an undergraduate at Oxford, and was well aware of Berkeley's argument that "general ideas" (i.e. mental images that, in-and-of-themselves, represent a kinds or categories of things, rather than particulars) are inconceivable. Berkeley argues that, for instance, the general idea of a triangle, which would need to be:
neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once. In effect it is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together. (Berkeley, 1734). Many philosophers take Berkeley's argument to amount to a knock-down refutation of the traditional theory -- first articulated by Aristotle (De Interpretatione 16a; De Anima 420b), and reiterated by Locke (1700) -- that images (ideas) are the primary vehicles of thought and that they ground linguistic meaning. If mental images can only, intrinsically represent particulars (as Berkeley, relying on the empiricist view of the nature of imagery as consisting of copies or fading echoes of sensory impressions, argued) then they are surely inadequate for grounding the meanings of the general, categorical terms that are fundamental to thought. However, Titchener, on introspective grounds, flatly rejected Berkeley's claim:
But I can quite well get . . . the triangle that is no triangle at all and all triangles at one and the same time. It is a flashy thing, come and gone from moment to moment: it hints two or three red angles, with the red lines deepening into black, seen on a dark green ground. It is not there long enough to say whether the angles join to form the complete figure, or even whether all three of the necessary angles are given. Nevertheless, it means triangle; it is Locke's general idea of a triangle; (Titchener, 1909).
Of course, Titchener was well aware that the image described here was thoroughly idiosyncratic. However, he did want to claim that such images (in virtue not so much of their individual, intrinsic characteristics, but of their place in a whole associative network of imagery) do carry meaning, and are thus fitted to be the vehicles of thought. He also described examples of his own visualizations of abstract concepts (such as the concept of meaning itself: "the blue-grey tip of a kind of scoop … digging into a dark mass of what appears to be plastic material") and even claimed to experience imaginal meanings of connectives such as but (Titchener, 1909). Titchener plainly held that (together with actual sensation) mental content is mental imagery.
3.3 The Perky Experiment
Titchener's theories, and, to a very large extent, the introspection based experimental methods he used to test and refine them, have long since fallen into disrepute. (By contrast, Wundt's reputation has seen a considerable revival in recent decades (e.g. Blumenthal, 1975; Bringman & Tweney, 1980; Fancher, 1996).) However, one series of experiments carried out in Titchener's laboratory, by his student C.W. Perky (1910), has achieved something of a classic status in the literature on imagery. Perky asked her subjects to fixate a point on a screen in front of them and to visualize various objects there, such as a tomato, a book, a leaf, a banana, an orange, or a lemon. As the subjects did this, and unbeknownst to them, a faint patch of color, of an appropriate size and shape, and just above the normal threshold of visibility, was back projected (in soft focus) onto the screen. Apart from on a couple of occasions when the projection apparatus was mishandled, none of Perky's subjects (ranging from a ten year old child to her colleagues, the trained and experienced introspectors of Titchener's laboratory) ever realized that they were experiencing real percepts; they took what they "saw" on the screen to be entirely the products of their imagination. In fact, however, the projections did influence their experiences: some subjects expressed surprise at finding themselves imagining a banana "upright" rather than the horizontally oriented one they had been trying for; one was surprised to wind up imagining an elm leaf after trying for a maple. On the other hand, purely imaginary details were also reported: One subject could "see" the veins of the leaf; another claimed that the title on the imagined book was readable.
Perky's results have been read as evidence that imagery may be systematically confused with genuine visual experience, that images and percepts, as Hume believed, differ subjectively in, at most, only their degree of "vivacity" or vividness. However we should note that the projected color patches were clearly visible as such to people who were not under instructions to form an image (Perky, 1910). Furthermore, Segal (1971b) reports that when she initially tried to replicate the "Perky effect" with "the suspicious, pragmatic students who populated our campuses in the late 1950s and early 1960s," they quickly saw through the deception. Eventually, she achieved better replications by taking steps to induce a state of relaxation in her subjects (Segal & Nathan, 1964). Several subjects, for example, asked to imagine a New York skyline whilst a faint image of a tomato was projected on the screen, reported imagining New York at sunset (Segal, 1972). Nevertheless, Segal concludes, from her extensive experimental studies over many years, that the Perky effect arises not so much from the indistinguishability of mental images and (faint) percepts, as from the fact that the effort to form an image, under certain circumstances, interferes with the normal course of perception and raises perceptual detection thresholds (Segal, 1971b; Segal & Fusella, 1971).
3.4 The Imageless Thought Controversy
Perhaps Wundt's most important German student was Oswald Külpe, who had for several years served as Wundt's assistant professor, but eventually left to set up his own laboratory in the philosophy department of Würzburg University. He and his students there developed a direct challenge to the prevalent imagery theory of thought. Under the influence of both Machian positivism and, later, the act psychology of Brentano and the phenomenology of Husserl, Külpe, like Titchener (whom he had helped train), rejected what he saw as Wundt's unnecessarily strict methodological restrictions on the scope of empirical science, and encouraged his students to extend the scope of the introspective "experimental" method to the study of the "higher" processes of thought and reasoning (Danziger, 1979, 1980; Ash, 1998). In 1901, two of these students, Mayer and Orth, performed a word association experiment in which subjects were asked to report everything that had passed through their mind between hearing the stimulus word and giving the response. Note that it was normal practice, in this era of psychology, for experimental subjects, or "observers" as they were often called, to be drawn from among fellow researchers within the same laboratory, often including the supervising professor. Present day psychologists would, with good reason, suspect such subjects of being liable to produce results strongly biased by theoretical preconceptions (Orne, 1962; Intons-Peterson, 1983). Great pains are usually taken, today, to ensure that subjects in psychological experiments have no idea what hypothesis the experiment is supposed to be testing. In 1901 however, it was thought that experienced and knowledgeable "observers" were more likely to produce consistent and meaningful results than the psychologically untrained. In the case of the Meyer and Orth experiment, two amongst the four subjects were Meyer and Orth themselves. Nevertheless, they professed to be surprised by some of their findings. In particular:
The subjects frequently reported that they experienced certain events of consciousness which they could quite clearly designate neither as definite images nor yet as volitions. For example, the subject Meyer made the observation that, in reference to the stimulus word "metre" a peculiar event of consciousness intervened which could not be characterized more exactly, and which was succeeded by the spoken response "trochee".(Meyer & Orth, as quoted and translated by Humphrey, 1951) The jargon term bewusstseinslagen ("states of consciousness" -- Humphrey, 1951) was coined to designate these indescribable non-sensorial states, and they soon began to turn up in more and more profusion in the introspective reports generated in the Würzburg laboratory, taking on an increasing theoretical significance as time went by. In 1905 another Würzburg researcher, Ach, also introduced the largely overlapping, but more explicitly intentionalistic concept of bewusstheit or "awareness", an unanalysable "impalpably given ’knowing’" (Ach, quoted and translated by Humphrey, 1951), and by 1907, Karl Bühler, perhaps the most radical of Külpe's students, was simply referring to gedanken ("thoughts"). Bühler's experiments might, for example, involve giving a subject (often professor Külpe himself) a somewhat gnomic sentence to interpret (e.g. "Thinking is so extraordinarily difficult that many prefer to judge.") and then collecting introspective reports of the conscious, but allegedly non-imaginal, gedanken that had occurred between the hearing of the sentence and the giving of the interpretation. Although the Würzburg school never denied that imagery does occur, by this time the greater part of the conscious contents of minds examined in Würzburg seemed to be non-imaginal.
Unsurprisingly, Wundt, and others, refused to accept these new methods and conclusions, and a heated debate, the so called imageless thought controversy, ensued. Though Wundt was surely skeptical of the existence of imageless thoughts, his primary criticisms were methodological. He was very much concerned with the fact that the experiments were necessarily constructed so that the introspective reports were given after the completion of the experimental task (word association, sentence interpretation, or whatever). The Würzburg research thus involved discursive recollection (or was it reconstruction?) of conscious contents that were no longer present to the mind. Such experiments, Wundt argued, were open invitations to suggestion, and, indeed, were
not experiments at all in the sense of scientific methodology: they are counterfeit experiments that seem methodical simply because they are ordinarily performed in a psychological laboratory and involve the coöperation of two persons, who purport to be experimenter and observer. In reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess none of the special features by which we distinguish the introspections of experimental psychology from the casual introspections of everyday life. (Wundt, quoted and translated by Titchener, 1909. Original German, 1907.)
Titchener also strongly objected to the imageless thought demonstrations, but for different reasons. He did not object to the aims or the introspective methodology of the Würzburg school, but to their purported results, and, for him, the experiments were not so much misconceived as incompetently executed: In particular, he felt, the "observers" (experimental subjects) in Würzburg had been inadequately trained in the art of introspection. According to Titchener, the main pitfall of introspection was what he called the "stimulus error," the strong tendency to confound the conscious experience itself with whatever it might represent: Thus, to report, when looking at a rectangular table top, that one experiences a rectangle, would be to commit the stimulus error: The "real" conscious content would (on Titchener's view) have the trapezoidal shape that the table top projects upon the retina. For Titchener, the intentionality generally ascribed to imageless thoughts only showed that the Würzburg introspectors were systematically committing the stimulus error: They were not reporting the intrinsic nature of their conscious contents, but what those contents signified. Titchener suggested that the purported bewusstseinslagen etc. were, in fact, faint and fleeting kinaesthetic sensations, feelings of muscular tension and the like (Tweney, 1987). In his laboratory, experiments quite similar to those done in Würzburg, but carried out using introspective "observers" well trained in avoiding the stimulus error (Titchener himself, or his own graduate students), produced no reports of imageless thoughts. Instead, they found the fleeting imagery or the subtle bodily sensations that Professor Titchener's theory predicted (Titchener, 1909; Humphrey, 1951).
This work of Titchener's (like other responses to the imageless thought controversy from America, Britain, and elsewhere) had relatively little impact in Germany, which, with some justification at that time, still regarded itself as very much preeminent in psychological science. Nevertheless, on both sides of the Atlantic the controversy was recognized as touching on deep foundational issues in the science of mind. Although largely forgotten today, it seems to have had a lasting impact on the development not only of psychology, but (especially in the German speaking world, where the fields were more closely intellectually and institutionally entwined) philosophy as well. The Würzburg school's claims, despite their shaky basis, undoubtedly contributed to a sense that imagery could not be so psychologically important as had traditionally been assumed, and that an alternative way of thinking about cognitive content was needed. Many psychologists and philosophers of this era came, partly for this reason, to feel that thought should be understood in terms of language per se, and that it was a serious mistake ever to have thought that the representational power of language derives from that of some more fundamental form of representation, such as mental imagery. Bloor (1983) goes so far as to suggest (though without citing any evidence) that the work of the later Wittgenstein largely grew out of the reaction to the imageless thought affair. Bloor may be overstating the case, but certainly a leading Würzburg alumnus, Karl Bühler, was established in Vienna during the inter-war years, and Wittgenstein is known to have met him there, and seems to have reacted strongly to his views (Toulmin, 1969; Bartley, 1973). Bühler also taught, and deeply influenced, the young Karl Popper (Popper, 1976), and undoubtedly his views would also have been quite familiar to the Vienna Circle positivists.
But the imageless thought controversy was never satisfactorily resolved, at least in the terms in which it was originally posed. Although the Würzburg school has been praised for drawing psychological attention to the intentionality of mental contents, and for the introduction of once important concepts such as "mental set" into psychology, it would certainly be grossly misleading to suggest that their work provides evidence for the existence of non-sensorial conscious mental contents (i.e. imageless thoughts) that comes anywhere close to meeting contemporary scientific standards. Indeed, the fact that Külpe's and Titchener's laboratories each produced results that fitted their directors' contrasting preconceptions did not go unnoticed by their contemporaries. The unresolvable debate contributed significantly to a growing sense of intellectual crisis within psychology, leading to a deep loss of confidence (persisting to the present) in the scientific value of introspection. It also led to a precipitous decline in scientific interest in imagery. On the one hand its importance in the cognitive economy was now subject to doubt; on the other hand it had come to seem that it was very difficult, if not impossible, to study it experimentally and objectively.
3.5 European Responses: Jaensch, Freud, and Gestalt Psychology
