As you might expect, the Media Ecology Association discussion list often turns to Ong and Ongian issues from time to time. Ken mentions one such recent discussion, and I’m posting here about another.

Martin Luther King, Jr. came up in a discussion of contemporary oral and literate discourse because he was “literate and oriented toward orality.” Someone else suggested that we can use the concept of bidialecticism to understand how “MLK could use orality to his advantage when he wanted to, and yet use the literate mode of discourse when he wanted to.”

While I completely agree that bidialecticism and the subsequent code-switching that comes with being bidialectical does explain in linguistic terms how we all move between such multiple forms of discourse, I was surprised by the idea that we would need to explain this phenomena, that it would be an orality-literacy issue. As the discussion developed over the period of a few days, I realized how and why this was an orality-literacy issue, and here, in revised form, is my belated post, which is offered not as a definitive statement but as a musing, as a probe in the McLuhanesque sense.

I’ve been musing over this discussion for a few days, and I’d like to offer some provisional thoughts, suggested as part of my personal ongoing process of developing a more fine-grained understanding of orality-literacy contrasts.

I’m wondering if we’ve reached the point in the study of orality-literacy contrasts where we need to start thinking not in terms of oral and literate modes of discourse so much as oral and literate noetics, both of which manifest themselves through a number of discourses, traditions, and registers.

We know now that there’s not just one kind of oral tradition or just one mode of oral discourse, and, likewise, we know that there’s not just one kind of literate discourse. The orality we find in MLK’s speeches and letters emerges from his training in the rhetorical traditions of ars predicandi and Western oratory, which are closely related and complementary Western rhetorical traditions but different traditions nonetheless. This orality is not the oral tradition of southern African American culture. (African American Vernacular English is not “oral” or “literate” any more than English, Arabic, French, or Mandarin are oral or literate — AAVE is a post-creole dialect of American English that has itself developed a continuum of sub-dialects.) [While I might be wrong in my understanding of the issue, subsequent posts seem to suggest that the bidialecticism of MLK being referred to in this discussion was that of the “orality” of African American Vernaccular English — that AAVE is a form of residual primary orality — and the “literacy” of “Standard English.”]

While the Western rhetorical tradition was an oral tradition, and while we equate classic examples of Western oratory such as MLK’s speeches as examples of orality, I can’t but help ask myself how much of its form is the result of residual oral noetic structures, how much of it is the result of an understanding of the media dynamics of oratory (the material affordances and constraints of the performance medium), and how much of it is the result of a desire to tap into a prestige discourse register in which MLK was trained. While the end result may be the same, the noetics of each are quite different.

Let me offer an example of what I mean. While the traditional use of proverbs in oral and highly residual oral cultures, what T. A. Shippey calls “proverbiousness” (that is, the proper understanding of how to use proverbs in discourse) is a holdover of the noetics of primary orality, the rhetorical figures of speech that often mark skilled oratory are noetically literate (that is, while emerging from oral tradition, Western rhetoric is a systematized discourse that is noetically literate, and the rhetorical figures of speech are consciously used by an orator or writer for effect, or because of the affordances of the medium, or both). This is, again, a noetic distinction. In the noetics of primary orality (or, at least, in the “primary orality” end of the noetic continuum), one practices a tradition because that is what one does — there is just tradition that evolves over time. In the noetically literate tradition of oratory, however, one consciously chooses to use the tradition of oratory because one wants to draw upon the tradition of oratory rather than upon other existing traditions.

This is, of course, is not to suggest that there is no choice within traditional orality (that is primary orality and primary residual orality). There is. (And, again, we need to recognize that primary orality would not have been monolithic any more than literate cultures and literate noetics are monolithic.) The difference I’m suggesting here is that one schooled in the literate tradition of oratory can have access to both oral and literate traditions.

So, while I agree that MLK is bidialectical, I believe we need to unpack what we mean by that. (I always think of this term as a misnomer because it means having the ability to use at least two dialects or varieties of a language rather than just two). Nearly all, if not all, of us are bidialectical. (Again, bidialecticism is the ability to move between different dialects, sociolects, registers, and varieties of a language. The orality of MLK’s oratory is not the orality of the Xhosa praise-poet or the Slavic gulsar. Nor is it the orality of the Mississippi sharecropper or the streets of Atlanta. While MLK could have and maybe did learn some of these oral traditions, they are not the orality we hear in his spoken and written orations.We need to be aware of and pay attention to the multiplicities that exist within orality and literacy; we need to remember that Ong’s study of orality-literacy contrasts is rooted in phenomenology, in the study of individual and cultural noetics; and we need to remember that orality-literacy contrasts is not the study of orality vs. literacy but the study of orality and literacy, the study of a ongoing, evolving continuum of noetic and cultural economies.

Again, I’m thinking outloud here and thoughts, comments, suggestions, are, of course, welcome.