ABSTRACT

A deeper understanding of pristine or primary orality enables us better to understand the new world of writing. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. Writing establishes what has been called 'context-free' language or 'autonomous' discourse, discourse which cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can be because written discourse has been detached from its author. Writing, and even more print, has some of this vatic quality. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. Plato was thinking of writing as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of the computer.