In Germany, some psychologists responded to this crisis by turning away from the experimental study of "cognitive" questions about the workings of the mind in general, and moved instead toward an understanding of their subject as concerned with interpretive studies of persons, or the differences between them. They, generally, became more interested in their subjects' dispositions, values, motives, etc. than in either their imagery (unless, perhaps, its contents were interestingly idiosyncratic) or their bewusstseinslagen (if any such existed) (Danziger, 1980).
An exception is the work of Jaensch (1930) on eidetic imagery (i.e. visual imagery that is experienced as before the eyes rather than "in the head," and that is unusually vivid and stable -- most evidence for the existence of eidetic imagery comes from studies of children, and it seems to be rare in adults (Haber, 1979)). However, although this work has not been without influence, and is not necessarily entirely devoid of scientific value, it is deeply tainted by Jaensch's enthusiasm for the Nazi racist ideology that was then taking hold in Germany. Eidetic imagery, he claims (on meager evidence), is characteristic of the less developed minds of not only children, but also members of "southern," "sun adapted" (i.e. darker skinned) races. (Jaensch later won notoriety for performing an experiment designed to show that "northern" chickens are racially superior -- as evidenced by more careful and intelligent pecking -- to "southern" ones (Ash, 1998).)
However, the idea that thought processes that rely upon visual imagery (as opposed to verbal thought) are characteristic of minds that are somehow defective or inferior is not confined to Nazi thinkers such as Jaensch in this era. Sigmund Freud (a Jew, who had to flee his native Austria to escape the Nazis) seems implicitly to have regarded visual images reported by his patients as part and parcel of their neuroses, as something to be exorcized and replaced by verbally mediated, "rational" insights (Esrock, 1994 ch. 3). This may well be related to the sensibility that Jay (1993) finds to be pervasive in 20th century French intellectual life, wherein visually based thought and experience is actively disvalued in comparison to other modes of sense experience, and verbally mediated thinking. Arguably, signs of a similar attitude are evident some decades earlier in England, in the responses Francis Galton received to his pioneering questionnaire about mental imagery vividness. Unlike the regular folk he questioned, many of the scientists and other intellectuals amongst Galton's respondents were distinctly unwilling to admit to ever experiencing mental imagery (Galton, 1880, 1883), a finding that more recent research has failed to reproduce (Roe, 1951; and see Ferguson, 1977, 1992; Shepard, 1978a,b; Deutsch, 1981; Miller, 1984). It is hard to say how widespread such attitudes were, or how they originated (or why they now seem to have faded), but they may well have contributed to the sharp decline in intellectual interest in imagery, apparent not only in psychology but also philosophy and literary studies, that is very apparent in the early decades of the 20th century (Esrock, 1994), and which, among philosophers and literary critics at any rate, has only quite recently shown signs of reversal (e.g. Rollins, 1989; Ellis, 1995; Scarry, 1999).
Many other German psychologists, in the wake of the imageless thought controversy, continued to adhere to the Wundtian ambition of developing an experimental science of the mind, and returned to something like the sort of methodological caution in the use of introspective reports that Wundt himself had advocated, often insisting on the direct corroboration of introspective evidence by observable effects on behavior (Danziger, 1980). This usually meant that, as with Wundt himself, although their experimentally based psychology did not explicitly repudiate the essential role traditionally assigned to imagery in thought and memory, in practice it had rather little to say about it. (Plausible behavioral correlates of imagery processes were not established until the rise of the cognitive psychology movement.)
Perhaps the most influential movement arising from this strand of German psychological thought was Gestalt Psychology. It was also perhaps the last German bred movement to make a major impact in the United States, where it became a sort of "official opposition" to the indigenous and dominant Behaviorism. This was facilitated by the fact that, under the pressure of the rising tide of German Naziism, a significant number of Gestalt Psychology's adherents -- including the acknowledged leaders, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka -- emigrated to America during the 1920s and 30s (Ash, 1998). Gestalt Theory attempted to explain "higher" thought processes in terms of a sort of hypothetical neuroscience (field theory) rather than in terms of the vicissitudes of introspected thought contents (Thomas, 1987; Ash, 1998). Although the Gestalt psychologists were much concerned with the experimental investigation of subjective experience (from whence they sought most of the evidential support for their views), in practice this research focused almost entirely on perceptual experience. The typical Gestaltist experiment sought immediate, unreflective descriptions of the appearance of a carefully constructed stimulus (frequently complex and illusional), and preferentially used subjects naïve to the theoretical views and concerns of the experimenter. This was something very unlike the deliberate "looking within" practiced by the psychologically sophisticated, trained introspectors of Titchener's or Külpe's laboratories. In certain respects Gestalt psychology foreshadowed, and, indeed, importantly influenced, the cognitivist movement of recent decades (Gardner, 1987). Nevertheless, it had little directly to say about the nature or function of imagery.
3.6 The American Response: Behaviorist Iconophobia (and Motor Theories of Imagery)
Where the Gestalt Psychologists, for the most part, ignored the concept of imagery, the Behaviorist movement, which came to dominate American (and, eventually, international) scientific psychology for almost half a century, actively attacked it. To borrow a coinage from Dennett (1978), Behaviorist psychology was thoroughly iconophobic. Although the rapid rise of Behaviorism in the United States in the early years of the 20th century certainly had multiple causes, social and institutional as well as intellectual (O'Donnell, 1985), the imageless thought controversy, and the questions it raised about introspection as a viable scientific methodology, was certainly prominent amongst the intellectual causes. In the famous "manifesto" by which John B. Watson publicly launched Behaviorism as a self-conscious movement, the controversy over imageless thoughts is cited as the prime example (indeed, the only really explicit example) of the malaise of psychological methodology, for which Behaviorism would be the cure (Watson, 1913a). In a lengthy footnote to this paper, and in a follow-up article, Watson (1913b) cast doubt on the very existence of mental imagery, a position he was to state more forcefully in later work, where he stigmatized the concept (together with all other remotely mentalistic concepts) as a thoroughly unscientific, "medieval" notion, inextricably bound up with religious belief in an immortal soul, and, as such, barely one step away from "old wives tales" and the superstitions of "savagery" (Watson, 1930). He described personal reports of such things as memory images of one's childhood home as "sheer bunk," nothing more than the sentimental "dramatizing" of verbally mediated memories (i.e. conditioned tendencies to say certain things, either out loud or sub-vocally) (Watson, 1928).
Not all American psychologists, even overt Behaviorists, were quite as vehement as Watson in their denunciation of mentality in general, or imagery in particular, but his views certainly resonated with many. The publication of Watson's manifesto (1913a) had, in fact, been preceded by several less radical critiques of introspective methodology from other American psychologists (Danziger, 1980). Particularly relevant here is Knight Dunlap's "The Case Against Introspection" (1912), because Dunlap, who was a junior colleague of Watson in the Johns Hopkins University Psychology Department, seems to have played a crucial if inadvertent role in the formation of Watson's attitude towards imagery, and, thereby, in the crystallization of Behaviorism itself (Cohen, 1979; Thomas, 1989).
During his early days at Johns Hopkins (where he arrived in 1908) Watson, by his own account, believed that "centrally aroused visual sensations [i.e., images] were as clear as those peripherally aroused" (Watson, 1913a), and when Dunlap told Watson of his skepticism concerning what he (Dunlap) called "the old doctrine of images" Watson initially demurred, insisting that he himself made important use of visual imagery, for example in the process of designing experimental apparatus (Dunlap, 1932; cf. Watson, 1936).
However, by this time Watson already seems to have been ambitious to approach human psychology using the methodology that he had already successfully developed for the study of animal behavior (Watson, 1924, 1936). By 1910, and perhaps before, the only real factor preventing Watson from conceiving of the study of behavior as embracing the whole of psychology seems to have been "the problem of the higher thought processes" (Burnham, 1968): Thought was supposed to be carried on primarily in imagery, and imagery was not behavior (see Watson, 1913b). Dunlap's objections to the "old doctrine" that held visual imagery to consist in "centrally aroused visual sensations" seems to have played a crucial role in emboldening Watson to deny the existence of imagery altogether, thus enabling him to present the study of behavior as a fully sufficient methodology for psychology (Watson, 1924; Thomas, 1989).
However, Dunlap never became a Behaviorist himself (Dunlap, 1932), and when his actual views about imagery are examined (Dunlap, 1914) it becomes apparent that he did not intend to deny that people have experiences that are, in a significant sense, quasi-perceptual. Although he described himself as an "iconoclast" (1932), and held that "the image, as a copy or reproduction of sensation . . . does not exist," (Dunlap,1914), Dunlap also asserted that Watson went much too far in rejecting "imagination" as well as "images" (Dunlap, 1932), and he continued to hold that we are in need of an account of the nature of "ideas". Something, something mental and, indeed, quasi-perceptual, is needed to fill the functional role that images played in the traditional psychology of thinking. It is clear that he (unlike Watson) did not deny the existence of imagery in the sense in which it was defined at the beginning of this article (i.e. quasi-perceptual experience). Dunlap's theory would seem to be best understood as a pioneering (though perhaps, ultimately, unconvincing) attempt to explain both the experience of imagery, and the functional role that it plays in thinking, in a way that avoids postulating the presence of pictures in the head, or inner copies of former sense impressions.
According to Dunlap, ideas are actually complexes of muscular sensations, caused by outwardly imperceptible movements, or, at least, tensings, of the muscles, particularly (though not exclusively) the muscles associated with the sense organs themselves, such as those that move the eyes. Particular patterns of muscular response, Dunlap holds, occur during the perception of particular types of objects or events, and may be aroused not only in the course of the actual perception of a relevant object, but also through associative links with the sensations produced by other muscular response patterns appropriate to other sorts of objects or events. These latter patterns may have arisen in actual perception, or may themselves have been aroused associatively in a similar way. Thus, associative trains of thought can be sustained. When the muscular response is aroused associatively, rather than by the actual perceptual presence of the relevant object, we experience the idea, or image, of the object. Visual imagery consists not of copies or echoes of visual sensations, but rather of actual current sensations in the muscles involved in the process of seeing something.
There is indeed a present content essentially connected with imagination or thought; but this present content is in each case a muscle sensation, or a complex of muscle sensations. We are therefore, in investigating images, dealing not with copies, or pale ghosts, of former sensations but with actual present sensations. (Dunlap, 1914) These muscle sensations are, explicitly, not to be confused with the impalpable imageless thoughts of Würzburg, rather, "This sensation is the true image" (Dunlap, 1914, emphasis in original). (For a more extensive account of Dunlap's theory of imagery, and its influence on Watson, see Thomas (1989).)
Dunlap's theory of imagery/ideas was publicly presented only in one brief and rather obscurely published article (Dunlap, 1914) and (apart from its unintended and covert influence on Watson), it seems to have attracted very little interest from his contemporaries. The theory probably owes much to the influence of Hugo Münsterberg, whose "motor theory" of the mind had a considerable vogue amongst American psychologists at the time, but which was soon to be eclipsed by the rise of Behaviorism (Scheerer, 1984). Münsterberg was a German, a former student of Wundt, who had been hired to teach psychology at Harvard when William James moved on, and Dunlap had studied under him before coming to Johns Hopkins (Dunlap, 1932). An earlier "motor" theory of imagery can also be found in the work of the French psychologist Theodule Ribot (1890, 1900) (predating Münsterberg's influence), but the most developed version was surely that of Margaret Floy Washburn, a former student of Titchener. Washburn (unlike Dunlap) is quite open in acknowledging her intellectual debt to Münsterberg (Washburn, 1932), and her book Movement and Mental Imagery (Washburn, 1916) goes into considerable, if speculative, physiological as well as psychological detail. However, by the time this was published Behaviorist iconophobia was already taking firm hold, and Washburn's version of the motor theory of imagery seems to have failed to attract any more adherents than Dunlap's had.
Infamously, during the period of Behaviorist dominance, up until about 1960, mental imagery received minimal attention from scientific psychologists. According to Paivio (1971), the 1920s and 1930s were "the most arid period" for imagery research, but Kessel (1972) reports that even through the 1940s and 1950s a scant five references to imagery are to be found in Psychological Abstracts. Admittedly some interest in the psychology of imagery continued outside the United States in this era. In Britain, for example, psychologists such as Pear (1925, 1927), Bartlett (1927, 1932), and, latterly, McKellar (1957) kept an interest in the topic alive. However, this work did not have much contemporaneous impact in the United States, which by the 1930s had already achieved its dominant superpower status in psychology, if not yet in other domains. A general revival of interest in imagery did not get under way in America before the1960s. By that time the Behaviorist consensus was beginning to break down (as can be seen in the work of Mowrer (1960), who tried to patch-up Behaviorist learning theory by introducing the alien concept of imagery into it), and new and striking empirical findings about imagery emerged to play a significant role in the cognitive revolution.

