Voice Week 1: Walter Ong, "Word as Sound"

For our first response writing in the comp topics course on voice that I'm taking, we were asked to explicate one or two of the theorists we read this week—namely, Bakhtin (speech genres), Foucalt (on enunciative modalities), Barbara Johnson (on Derrida's critique of Logocentrism in Western metaphysics), Walter Ong ("Word as Sound") or J.L. Austin ("How To Do Things With Words").

I chose to write about Walter Ong, in which I see some threads related to the Johnson piece on Derrida.  Johnson writes that the spoken word's immediacy and "perfectly self-present meaning"is a privileged ideal of Western metaphysics that Derrida critiques, giving us the classic postmodern term  Logocentrism. While I'd hesitate to characterize Ong as logocentric in his thinking—given his characterizing of literate societies as those that allow for a fuller development of interiority and individualism, and better able to cope with and think through the pressures that cause anxiety and confusion—Ong writes about Derrida's idea of the immediacy of the spoken word. That is, Ong notes that the spoken word has the potential to enable more powerful communication than the written word because of its close proximity to action ("Words in an oral-aural culture are inseperable from action for they are always sounds" [20]), obvious and self-made context, ability to convey a sense of presence, and its ability to reveal interiors, as well as relate between interiors in other beings and objects.


Particularly with regard to his writing about voice and presence, interiority, and auditory synthesis, Ong's treatment of voice is difficult to extract from an awareness of embodiment and materiality. Much of his analysis of the power and potentiality of the voice is linked to its physical production and resonance in bodies (both animate and inanimate); sound, he writes, “reveals the interior without the necessity of physical invasion…[it] reveals interiors because its nature is determined by interior relationships” (23). Citing the example of a violin, he argues for the importance of material interiority and awareness of embodied realities noting that filling the cavity of the violin with water or concrete (CRINGE!) would change not only the physical conditions of the violin’s interior, but the sound the instrument produces.

Sound gives us access to these interiors and also allows us to bare them to others (e.g., the sonar of porpoises apprehends such interior materialities through resonance); in fact, Ong writes that “communication is more inwardness than outwardness” (26), by which I suppose he means that even though we might think of communication as turning outward to reach others, the communication actually comes from within, making it an interior act in actuality. Sound, writes Ong, “binds interiors to one another as interiors” (27).

The last point I will address: Ong also claims sound carries more potential for multiplicty and simultaneity, contrasting it with the visual, which is more linear/sequential and less immediate (set in front of man). Sound, Ong writes, is about unity: one cannot selectively filter the sound in the surrounding environment from one’s hearing, but instead must listen to the entire cacophony at once. Because of this wholeness, Ong writes, sound resists synthesis, an analytic act of fragmentation that seeks to examine pieces of the whole one at a time in a sequential manner. I wonder, though, how color might disrupt some of these comparisons and contrasts between sound and the visual.