Group Presentations

2005-04-10T19:37:00.000-07:00

The group presentations were, once again, phenomenal! I enjoyed everyone's, some were a might long winded, but nonetheless all were excellent. This has been such a great experience for me to be able to work in groups where everyone had fun and came together to bring about something that was unusual and entertaining. And you know, Dr, season always says he wants to be entertained, and that we did. I used to not like to do group work because it was always a pain in the !@#, but in the classes that I have had with Sexson we have always had a great time. Everyone is always full of fun and unusual ideas, and we know that Sexson loves this. I guess his enthusiasm rubs off on everyone else. This has been a good class and it has been a different class. But, then again, all my classes with Sexson have different, and that is a compliment to him. It has been a terrific end to my Jr. year. Yahoo!! Its finally near the end. Peace Cindy

Epic poem by Ed Shanley for Cindy Kasner(Thank you Ed!!!)

2005-04-10T19:05:00.000-07:00

I sing of the Mother-Earth Goddess
The protectress of all animal kind
The Goddess of the Feast and of Celebration,
The Goddess of Wisdom- I sing of the omni potent Cindy Kasner
May we all envoke her mighty grace.

I sing of she who was conceived out of the fiery orange ethers of the universe,
By her own energies and humors not yet contained within a human vessel;
Yes, no mother or father could provide a lineage worthy enough for the omni potent Cindy Kasner.

I sing of she who was born in a land where the father spirit, the great Grizzly bear, towers above all else, even life itself; A land where the sun is bi-polar: yearly giving forth great abundance and continuous fiery orange illumination before utterly deserting all it had once cherished and reside over.

I sing of the Mother-Erarth Goddess, who in her birth and rebirth provides for the multitudes of man.

I sing of the protectress of all animal kind, who is so loved by her simple disciples within the natural world that they have vowed to follow her through whatever hardships she may face, willingly sacrificing their individual lives for her safety so that their progeny maybe plentiful. Yes! this is she who is surrounded when venturing through the treacherous waters of the deep unknown waters which had once swallowed her mortal love extinguishing his life; surrounded by the mighty wolves of the sea; the Killer Whale.

Of this voluptuous, hazel eyed, browned haired, omni-potent deity; may we all invoke her mighty grace.

I sing of the Goddess of the Feast and of Celebration, who having joyously concocted within her orange hued palace in the heavens the divine dish of spaghetti and meatballs then gave this food of divinity unto the masses of humanity so that they would be, when standing in her favor, sorrowful and starving no more.

I sing of the Goddess of Wisdom, who basks eternally in the light of universal knowledge. It is she who, unlike her fellow Gods having once attained greatness and now lay lazy and fallow, she who not only inspires man to be a seeker of knowledge, but she, also herself, endeavors to be a non-traditional university student.

Oral Traditons -Epic/Heroic Poems

2005-03-27T17:09:00.000-08:00

I was so amazed by the heroic/epic poems that everyone presented on Thursday! Everyone's was so good. I was just blown away, and I enjoyed listening and watching everyone, this was an excellent idea Dr. Sexson!

Salmon Rushdie"Freedom of Choice"

2005-03-19T20:54:00.000-08:00

OH MY GOD! Rushdie was incredible! One of the best times I have spent here in Montana.
Here are some of the many note worthy things Rushdie had to say:
*Juggling act of oral narrator-5 balls in the air at once and not dropping any-Rushdie did a excellent job of this
*Rusdie is a good "juggler" as seen in Haroun-he is well accomplished as is Scheherazade at story telling
* Blasphemy-he thinks not-his family excused Religion-they did not give a damn
* Subject of Religion was not important until it came after him-religion coming after all of us
* Frontier use dto be optimistic-potential and hope-aftermath of 911 -alarmed frontier-America thinks it has something to close/seal-putting walls up to keep people out-instead of to keep people in-Walls-Berlin-Dark shadow of Soviet Union-America must question this
* Rushdie speaks of a book by Saul Bellows where a dog thinks 'for God's sake open the universe a little more-you must push against the wall-you do it by pushing out against the universe-go to the edge and push-we as people-artist's do not take the safe/middle ground
* in order to not be defeated by the enemy we must continue to be what we are!
*homeostatic-ability to retell stories 'freedom of choice'/free speech
*a man's character is his fate/destiny-writing novels in the world of- your character may not be your destiny-how to do this now?
*no such thing as a ordinary life-inside the walls of every home/family there is mayhem-our lives are not ordinary/ fiction of ordinary life-this is the power of the novelist 'to shape life' who has the power over the story-Satanic Verses-power and art power and intellect
*Battle between those who are into books and those who are not-journalists? They only want the facts-but who's facts are they? yours, the journalists?
He is outrageous!
*Society -Religion they are the grand narrators!
What an amazing lecture or story or what ever you want to call it, I found Rusdie to absolutely amazing! Peace Out

Ong "Space and Meaning"

2005-03-06T17:01:00.000-08:00

logomachy a controversy of no real substance, depending on a merely verbal dispute ( Derrida probably would not agree with this)

lo·gom·a·chy
A dispute about words.
A dispute carried on in words only; a battle of words.

logocentrism - Derrida: all forms of thought based on a desire for (absolute) truth.

DERRIDA, RE ARTAUD BY WAY OF NERVAL - "Necessity of a logomachy. That is to say beyond the becalmed politeness of a cultured language, the war with words, the drilling and maddened destruction of a language policing and reigning over its subjectiles. In this conflagration of words, against words, the guardians of language will denounce a logomachy; they will require that discourse conform to pedagogy and philosophy, indeed to dialectic. But logomachy aims at taking breath back from them, in a war of reconquest." --Jacques Derrida,

logos - cf KJV John 1:1- "In the beginning was the Word, & the Word was with God, & the Word was God." [In the original Greek, the word for word was logos.] This is a complicated idea central to much of Western poetics. So to say that a poet is searching for the Logos means that he is searching for the power that gave birth to the universe. In some sense, Logos refers to the idea of perfected language, speech that can conjure & create. It is often used by contemporary critics to refer to a non-existing speech or language that can capture the essence of reality; the opposing idea is that no language can ever truly depict the world as it really is. Some people [nearly all literary critics] also slag it off as just meaning rationalism. Rhet: appeal to logic or reasoning using various kinds of evidence supporting the speaker's arguable claims.(this is an interesting definition compared to our's in class)

Language is perhaps the most anthropomorphic and anthropocentric of all the great human ficta (inventions). It is the prerequisite myth for the existence of any other myths.

In Ong's 5th chapter of "Print, Space, and Closure" he refers to Derrida's logomachy and I have spent some time researching the meaning. Ong says "Writing has reconstituted the originally oral, spoken word in visual space"(pg 121). Yes, I agree. It seems that Derrida had a 'war with words' and it seems to me that Ong too is at a war with words; granted the oral culture and how it developed and survived is really interesting and the whole memory system is as well. However, I think that we need words and that words on paper are a good thing for many reasons. It lets us learn new things, review old things, it gives us a privacy with words, which Ong speaks of, and it lets us know what we mean because we can see what we say.
I am not sure why Ong brings up Derrida, it seems that if he is to bring up Derrida that he should mention Saussure, Lacan, Kristeva and others. All of these critics and word professors had much to say about words, where they came from, what they mean, what they do not mean, how they came about, and so on. I think that Ong contradicts himself at times and that he liked the oral tradition and he also likes the literary tradition, or the secondary orality. I wish that when he mentions someome like Derrida that he would address the importance of addressing them. I have spent over an hour trying to find something that Derrida said about logomachy and so far I have not been able. However, that may due to my research skills. I am dertermined to find more and will post it.
Ong goes on in the chapter to say "print created a new sense of the private ownership of words" and "the drift in human consciousness toward greater individualism had been served well by print" I think that print is and was a good thing.I am never quite sure if Ong agrees or disagrees and that irritates me. Cindy

Myth & Mythology

2005-02-27T17:11:00.000-08:00

Mythologyby Bernard Doyle

Definitions of MythBefore defining the term "mythology" one needs to define the meaning of the word "myth". The word itself comes from the Greek "mythos" which originally meant "speech" or "discourse" but which later came to mean "fable" or "legend". In this document the word "myth" will be defined as a story of forgotten or vague origin, basically religious or supernatural in nature, which seeks to explain or rationalize one or more aspects of the world or a society.
Furthermore, in the context of this document, all myths are, at some stage, actually believed to be true by the peoples of the societies that used or originated the myth. Our definition is thus clearly distinguished from the use of the word myth in everyday speech which basically refers to any unreal or imaginary story.
A myth is also distinctly different from an allegory or parable which is a story deliberately made up to illustrate some moral point but which has never been assumed to be true by anyone.
Some myths describe some actual historical event, but have been embellished and refashioned by various story tellers over time so that it is impossible to tell what really happened. In this last aspect myths have a legendary and historical nature.
Definitions of MythologyFor our purposes the word mythology has two related meanings. Firstly it refers to a collection of myths that together form a mythological system. Thus one can speak of "Egyptian Mythology", "Indian Mythology", "Maori Mythology" or "Greek Mythology". In this sense one is describing a system of myths which were used by a particular society at some particular time in human history. It is also possible to group mythologies in other ways. For example one can group them geographically and then speak of "Oceanic Mythology", "Oriental Mythology" and "African Mythology".
A second meaning of the term mythology is the academic study of myths and systems of myths in general.
The types of individual myths and the purpose of mythologyBroadly speaking myths and mythologies seek to rationalize and explain the universe and all that is in it. Thus, they have a similar function to science, theology, religion and history in modern societies. Systems of myths have provided a cosmological and historical framework for societies that have lacked the more sophisticated knowledge provided by modern science and historical investigation.
Creation myths provide an explanation of the origin of the universe in all its complexity. They are an important part of most mythological systems. Creation myths often invoke primal gods and animals, titanic struggles between opposing forces or the death and/or dismemberment of these gods or animals as the means whereby the universe and its components were created.
Apart from an explanation of the creation of the universe, mythologies also seek to explain everyday natural phenomena. The Egyptian scarab god Khepri, who rolled the ball of the sun across the sky each day thus provided an explanation of the rising of the sun each day, its progress across the sky and its setting in the evening. Similarly, the Maori of New Zealand attributed the morning dew to the tears of the god Rangi (Heaven) for the goddess Papa (Earth) from whom he was separated. This class of myth is sometimes called a nature myth.
Myths are also often used to explain human institutions and practices as well. For example, the Greek hero Pelops was reputed to have started the Olympic Games after Poseidon helped him win the hand of Hippodameia in a chariot race. This type of myth is thus etiological. It seeks to account for some human institution through a myth.
Another class of myth is the Theogenic myth. This sets out to delineate the relationships between various gods and other mythical personages and beings who are mentioned in previously existing myths. Theogenic Myths are thus secondary in their purpose. They set out to provide a reinforcement or framework for an existing system of myths. The best known example of this is the Theogeny of Hesiod.
It should not be thought that the functions of myths as delineated above are mutually exclusive. For example creation myths by their very nature are usually Theogenic as well. Myths can, and have, served many purposes. Myths and systems of myths have been created by human beings for many reasons over thousands of years. They are a superb product of humanity collectively and a rich resource for the enjoyment of all mankind. Their fantastic and unreal nature to our modern eyes should not prevent us from enjoying them.

Article created on 17 April 1997; last modified on 02 August 2004.© MCMXCV - MMV Encyclopedia Mythica. All rights reserved.

Myth Tellers....

2005-02-27T17:03:00.000-08:00

The ARCHITECTURE of the SPIRIT

"it seems as if the whole of human life is contained within the mythical framework, as if the difference between the sacred and the profane no longer existed. Mythology provides man with models on which he must base his conduct, from the gesture of sowing seeds to the act of love, from house building to the touch of the fingers on the musical skin of the drum."

'In Africa it seems as if the whole of human life is contained within the mythical framework, as if the difference between the sacred and the profane no longer existed. Mythology provides man with models on which he must base his conduct, from the gesture of sowing seeds to the act of love, from house building to the touch of the fingers on the musical skin of the drum....for the whole of Black Africa we can affirm the primordial importance of the myth both as...the basis of a theory of symbolic knowledge and as the basis of social, political. even economic structures, which are nothing more nor less than exemplifications of mythical patterns.'
This concept of myth as a vast and complex determinate structure for both social and spiritual life is one that we may find difficult to comprehend. We are used to visiting the world of myth in the same way we visit a museum. Around us are excerpted exhibits, plundered from their own worlds and displayed for our amazement. Whether glorious or crude, they are presented to us as solemn reminders of the incomprehensible products of the human mind in a state of innocent ignorance. We may wonder at the extravagance and fertility of the invention, marvel at the impressive achievements or smile at the uncouth nature of the more exotic tales, but the overriding impression we are led to receive is that here are the products of the childhood of understanding, things which we have put aside. Even when we have been introduced to the works of the Jungians, with their attempts to describe myths as the 'manifestations of the unconscious', or to those various theorists who have analysed myths in terms of symbolism, of functionalism, of structuralism or even of ecology, it comes as something of a shock to discover this world of mythical complexity and organization. Clearly this is a product of minds far removed from their infancy. Within this complexity whole societies find their inspiration for intricate and sophisticated models of social structure, models which have proved sufficiently sustainable to survive apparently little changed across thousands of years.
In Equatorial Colombia, for instance, Reichel Dolmatoff describes the world of the Desana Indians:
'The six corners of the tribal territory are marked 'by six waterfalls, each a place where the head of one of the six original giant anacondas meets another's tail. Each of these snakes stands for one of the six rivers that frame the traditional homelands'.
This hexagon of landmarks is the earthly equivalent of a 'giant hexagon of stars, centred on the belt of Orion'. The terrestrial hexagon is centred on the 'intersection between the Pira-Parana River and the earth's equator.
'Here where the sky is said to cohabit with the earth, is the place where Sun Father erected his shadowless staff and fertilized the earth'.
This spot is the whirlpool entrance to the womb of the earth, and from here the first people emerged at the beginning.
'Because of its importance as an organizing principle of thought, the hexagon metaphor reappears in one aspect of Desana tradition after another. All hexagonal shapes in nature have significance for them... even the shell of a particular land tortoise. Each cell in the shell's pattern of hexagons symbolizes a character in the creation myth or an organizational principle of society - the family, for example, or marriage into another family. Desana rules for marriage exchange are visualised in terms of a hexagon'.

Here are sky, earth, nature and myth united into one model of the universe, a model still actively inhabited by a tribe of equatorial Indians, but built of images as ancient as any we know of. We would make a major step forward if we were to describe these earliest expressions of understanding as 'prime' thought, rather then 'primitive'. We would then have in one word the notion of 'first', together with that of 'quality' but also with the sense of 'an indivisible quantity'. At least we should then be better prepared to face the full impact of myth, which beneath the museum-exhibit surface of the populist imagery, is seething with an abundance of concepts so complex and obscure that it threatens to sweep us away on a tide of incomprehensibility
Nor is this a characteristic only of those myths reported from remote and isolated contemporary societies. When we look more closely at the most ancient records, from Egypt, from Mesopotamia, from India and China, the myths of creation stand complete and almost incomprehensibly elaborate. All aspects of life seem to be embraced by their intricacy. Art, government, music, ritual, family relationships, architecture, even writing and the alphabet, appear as part of this completeness. Even a preliminary reconnaissance of the material reveals that, whatever else they are, myths are much more than the product of minds in a benumbed sense of uncomprehending fear before the forces of nature. They represent the products of highly developed intellects, revealing an immensely complex and profound awareness of that most fundamental of human endeavours, the art of organizing experience.
The ancient Hindu scriptures of the Rig Veda, considered amongst the earliest of sacred writings, reveal this complexity both in their language and in their structure. In her introduction to her translation Wendy O'Flaherty discusses the formidable difficulties of making sense of such dense and paradoxical writings. One such difficulty, which she describes as a 'form of deliberate confusion', is the use of
'mutually illuminating metaphors. Certain concerns recur throughout the Rig Veda..the themes of harnessing and unharnessing, which shift in their positive or negative value (sometimes good, sometimes bad)..the closely related theme of finding open space and freedom in contrast to being hemmed in or trapped. (T)hese are linked to other constellations of images; conflict within the family; the preciousness of animals; the wish for knowledge and immortality. The problem arises when one tries to determine which of these are in the foreground and which in the background of a particular hymn. Are the cows symbolic of the sun or is the sun a metaphor for cows? The careless or greedy exegete finds himself in danger of rampant Jungianism: everything is a symbol of everything else; each is a metaphor for all the others. ..when asked to pinpoint the central point of a verse, he will (answer) 'all of the above'
In addition to its immense linguistic and semantic complexity, the RigVeda also reveals structural characteristics which are far from accidental. It is composed of 10800 verses, each of 40 syllables, making a total of 432,000 syllables in all. This is no arbitrary number. The fire altar, assiduously dismantled and rebuilt each year for the agnicayana ritual, contains 10800 bricks, each one representing an individual part of the created universe. There are 108 classical upanisads, and the same number, together with its factors, reappears throughout Indo-European myth and temple architecture.
The Rig Veda is a concentrated expression of the immense web of relationships which the myth tellers created from their experience, from the messages they read in the world around them. It is this web of mutual affinities, this ever-increasing texture of organization, which generated the meaning upon which their society was constructed.
In weaving this web, the myth tellers were laying down the foundation for all the fundamental ideas about human spirituality and culture, from 'fertility cults' and ancestor worship to Plato's doctrine of essences and the unity of all existence, from original sin and salvation to the concept of law and order, from domestic architecture and family relationships to immortality and the eternal godhead.
Each of these ideas is linked to the others, not in any nebulous way but according to a fundamental set of principles, expressed in the myths of creation and organization. Our task is to reclaim these principles. However 'wild' the kind of thought which constructed them might appear, it was never undisciplined. The relationships it explored and celebrated all referred back to one primal model for their classification, a model which has shaped the way we view the world and the sense we make of our experience of it. The source of inspiration for this model, the originating referents that laid down the 'warp and weft' of the fabric of meaning, must date from the earliest history of the human mind in its present form.

# 10 Millman Perry

2005-02-20T18:21:00.000-08:00

Milman Parry
Milman Parry was a classical scholar who between 1933 and 1935 was in Yugoslavia studying the oral traditions among the South Slavs. In the course of his work, he could not help but notice the similarities between the oral poetry he was hearing and the formulaic verse of the Iliad. The epic poets has a repertoire of formulae or tags, adapted for various places in the metre of the poems. Parry died in 1935, and the dissemination of the idea of Homer as an oral poet was continued by Albert Lord[?].

Oral Poetics and Homeric Poetry
Gregory Nagy
The concept of oral tradition, especially as we see it redefined in the work of Milman Parry (1971) and Albert Lord (espec. 1960/2000), has had a major impact on the understanding of Homer and Homeric poetry in the field of classics. Volume 1 of Greek Literature (Nagy 2001) features reprints of twenty studies illustrating this impact, along with an extensive introduction and bibliography. The introduction and bibliography are available gratis at http://chs.harvard.edu/chspubs/ninevol/index.htm. Nowadays, classicists who publish on Homer generally acknowledge the relevance of Parry's and Lord's work, though all too many publications still reveal a woefully superficial understanding of this work (for a list of ten common misunderstandings, see Nagy 1996:19-27).
A most pressing problem in the field of classics is that the concept of oral tradition tends to be applied—however superficially—only to Homer, while the rest of Greek literature continues to be studied without an awareness of any need for applying the same concept (for a corrective, see Lord 1991:espec. ch. 2).
Another problem is that some influential classicists, in their publications on Homer, have separated the work of Parry from that of Lord (Nagy 2003:ch. 3, with bibliography). A most prominent example is the introduction written by Adam Parry to the collected papers of his father (Parry 1971:ix-lxii). Since most of Milman Parry's work on Homer predated his study of living oral traditions in the former Yugoslavia, the separating of his work from Lord's leaves the relevance of oral traditions to Homeric studies seriously undervalued.
This problem folds into a larger problem. Those who have no direct knowledge of oral traditions generally assume that "orality," as distinct from "literacy," can be universally defined. And yet, the only universal distinction between oral and literary traditions is the historical anteriority of the first to the second. Beyond this obvious observation, it is pointless to attempt any universalizing definition of oral or even of written tradition. In [End Page 73] cultures that do not depend on the technology of writing, the concept of "orality" is meaningless (Lord 1995:105, n. 26).
An ongoing challenge in Homeric studies is the persistent assumption that oral traditions are inferior to literary traditions (for a critique of this assumption, see Mitchell and Nagy 2000:xiv).
For current research in Homeric poetry, a most interesting new direction in oral tradition studies centers on the interaction of genre and occasions of performance (Martin 1989, Bakker 1997). "In a living oral tradition, people are exposed to verbal art constantly, not just on specific entertainment occasions, which can happen every night in certain seasons. When they work, eat, drink, and do other social small-group activities, myth, song, and saying are always woven into their talk. Consequently, it is not inaccurate to describe them as bilingual, fluent in their natural language but also in the Kunstsprache of their local verbal art forms" (Martin 1993:227).

DescriptionMilman Parry, who died in 1935 while a young assistant professor at Harvard, is now considered one of the leading classical scholars of this century. Yet Parry's articles and French dissertations--highly original contributions to the study of Homer--have until now been difficult to obtain. The Making of Homeric Verse for the first time collects these landmark works in one volume together with Parry's unpublished M.A. thesis and extracts from his Yugoslavian journal, which contains notes on Serbo-Croatian poetry and its relation to Homer. Adam Parry, the late son of the scholar, has translated the French dissertations, written an introduction on the life and intellectual development of his father, and provided a survey of later work on Homer conducted in Parry's glorious tradition.

Hey, I have spent quite some time trying to get information about Milman Parry, however this about all I can come up with. I am interested about him and his work. There is a great site at Harvard that has an online collection about him, it is worth checking out if your interested. Cindy

# 9 "Orality and Literacy" Ong

2005-02-13T15:28:00.000-08:00

I just finished re-reading chapters 1-4 and I enjoyed what Ong has to say much more this time around. I think at first it was because I had nothing to found on, with no foundation, and now that we have had class a few times it make much more sense, and I actually enjoyed it.
One paragraph from chap 3 especially....
"Oral man is not so likely to think of words as 'signs", quiescent visual phenomena. Homer refers to them with the standard epithet 'winged words' - which suggest evanescence, power, and freedom: words are constantly moving, but by flight, which is a powerful form of movement, and one lifting the flier free of the ordinary, gross, heavy 'objective' world." Ong pg.76 Cindy

#8 Memory

2005-02-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html - More from this site This is a great site, even though it is for kids I enjoy surfing around in here because it has alot to do with what our class is about. Take a look!

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Memory:
11 entries found for memory. The first 10 are listed below.To select an entry, click on it. For more results, click here.
memorybubble memorycache[1,noun]memory lanememory tracerandom-access memoryread-only memoryscreen memoryvirtual memoryflash memory
Main Entry: mem·o·ry Pronunciation: 'mem-rE, 'me-m&-Function: nounInflected Form(s): plural -riesEtymology: Middle English memorie, from Middle French memoire, from Latin memoria, from memor mindful; akin to Old English gemimor well-known, Greek mermEra care, Sanskrit smarati he remembers1 a : the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms b : the store of things learned and retained from an organism's activity or experience as evidenced by modification of structure or behavior or by recall and recognition2 a : commemorative remembrance b : the fact or condition of being remembered 3 a : a particular act of recall or recollection b : an image or impression of one that is remembered c : the time within which past events can be or are remembered 4 a : a device or a component of a device in which information especially for a computer can be inserted and stored and from which it may be extracted when wanted b : capacity for storing information 5 : a capacity for showing effects as the result of past treatment or for returning to a former condition -- used especially of a material (as metal or plastic)synonyms MEMORY, REMEMBRANCE, RECOLLECTION, REMINISCENCE mean the capacity for or the act of remembering, or the thing remembered. MEMORY applies both to the power of remembering and to what is remembered . REMEMBRANCE applies to the act of remembering or the fact of being remembered . RECOLLECTION adds an implication of consciously bringing back to mind often with some effort . REMINISCENCE suggests the recalling of usually pleasant incidents, experiences, or feelings from a remote past .

Ancient Greek trick to memory feats
By Deborah Smith, Science WriterDecember 16 2002
Most people could improve their memories if they followed a trick first devised in ancient Greece, a new study of the brains of people who can perform extraordinary feats of memory shows.
British researchers carried out a range of tests on people who were highly ranked in the World Memory Championships, held annually in London.
They found these people's superior memories were not due to any exceptional intellectual capacity or unusual brain structure. The 10 champions performed the same as normal people on intelligence tests, and their brains contained an average amount of grey matter.
However, a difference showed up when the memory buffs' brains were scanned as they committed lists of items to memory - in this case, numbers, faces and snowflake shapes. Their brain regions associated with navigation and memory for locations were more active than in normal people attempting the same memory tasks.
Nine out of the 10 champions told the researchers they used a strategy called the "method of loci", in which the objects to be remembered were placed along an imaginary pathway that could be retraced when recalling the items in order.
The research team, led by Eleanor Maguire, of University College London, said this "mental walk" technique had been described by the Greek poet, Simonides of Ceos, in 477 BC.
"The efficacy of the method is reflected in its continued use over 2 millennia, in virtually unchanged form," Dr Maguire said.
The study, published today in Nature Neuroscience, was the first of people with extraordinarily good memories across a range of areas, the team said. It suggested the human brain had an inbuilt proclivity for using spatial images to recall information effectively, and this technique could be attained by almost anyone willing to learn it.
Two years ago a study of London taxi drivers, who keep detailed maps of the city in their heads, found that the navigation parts of their brains were larger than normal.
This was not the case for the memory champions, Dr Maguire said. "This may be because taxi drivers store a large and complex spatial representation of London, whereas the superior memorisers use and re-use a more constrained set of routes."

Just a little something to relate back to our amazing Dr. Sexson, this article seems to validate all he tells us and everything that we are reading. Cindy

# 7 The mysterious powerful world of Orality

2005-02-06T13:44:00.000-08:00

I find Sean Kane's Wisdom of the Mythtellers to be all about the mysterious powerful world of orality. Referring to The Sacred once again Kane hits the nail on the head with this chapter: "It seems that the most generous definition of myth involves a sense of mystery, a concelaed knowledge about relationship that is available only in story. Myths are not stories about the gods in the the abstract; the are about 'something mysterious,' intelligent, invisible and whole. The word whole comes from the Germanic word halig, from which we also get the word 'holy.'

I love this book and what Kane has to say. It seems to really get at the essence of what oral storytelling is all about. Cindy

# 6 Oral traditions and the "Song of Nature"

2005-02-06T13:42:00.000-08:00

In class on the 3rd of February when Dr. Sexson was talking about oral storytelling and the"Song of Nature" it reminded me of Wisdom of the Mythtellers by Sean Kane. On page 44 The Sacred Kane speaks of Leviticus and "chapter 25 the words put into the mouth of Jehovah." Every seventh year, says the Lord, 'you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard...you shall not reap...you shall not gather; it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land.' Keep these statutes, the Bible adds, and the land will nourish you. This seems to relate very naturally to the basic theme of Kane's whole book.

I agree with this, it seems natural to think that the "song of nature" is the power of song, the original oral tradtion. In Leviticus God tells the people to keep the land special and to nurture it as it is the nuturer of people. I am reminded of the creation stories of the Native Americans and that how they all believe they came from either the land or animals. I am also reminded of Pan in The Wind in the Willows and how Pan gives the gift of forgetting to Ratty and Mole by his song and keeps the little baby otter with him by playing his "pipes' made of the reeds.

We are also reminded of the myth of Demeter, Goddess of the harvest, in Kane's Mythtellers as she cursed Erysikhthon for cutting down trees to build his banquet hall. Demeter curses him with perpeptual hunger. Once again reminding us of the law of nature and how we must always take care of nature as she provides humans with what they need, in all ways; including the 'song'.

We are also reminded again in Kane's chapter The wisdom of plants and seasons. Once again Demeter is referred to with regard to the agricultural and seasonal and animal life cycles. I definitely think that Kane is on to something and that oral storytelling had a almost embilical connection with nature.

"At its simplest, the term "orality" describes a condition of society in which speaking and listening form the only or principal channel through which communication in language takes place" (Catherine Wylie).

An interesting quote, to me this can be related right back to our primal beginnings, therefore song, nature, animals, earth, and how all get rolled into one big ball...a channel in which to communicate, a song to sing. Cindy

#5 Derrida and intertextuality, & MUDs, Memories and Morals

2005-01-24T11:33:00.000-08:00

Textual Openness
Like Barthes, Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida continually uses the terms link (liasons) , web (toile) , network (réseau), and interwoven (s'y tissent), which cry out for hypertextuality; but in contrast to Barthes, who emphasizes the writerly text and its nonlinearity, Derrida emphasizes textual openness, intertextuality, and the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text. These emphases appear with particular clarity when he claims that "like any text, the text of 'Plato' couldn't not be involved, or at least in a virtual, dynamic, lateral manner, with all the worlds that composed the system of the Greek language." Derrida in fact here describes extant hypertext systems in which the active reader in the process of exploring a text, probing it, can call into play dictionaries with morphological analyzers that connect individual words to cognates, derivations, and opposites. Here again something that Derrida and other critical theorists describe as part of a seemingly extravagant claim about language turns out precisely to describe the new economy of reading and writing with electronic virtual, rather than physical, forms.
Derrida properly recognizes (in advance, one might say) that a new, freer, richer form of text, one truer to our potential experience, perhaps to our actual if unrecognized experience, depends upon discrete reading units. As he explains, in what Gregory Ulmer terms "the fundamental generalization of his writing" (58), there also exists "the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken and written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semiolinguistic communication. . . . Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks." The implication of such citability, separability, appears in the fact, crucial to hypertext, that, as Derrida adds, "in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable" ("Signature," 185).
Like Barthes, Derrida conceives of text as constituted by discrete reading units. Derrida's conception of text relates to his "methodology of decomposition" that might transgress the limits of philosophy. "The organ of this new philospheme," as Gregory Ulmer points out, "is the mouth, the mouth that bites, chews, tastes. . . . The first step of decomposition is the bite" (57). Derrida, who describes text in terms of something close to Barthes's lexias, explains in Glas that "the object of the present work, its style too, is the 'mourceau,' " which Ulmer translates as "bit, piece, morsel, fragment; musical composition; snack, mouthful." This mourceau , adds Derrida, "is always detached, as its name indicates and so you do not forget it, with the teeth," and these teeth, Ulmer explains, refer to "quotation marks, brackets, parentheses: when language is cited (put between quotation marks), the effect is that of releasing the grasp or hold of a controlling context" (58).
Derrida's groping for a way to foreground his recognition of the way text operates in a print medium -- he is, after all, the fierce advocate of writing as against orality -- shows the position, possibly the dilemma, of the thinker working with print who sees its shortcomings but for all his brilliance cannot think his way outside this mentalité . Derrida, the experience of hypertext shows, gropes toward a new kind of text: he describes it, he praises it, but he can only present it in terms of the devices -- here those of punctuation -- associated with a particular kind of writing. As the Marxists remind us, thought derives from the forces and modes of production, though, as we shall see, few Marxists or Marxians ever directly confront the most important mode of literary production -- that dependent upon the techne of writing and print.
From this Derridean emphasis upon discontinuity comes the conception of hypertext as a vast assemblage, what I have elsewhere termed the metatext and what Nelson calls the "docuverse." Derrida in fact employs the word assemblage for cinema, which he perceives as a rival, an alternative, to print. Ulmer points out that "the gram or trace provides the 'linguistics' for collage/montage" (267), and he quotes Derrida's use of assemblage in Speech and Phenomena : "The word 'assemblage' seems more apt for suggesting that the kind of bringing-together proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to separate again, as well as being ready to bind others together" (131). To carry Derrida's instinctive theorizing of hypertext further, one may also point to his recognition that such a montagelike textuality marks or foregrounds the writing process and therefore rejects a deceptive transparency.

# 4 Interesting article on memory

2005-01-24T11:29:00.000-08:00

MUDs, Memories and Morals: A Revisioning of Primary Orality and Late Literacy
By: Catherine Wylie
Welcome to the world of MUDs and the art of memory; two very odd concepts to grasp, even if one has knowledge of concepts and applications. Chances are, you may be well educated as to what a MUD is and how it functions within the realms of psychology and the origin of role playing games. However, it is apparent that less attention has been paid to how the MUD functions in terms of "literacy and orality" and how the basic precepts of textuality are altered by the advent of a new medium of discourse. With the burgeoning implications and cultural side affects of digital media, the playing field is wide open for experimental treatments of the MUD and how it affects, and is affected by, both old and new ideas in the game of literary studies.
However, the game of trying to decide how to decipher and register the seismic effects on the grounds of literary studies and post-modern theory, is still just breaking ground . With theorists such as Lacan, Baudrillard, Eco, Derrida, and of course, the renegade futurist, Marshall McLuhan , we are on our way to developing a new literary and cultural paradigm by which to examine the new forms erupting out of old structures of communication , especially in regards of computer mediated systems. As McLuhan states, We look at the present through a rear- view mirror. We march backwards into the future. In the name of "progress," our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old. The world is a global village. The MUD environment, which mirrors a literal "cyberarchitecture," as well as a postmodern version of ancient paradigms of communication and loci central to human interaction, is suitable for studying the effects of orality and the importance of memory in a pre-print culture, as well as serving as a prototype for a new brand of textual revolution and its effects on the rise of digital culture.
Long before the dawn of "print culture" as we have experienced it thus far in this millennium, oration was the primary medium for mass communication in at least Western civilization. Needless to say, oration was a valued skill in ancient Greece, possessed by relatively few. Today, secondary means of communication, such as radio, TV, and telephony, have produced numerous orators and commentators. Thus, the title of orator has since become an easy one to obtain, due to the high literacy rate in print culture aided by invention of secondary forms of mass communication. A speaker can easily refer to cue cards and the like, thus not having to concentrate entirely on remembering key elements in a speech.
Without the advent of cue cards or note paper, Greek orators used what Frances Yates refers to as "the art of memory," The referential place for such a concept, resides in the mental architecture of the individual mind. The original concept of a "mental architecture" is credited to Simonides of Ceos (556- 486 bce), a Greek poet who accessed his own internal memory system to help identify a room full of dead bodies. As a guest who escaped a collapsed dining hall, he returned only to help identify the mangled corpses of the those he had been dining with that evening. He did this by means of creating an internal mnemonic system whereby he was able to recall who was sitting where at the table. Although he did this long before the disaster, he was able to recall where everyone had been sitting and what their names were.
Thus, the advent of the "memory theater" was born and ascended through time as the use of a major mnemotechnic devise that would transmute its self- referential purpose through the ages, politics, and development of mass communications. Assimilated by Roman culture, the art of memory was used as a great oratory device whereby the speaker often attached key phrases as pictured words, to various crevices and portals in his own villa. During the speech, he could mentally rerun a slow and attentive journey through his own villa, and recall all the details of its carefully constructed mnemonic architecture. For instance, perhaps a highly important key phrase in his speech could be attached mentally to an image of a portal, thus emphasizing light and enlightenment.
Taken from the originating period of Simonides, whereby memory theaters were used my poets, orators, and as an aid in the memorization of long lists of items, the evolution of the concept remained dynamic and adaptable even beyond more widespread literacy and the eventual genesis of the Johannes Gutenberg's printing press . There were those who tried to use the memory theater as a modeled attempt to grasp the mysteries of religion and the universe. Giordanno Bruno, of the 16th Century, was burned at the state for heresy against the Roman Catholic church. Accused of propagating the black art of Hermeticism , that was feared for its occult application in one man's attempt to find out more than what was commonly dictated by the Church in regards to religion and destiny. Needless to say, his memory system was an elaborate project which took a life-time of dedication and resulted in a horrible death.
On a much more benign level, the memory theater was used in the design and construction of Shakespeare's Globe Theater . Based on the hermetic philosophical principles of memory, The Globe theater was constructed in such a way as to include certain columns and visually embedded elements into the walls off to the sides of the stage. As the most elaborate theater in England during the 16th Century, The Globe was based on the memory theater of Robert Fludd, one of the last surviving progenies of the hermetic philosophers. Fludd used an actual theater stage as his mnemonic devise. The architecture of the stage lent itself to the representation of the mysteries of the heavens and the earth. The original architecture of The Globe matched the philosophical foundation Fludd's theater in that it contained a definite number of entrances, levels, and exits, and all precisely placed in hermetic order. Thus, The Globe itself lent itself to the dynamics of the Shakespearean world of human mystery and discovery.
Interestingly, the art of memory and the memory theater, had been active in the hands of Church scholars since the 11th Century. The system was used to place images in religious works of art and in the minds of the masses, so as to instil moral truths and lessons that would not be forgotten. Cicero, whose works were based on an anonymously produced treatise of memory systems called the Ad Herennium, wrote a manual on rhetoric, the De oratore. According to Cicero, the art of rhetoric could be divided into five parts. In terms of the art of memory, which could was said to be ruled by the virtuous principle of Prudence, Cicero stated that, "Virtue has four parts: Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, and Prudence. Prudence is the knowledge of what is good and bad and what is neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, and foresight. Memory is the faculty by which the mind recalls what has happened. Intelligence is the faculty by which it ascertains what is. Foresight is the faculty by which it is seen that something will occur before it does occur."
Unfortunately, the art of memory lost its prudential application for the use in the moral betterment of the individual and was given to flagrant displays of rhetorical "showing off," whereby one would use it only to impress his audience with the scope and adeptness of his memory. However, it was not long before the sciences recognized the art of memory as a practical means for storing and retrieving empirical data. Francis Bacon, for one, was well versed in the art of memory, which he used saw as a valuable tool in the advancement of learning. Ramon Lull, a mathematician and a believer in Caballistic religions, believed that he could use the quantifiable properties of mathematics in a system that could be retrieved from memory in order to solve any problem in the world and perhaps beyond. Due to his emphasis on quantifiable mathematics versus qualitative mathematics, one could see where such a system might be appropriately and masterfully applied.
Ultimately, the studies of Frances Yates and the art of memory, end with her sentiments that, "the serious investigation of this forgotten art may be said to have only just begun. Such subjects do not have behind them, as yet, an apparatus of organized modern scholarship: they do not belong into the normal curricual and so they are left out. The art of memory is a clear case of a marginal subject, not recognized as belonging to nay of the normal disciplines, having been omitted because it was no one's business. The history of religion and ethics, of philosophy and psychology, of art and literature, of scientific method, the artificial memory as a part of rhetoric belongs into the rhetoric tradition; memory as a power of soul belongs with theology. When we reflect on this profound affiliation of our theme it begins to seem after all not so surprising that the pursuit of it should have opened up new views of some of the greatest manifestations of our culture (Yates, 389)."
In response to the ending of Yate's groundbreaking work on the art of memory, it seems that the digital revolution might be the next frontier whereby the "lost art" or the art of memory may have insidiously begun to reposition itself as a method of mental "relearning" or "reformatting." In terms of the old order of print culture, which dictates the social stratification based on the paradigm of print and literacy, new forms of digital discourse are toppling the old forms of print communication and even other forms of modern, mass media communication. The result seems to be a recycling or reemergence of the dichotomous philosophy that exists between orality and literacy.
Donald Theall, makes an important contribution to understanding the role of cyberspace in terms of revisioning and exploring this particular dichotomy that now earned new meaning in the realm of computer mediated communications. Although his focus is on the work of James Joyce's curious, almost indecipherable work, Finnegan's Wake, like Marshall Mcluhan he sees the interconnectedness and the unbroken, song-like quality of the Wake, and uses this as a starting point for his theories on the "prehistory of cyberspace." William Gibson as well, author of Neuromancer , who was aware of the potential effects of the simultaneous nature of computer mediated communication, looked at the cyber frontier as "...data stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed." In terms of the mass assimilation of data in such an decentralized medium, certain icons of navigation are needed to find one's way through an endless, linking stream of seemingly undifferentiated data. In regards to the "computer revolution," Gibson terms the on-line world of participation as a "consensual hallucination," which is generated by "data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system."
In order to organize a meaningful and ethically logical use of navigating and remembering information, it seems that more than a general bookmarking system will be needed. However, in a world of textual and graphical representation, how does one apply both the virtuous and the practical uses of the ancient memory theater? And, is it a viable method whereby those on the information superhighway can find a way to not only navigate the terrain of cyberspace, but to perhaps be able to signpost and develop a personal mapping system in relationship to one's own personal experience of relating within the milieu of "the global village?" Perhaps, but not quite yet is this medium easily navigable enough to lend itself to a virtual Renaissance of the old values across the major disciplines that teach a society how to recommunilize and prosper in times of major paradigm shifts and social upheaval.
However, one must find a place to start; a place to begin looking for signs of the old order to give us insight into the new. In terms of the vast world of cyberspace, the cybermilieu of the MUD might be an interesting and appropriate place to start. A self- contained world based on the model of role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, this particular venue of cyberspace lends itself to the model of Bruno's memory theater.
Although a MUD is so far, only a text-based world, it is a rich world nonetheless, an ongoing story whereby one interacts with other players in an imaginary medium based solely on textual description and the use relatively short command phrases. In a world such as this, one is scooted off with a only a crude diagram in the form of a mapped layout of the "town" which serves as the imaginary interface. Because navigation through this town requires somewhat of an imagination, which will build by default the longer one engages in MUDding, it is advantageous to commit the layout of the land, so to speak, to memory.
As one travels through the MUD, one has experiences there that build one upon another so that whatever virtual character is engaged, it is guaranteed that this character is going to develop a MUD citizenship and a history. Whatever moral principles or psychological ramifications are inherent within that experience, are going to be part of that character's repertoire of memory. Because there are only textual descriptions of images representing certain tools, and perhaps other computer generated characters, a player cannot help but command from imagination, a visual image of objects located in imaginary locales.
While the memory theater of yore relied specifically on ideas represented by placement around real objects, the MUD does not lend itself to such sturdy resources. However, the MUD is curiously sturdy enough for the task of building a memory theater in it own right. As the average MUD is navigable through the directions of either north, south, east, or west, it is easy to establish a locus from which to move quadrilaterally in the virtual village. Usually there is a center in the township and then many buildings with many rooms which serve well in Yate's description of loci, which are a variety of places committed to memory in a certain order.
Interestingly enough, the ancient anonymous Ad Herenium, dated circa 86-82 B. C., explains the "rules" and the logical application of memory systems as they pertain to the binary nature of memory itself. According to the author of the Ad Herenium, memory can be either of a natural or artificial origination. The natural is what comes innately with thought in the immediate mind. The artificial memory, however, is an aspect of memory which is bolstered and extended by practice and concentration (Yates, 5).
In terms of the MUD, such a distinction is easy to make. The concept of town, building, room, and familiar objects are already part of one's second natured orientation of thought. The artificial memory, however, is born of the need to retrace one's steps through the virtual construction of the MUD and to survive and thrive there as well. In terms of simple directions, it could be useful, for instance to attach certain symbols or images to the words north, south, east, or west.
In regards to the digitization of text and cyberculture, it is interesting to bring into the context of the present, a quote from the author of the Ad Herenium : "For places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like the letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like a script, and the delivery is like the reading."
According to Yates' interpretation of the Ad Herenium, "the formation of the loci are of the greatest importance, for the same set of loci can be used again and again for remembering different material.... The loci are like the wax tablets which remain when what is written on them has been effaced and are ready to be written on again."
In terms of the textual nature of the MUD and its structural aspect which includes a continual text scroller, the territory can be navigated by certain points in the loci, which in turn, can be returned to and used over and again at the player's discretion. Hence, the metaphor of a "wax tablet" fits the postmodern reality of the computer screen, constructed by the non-material aspects of binary information. Although the territory of cyberspace changes the meaning of the term "territory" itself, it is still a territory in a somewhat natural form, simply by the way in which the mind finds an immediate representation. Hence, the abstraction of the meaning of territory becomes worth looking at in terms of MUD and memory dynamics.
Jean Baudrillard, who studies the finer details of simulation in terms of computer mediated communication, claims that even the term "abstraction" has become void of previous meaning. He says, "Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept." Perhaps this is why the map of most MUDs is rather crude, leaving much to the imagination indeed. As Buidrillard goes on to further explain the postmodern nature of the MUD:
"Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself."
In terms of the MUD, Buidrillard has eloquently described the nature of the individual reality of the MUD character and how he or she is to construct a life and a meaning for themselves on the surface of a postmodern medium that simply falls away with the "real time" scrolling of the text. And yet, ask any MUDster if the MUD is a "real" place to them and they will most likely say yes. And yet the meaning of the "real" has been assigned new "postmodern" relevance which can still be found beneath the surface of the game, an older order of structure that is at once, ethically substantiated through a system of "rules."
In terms of the memory theater, which was originally used for the purpose of rhetoric, over time has shifted its cause to the realm of ethics and morals. The Church had long since used the memory theater as a means by which to instil moral fiber into the natural memories of the community at large. Although there seems to be no great need for the art of rhetoric on a MUD, such an environment does, in fact, function like a community committed to competition but also is very much opposed to the total outbreak of textually committed anarchy. Like all societies, the MUD has its rulers and its wizards who are there to make sure that order remains in tact.
Although MUDs typically started out as arenas where one could engage in a fairly healthy competition with other players, now they are an cybersituations given to a certain amount of contempt and disappointment. According to one MUDster, there are very few decent MUDs left, and very few players left who can be trusted. Like any society the motives of its individuals or groups of members are at odds with each other. In order to survive in a MUD, one has to make the right connections, observe the rules, and skilfully master the tactics of the game while trying not to suffer too much loss of virtual possessions or life, as it were. And so the metaphor fits the basic survival needs inherent in real life.
One particular MUDster, who is a part of the MUD community EVERDARK (http://www.angelfire.com/co/everdark/everdark.html) says that he can remember his cumulative experience through the MUD, mainly because he has a map of the whole village committed to memory. Not only has he come to rely on memory for navigation through the MUD (which can be quite difficult for a newbie), but he claims to remember every conquest, kill, and defeat he was involved in and in what loci of the MUD the event took place.
Because such experiences in the MUD are textually based, there is a wide use of imagined images with words, which fit the paradigm of the ancient memory principles from the Ad Herenium. Thus, the two necessary principles of the art of memory , are both a memory for words and a memory for things. In the case of the MUD, it is interesting to note that the objects used in the MUD are often sharp knives or other dangerous weapons. The actions carried out with such items, are usually those of the violent order, whether it be against other players, computer generated monsters, or helpless small animals such as chickens on a virtual farm waiting to be slaughtered. Furthermore, the value of such items and their acquisition, is what enables a player to move up through the ranks of the MUD hierarchy.
In terms of memory, it helps the player immensely if he or she can remember what the rules are for which areas of the MUD and for the uses of certain objects. In the case of MUDs, the hypereal architecture and the constant navigation through it, is all that the player needs for a made-to-order memory theater. In terms of the images and the actions that are to be applied and taken in the realm of the MUD, it is also interesting to note that the ancients knew that certain images were more powerful and thus, more suitable for memory training purposes than were other, less emotionally provocative images.
In the MUD, a player's very textual existence is based upon surviving and thriving in a world of dangerous images and vulnerable spaces. One must be aware of the impact of the image relayed through the word on the screen in order to navigate through a form of textual violence, which luckily still strives to keep an orderly code of ethics that protects against "foul play" and reduces the recidivism of certain MUD crimes.
In terms of the finer nuances between natural and artificial memory systems, the author of the Ad Herenium makes an interesting observation in terms of memory training:
"Now nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time. Accordingly, things immediate to our eye or ear we commonly forget; incidents of our childhood we often remember best. Nor could this be for any other reason than that ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and the novel stay longer in the mind."
In terms of the MUD environment and the discourse that prevails therein, it is no surprise that the stimuli of textually committed acts of violence, thievery, and trickery are what keep certain MUDs fascinating and engaging and memorable from one textual encounter to the next. And the fact that there are social hierarchies and guilds wherein special spells and powers are reserved, makes the textual territory of the quadrilateral orientation of the town, reusable - enough to build memories and to retain them for future use.
And yet, for such a violent atmosphere as a MUD, there appears to be an very firmly placed moral code of ethical behavior that all participants are required to honor and follow. No doubt, the loci of one's travels provides the stimulus for acquiring and remembering the rules. And, it is interesting to note, that if one falls out of line or goes against the rules, that the other members of the MUD community are slow to forgive and are even slower to forget.
In the experience of one MUDster, who tried to join the battle for good after being involved in the "dark side" of the MUD, it was very difficult for him to redeem his honor. In learning the MUD and its rules, he decided that he wanted to eventually become a member who is respected for their honorable place in the virtual society. In order to do this, it is taking him months to gain or regain the trust of other MUDsters who are not showing to be so quick as to let him gain admittance to a certain guild.
With all the complexities of houses within guilds warring against other houses, etc., it is amazing to one who has no knowledge of MUDs to fathom the methods used to remember all the current and past events of the game. Perhaps this is merely because the MUD environment is its own self-constructed, self-referential memory theater whereby the players are allowed access to only the most violent and competitive images, which seem to serve the strengthening of the artificial memory. In terms of the learning of morals, it seems that the memory theater, in the context of the MUD, has served its purpose well (at least for some players), in order that a standard of morals might be held to by the virtual participants in the MUD. And for those who have achieved high ranks for both the construction and the mastery of the MUD environment, they are granted the powers to either correct rebellious trouble makers or to even terminate and "kill" an uncooperative MUDster who does not obey the "rules."
In lieu of the MUD, where moral regulations reign as supreme as in real life, perhaps Baudrillard's theory of simulacra, does not apply to the postmodern, canceled out, real reality of the MUD. In terms of the MUD as a living, thriving cybercommunity of substance, it is hard to believe that Buadrillards statment could apply; "This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics... the real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times... It is nothing more than operational... It is hyperreal: the product of an irradiating syntheses of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere."
In terms of a dichotomous approach to literacy and orality, the MUD makes a good case that perhaps the "hyperreal" world of binary reality does not have such a postmodern, polished surface as some might believe. Although it is a game, the MUD is also an environment in which places can be identified through the navigation of memory. And although the words passing on the screen are mere figures of speech, the "real time" orientation and impact of language in this particular context, combine the best of ancient moral principles of orality with the most radically altered forms of new literacy.
Hence, it was Plato who exalted the art of written communication, and Socrates who feared that such a thing would ruin the individual's relationship to society via the solitude of personal discourse. Today there are critics of computer mediated communication who feel that the relationship between the individual and him or herself will be destroyed by the "consensual hallucination" of digital literacy. Perhaps the MUD is the perfect theater or forum whereby to showcase the virtues of primary oral communication and how they are still useful and revisable in the "hyperreal" realm of the new literacy. Perhaps the scrolling, "hyper-realtime" world of the MUD, can stand as a lingering and lasting example of old forms subtly and magically directing the moral tide of one digital community, which will no doubt play a part in constructing the "global village" of the future.
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Richard A. Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk)18th July, 2003.

#3 googling "Orality and Literature"

2005-01-21T15:17:00.000-08:00

This is from "The Johns Hopkins Guide to Orality and Literature":
Orality and Literacy
To a generally unacknowledged extent, issues raised by orality and literacy have always been important for literary criticism, especially in relation to three major areas of concern. First, there are questions about the medium in which literary texts exist. While literature is usually taken to involve books (though theatrical works are problematic for this conception, as are lyrics, if considered historically), "oral literature" seems to contradict this idea, given the meaning of "oral" (to do with the spoken) and the etymology of "literature" in litterae (Latin, meaning "letters"). Also, since many of the constituent elements of literature feature prominently in contemporary cultural forms in media other than "letters" (narrative occurs in film and television, lyricism is found in pop song lyrics, etc.), many of literature's apparently defining properties can be seen to exist outside "writing"; this problematizes literature's generally assumed close connection with "literate" forms and "literate" cultures (as has been shown, for example, by Ruth Finnegan).Second, there are issues concerning ideas of authors and authorship. In oral societies--including not only those that have what are typically thought of as oral "literatures" but also (following work by Milman Parry and Albert Lord) the classical Greek culture of Homer--the notion of an author does not exist in anything like the form that gives it its importance in most traditional literary criticism. Rather, "authorship" exists in such societies, if at all, within conventions of communal improvisation and formulaic composition; and it is only with a transition to literate societies, especially with print literacy (see Eisenstein), that the modern category of an author fully emerges.Third, there are issues of readerships. Reading is not simply a matter of interpretation based on a presumable physical and cognitive process but a socially formed and very unevenly distributed set of skills and conventions. Limits on the historically constituted readerships for literature--crucial for any socially based theory of reader response--are set by social patterns of literacy, differing massively between societies and periods. It is the main contribution made by ideas of orality and literacy to consideration of these three unresolved questions of literary criticism and theory that the terms connect works of "literature" with their broadest contexts of production and reception. Yet it is only recently, and in a relatively small number of critical works, that orality and literacy have been acknowledged as important structuring concepts in literary and cultural history (for a survey, see Ong).At its simplest, the term "orality" describes a condition of society in which speaking and listening form the only or principal channel through which communication in language takes place. By far the majority of languages in the history of the world, and most languages in use today, are used primarily "orally" in this sense. (It has been estimated, for example, that only about 3 percent of all extant languages have "literatures," in even the most general sense.) The term "literacy," by contrast, describes the condition of societies in which reading and writing, based on the technology of a given writing system and possibly linked to technical modes of storage, transmission, and reproduction such as printing, postal systems, telegrams, and so on, form a channel through which communication in language takes place alongside speaking and listening. When used to describe individuals, as the term commonly is, "literacy" describes a set of skills of reading and writing (and so contrasts in this sense not with "orality" but with "illiteracy"). Notice immediately that orality and literacy do not form a symmetrical binary opposition. Orality exists very often without literacy; but wherever there is individual or collective literacy, there is also orality--literate societies involve a mix of the written and read with the spoken and heard; and the term "functional penetration" is used to characterize the range of roles or tasks generally performed in a society or period through reading and writing (e.g., for receipts, diaries, checks, etc.). The two realizations of language (speech and writing) are also acquired differently. Orality is the result, except in pathological cases, of a universal process of language acquisition in humans that requires little or no formal instruction--though it can be trained toward specialized, conventional capabilities in oral societies, such as memorization and formulaic narration (as has been shown in detail by Finnegan, Goody and Watt, Lord, Ong, Parry, and others). Literacy, on the other hand, is only acquired through a conscious, deliberate process of learning to read and write, usually in formal, educational situations.Given an idea of literacy as a scale of skills that are progressively developed, the question immediately arises how much you need to be able to read and write to be described as literate. In historical studies, mere signatures have often been taken as an index of literacy. In contemporary educational programs, on the other hand, specially constructed tasks (often based on an essay-text principle rather than on signs, lists, business records, signatures, or labels) are widely used to define "functional literacy," which is characterized in turn, by literacy-promoting organizations such as UNESCO, with regard to one or more of the following considerations: some estimate of a desirable degree of democratic participation in a given society's political processes; some idea of employability, within increasingly technical and complex industrial processes; or some concept of educated consumerism or reachability by complex legal and administrative procedures. Calculating on the basis of definitions of functional literacy such as these, C. A. Anderson has suggested (influentially but also controversially) that 40 percent literacy in a population signals a readiness for economic take-off in development terms (though Anderson does not make clear what level of "literacy" is required or what precisely "economic take-off" means). More generally, definitions of functional literacy are abstracted from educational processes as a whole and are used to shape more specialized literacy programs, as well as being used in other areas of economic and political planning.Major consequences have been claimed to follow from the distinction between orality and literacy (though critical commentators such as Levine and Street have challenged the theoretical bases of work along these lines). Stylistically, for example, there are evident contrasts between communications in speech and ones in writing. In spoken texts, there is likely to be less syntactic embedding, less use of explicit connectives, greater dependence on nonverbal contextual clues, and more use of fillers and repetition than in written texts. Extrapolating from such stylistic contrasts to speculate about the psychodynamics of members of cultures with access to only spoken traditions (though again, there is some doubt about how much idealization is involved in finding a purely "oral" culture today), the anthropologist Jack Goody and others have suggested that the distinction between orality and literacy should replace earlier cultural "great divide" distinctions such as those between primitive and civilized, or prelogical and logical, societies. Goody and Ian Watt propose, in fact, that the distinction between oral and literate should mark the boundary between the fields of anthropology (which would study oral societies) and sociology (which would study literate societies), taking this view from the idea that literacy creates a new relationship for any individual to language and determines modes of thought and social organization (rather than taking cognitive differences, as was commonly done in earlier, more evidently ethnocentric anthropology, to be the result of innate differences between ethnic groups). For Goody and Watt, written language (unlike spoken language) can be kept stable for scrutiny on the page and scanned forward and backward, so facilitating large-scale arguments and discussion, including complex logical derivations such as sequences of syllogisms (hence, for many commentators, the significance of the emergence of logic in Greece roughly coincidentally with the earliest use of a phonetic-alphabetic script that, unlike its Semitic antecedents, defined vowel values as well as consonants).Relatedly, it has been claimed that literacy removes the magic or ritualistic properties of language characteristic of oral societies and makes possible a new degree of abstraction and objectivity, as well as greater historical accuracy (compared with oral histories and genealogies, which place less emphasis on historical record than on current relevance). More generally, literacy is taken to encourage skepticism, in the sense of doubt about and disagreement with the established, communal wisdoms of a culture, and is therefore believed to promote social change. From the perspective of literate societies, literate forms (as well as literate people) are consequently assumed to be of higher cultural status than oral ones (a social prestige contrasting with the different privileges Jacques Derrida claims are attributed to speech: that of being closer to thought and images of immediate self-presence and, since writing is a largely secondary system modeled on speech, that of being taken, in the twentieth century at least, as the proper subject of linguistic investigation).Underlying such arguments over how far it is reasonable to assume that the distinction between orality and literacy determines individual modes of thought and directions of social change is a contrast between two viewpoints: an "autonomous" view of literacy (see Goody), which describes literacy as a complex of skills that do not carry any particular ideological load and are isolable from political structures and social formations, causing kinds of social change; and an "ideological" view of literacy (see Street), which suggests that the skills and applications of literacy always exist within a particular social matrix of goals, ideologies, and distributions of social roles, such that "literacy" itself is only an instrument of other, determining social and political forces and is never an autonomous agent. (These two views are usefully compared in Street and Levine.) Developing, in both theory and practice, one of the most influential versions so far of an "ideological" view of literacy, the Brazilian educationalist Paolo Freire has rejected any distinction in a given social situation between communicative means (reading and writing) and the content of the material to be communicated. Instead, he connects reading the word with reading the world, to create programs directed toward "emancipatory literacy," that is, programs that emphasize using vernacular languages rather than imposing colonial "standard" languages in postcolonial countries and that seek to develop critical skills of analysis of the political formations in which reading and writing are required. As a further objective, such programs seek also to stimulate cultural development, through affirmation of local and class history and cultural forms. In linking the reading of texts with the reading of social and political values in this way, literacy programs such as Freire's have something in common with much structuralist pedagogy and with critical discourse analysis, which both also focus on enlarged definitions of "literacy" in which it is used to mean a capability to decode texts closely linked to an ability to form critical perspectives not only on sign systems but also on the social structures that give rise to them.In recent years, arguments over orality and literacy have been recognized to have taken on an added importance, as a result of the changing shapes of literacy and massive extensions in the use of modern communications media. Ong, for example (in Orality and Literacy and elsewhere), has proposed the term "secondary orality"--by contrast with his "primary orality"--to describe skills needed to cope with such transitions- a new kind of communications literacy that involves, in a changing mix with established literate modes, new and specialized understanding of the adapted, "oral" systems used in radio, telephones, audio recording, television, and film. The large-scale social consequences of such a transition into "secondary oral" societies have been widely discussed, not only by Ong but also, more celebratedly, by Marshall McLuhan, especially in Understanding Media (see McLuhan's concept of "rear-mirrorism," or the tendency of new communications media to carry over forms initially from established communications systems until specific, new forms develop).What emerges most clearly from current discussions of this contemporary transition, apart from the increasingly metaphorical way in which the term "literacy" is used, is a breakup within traditional ideas of literacy from one, supposedly isolable and autonomous set of reading and writing skills into a range of more specialized and contextually determined understanding and communications skills that suggest a range of new kinds of literacy: television literacy, computer literacy, political literacy, and so on. Some combination of these skills is recognized to be necessary for life in "information societies" of the future. But current argument is still entangled, not only over the extent to which what Goody has called "technologies of the intellect" can cause kinds of social change but also over what kind of participation in societies of the future is being contemplated in any given practical initiative regarding the new literacies: more active democratic participation; subjection to increasingly remote and technically governed bureaucratic procedures; suitability for new kinds of employment; or passive accessibility, as consumers, to new modes of commercial advertising and publicity.

Wow!this is a heavy article to read and understand. However, it brings up new considerations to think about such as anthropology and how this is important to orality and literacy, politics and they play a very big role in orality and literacy, and just what you or I want to define literate as, or more importantly, what illiteracy is. Reading this article gave me new ideas and different ways to think about orality and literacy, yet what seems to be more important is, what does this involve and who does it involve.

Here are some terms and definitions that seem to be quite important and relevant to orality and literacy:
Semantics:
Main Entry: se·man·tics Pronunciation: si-'man-tiksFunction: noun plural but singular or plural in construction1 : the study of meanings: a : the historical and psychological study and the classification of changes in the signification of words or forms viewed as factors in linguistic development b (1) : SEMIOTIC (2) : a branch of semiotic dealing with the relations between signs and what they refer to and including theories of denotation, extension, naming, and truth2 : GENERAL SEMANTICS3 a : the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs; especially : connotative meaning b : the language used (as in advertising or political propaganda) to achieve a desired effect on an audience especially through the use of words with novel or dual meanings
Linguistics:
Main Entry: lin·guis·tics Pronunciation: li[ng]-'gwis-tiksFunction: noun plural but singular in construction: the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language
Socialinguistics:
Main Entry: so·cio·lin·guis·tics Pronunciation: -tiksFunction: noun plural but singular in construction: the study of linguistic behavior as determined by sociocultural factors
Phonemics:
Main Entry: pho·ne·mics Pronunciation: -miksFunction: noun plural but singular in construction1 : a branch of linguistic analysis that consists of the study of phonemes2 : the structure of a language in terms of phonemes- pho·ne·mi·cist /-m&-sist/ noun
Phonemes:
Main Entry: pho·neme Pronunciation: 'fO-"nEmFunction: nounEtymology: French phonème, from Greek phOnEmat-, phOnEma speech sound, utterance, from phOnein to sound: any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds (as the velar \k\ of cool and the palatal \k\ of keel) which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language
Language:
Main Entry: lan·guage Pronunciation: 'la[ng]-gwij, -wijFunction: nounEtymology: Middle English, from Old French, from langue tongue, language, from Latin lingua -- more at TONGUE1 a : the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community b (1) : audible, articulate, meaningful sound as produced by the action of the vocal organs (2) : a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings (3) : the suggestion by objects, actions, or conditions of associated ideas or feelings (4) : the means by which animals communicate (5) : a formal system of signs and symbols (as FORTRAN or a calculus in logic) including rules for the formation and transformation of admissible expressions (6) : MACHINE LANGUAGE 12 a : form or manner of verbal expression; specifically : STYLE b : the vocabulary and phraseology belonging to an art or a department of knowledge c : PROFANITY3 : the study of language especially as a school subject
Syllogisms:
Main Entry: syl·lo·gism Pronunciation: 'si-l&-"ji-z&mFunction: nounEtymology: Middle English silogisme, from Middle French, from Latin syllogismus, from Greek syllogismos, from syllogizesthai to syllogize, from syn- + logizesthai to calculate, from logos reckoning, word -- more at LEGEND1 : a deductive scheme of a formal argument consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion (as in "every virtue is laudable; kindness is a virtue; therefore kindness is laudable")2 : a subtle, specious, or crafty argument3 : deductive reasoning- syl·lo·gis·tic /"si-l&-'jis-tik/ adjective- syl·lo·gis·ti·cal·ly /-ti-k(&-)lE/ adverb
Logos:
Main Entry: Lo·gos Pronunciation: 'lO-"gäs, -"gOsFunction: nounInflected Form(s): plural Lo·goi /-"goi/Etymology: Greek, speech, word, reason -- more at LEGEND1 : the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world and often identified with the second person of the Trinity2 : reason that in ancient Greek philosophy is the controlling principle in the universe
Mythos:
Main Entry: my·thos Pronunciation: 'mi-"thOs, -"thäsFunction: nounInflected Form(s): plural my·thoi /-"thoi/Etymology: Greek1 a : MYTH 1a b : MYTHOLOGY 2a2 : a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the characteristic or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture3 : THEME, PLOT

Literature= litterae=Latin:
Main Entry: lit·er·a·ture Pronunciation: 'li-t&-r&-"chur, 'li-tr&-"chur, 'li-t&(r)-"chur, -ch&r, -"tyur, -"turFunction: nounEtymology: Middle English, from Latin litteratura writing, grammar, learning, from litteratus1 archaic : literary culture2 : the production of literary work especially as an occupation3 a (1) : writings in prose or verse; especially : writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest (2) : an example of such writings b : the body of written works produced in a particular language, country, or age c : the body of writings on a particular subject d : printed matter (as leaflets or circulars) 4 : the aggregate of a usually specified type of musical compositions
etymolgy:
Main Entry: et·y·mol·o·gy Pronunciation: -jEFunction: nounInflected Form(s): plural -giesEtymology: Middle English ethimologie, from Latin etymologia, from Greek, from etymon + -logia -logy1 : the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language2 : a branch of linguistics concerned with etymologies- et·y·mo·log·i·cal /-m&-'lä-ji-k&l/ adjective- et·y·mo·log·i·cal·ly /-k(&-)lE/ adverb
Anthropology:
Main Entry: an·thro·pol·o·gy Pronunciation: "an(t)-thr&-'pä-l&-jEFunction: nounEtymology: New Latin anthropologistogia, from anthrop- + -logia -logy1 : the science of human beings; especially : the study of human beings in relation to distribution, origin, classification, and relationship of races, physical character, environmental and social relations, and culture2 : theology dealing with the origin, nature, and destiny of human beings- an·thro·po·log·i·cal /-p&-'lä-ji-k&l/ adjective- an·thro·po·log·i·cal·ly /-ji-k(&-)lE/ adverb- an·thro·pol·o·gist /"an(t)-thr&-'pä-l&-jist/ noun
Social Anthropology:
Main Entry: cultural anthropologyFunction: noun: anthropology that deals with human culture especially with respect to social structure, language, law, politics, religion, magic, art, and technology -- compare PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Physical Anthropology:
Main Entry: physical anthropologyFunction: noun: anthropology concerned with the comparative study of human evolution, variation, and classification especially through measurement and observation -- compare CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Well thats about enough for now, this gives everyone something to think about and learn about. Cindy

#2

2005-01-19T09:54:00.000-08:00

Class was directed today by Corey a Graduate student and she did an excellent job. Her class was interesting and lively and I have 3 pages of notes. This class is going right along with my Grammar for Teachers with Kirk Branch, which is about languge and the transmission of literacy, grammar and usage, and interation of learner and envirionment. Cindy

# One

2005-01-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

Here is my journal for Oral Traditions. I have already started to read for the class and I can see that the "persona's" we did in Lit. Crit with Sexson, or at least my persona Julia Kristeva, is going to help with understanding this class. Much of the theorists that we looked at have a large role to play in language. The semionics, structuralists, and deconstructionists that many of us had to research we will meet again in this class, or at least "thier" work with lingusitics and the theories behind much of thier ideas will play an important role. Cindy