"To See What Is In Front of One's Nose..." Part I

Writing, Water, and Secondary Orality

N.B. I apologize for the nature of this essay, and its tardiness. It has two problems. One, I’m a little out of practice and the essay attempts too much. Two, it was written during a very difficult week for my family, which is also why it’s a day late. If it were just the former, I would have reorganized it and split it into three or four interconnected essays instead of just two. But that wasn’t possible given the second problem. However, I made a commitment to you. That commitment entails risk and sometimes failure. I appreciate the opportunity to fail for you.

Written media are not all the same. A sentence here in a Substack newsletter is different than a sentence there, say, in a book of essays. This is a little strange, though, isn’t it? After all, why wouldn’t they be interchangeable? The morphologies are the same, the denotations and connotations don’t change whether they’re pixels or print, or print available as pixels. They would seem to be fungible. Why wouldn’t an essay (nominally) about Orwell read the same here as it would in a printed anthology, or The Hedgehog Review? Such an essay published amidst other essays on totalitarianism wouldn’t immediately be suspected of cliche, but an essay here, in this format, with a title like mine, and a reference to Orwell in the subheading? That’s a heavier lift. Let’s talk about why and the implications of that why.

For starters, I’m not merely talking about social status.¹ Everyone understands the value and prestige that attends acceptance by an exclusive group, from the Ivy League to your church’s parish council. Recognition via the promotion of one’s articulations, written or otherwise, bears weight. This happens on social media when someone famous boosts someone anonymous. It happens when a publication accepts your work. It’s a deep pleasure to be seen by those with social status when we also recognize the value of that social status.

This clarification is important, the “recognize the value of” part.² I’m not being pedantic. The surge of validation is relational. And it’s a very, very messy relation, not at all limited to academic standards and social media heraldry. I’m thinking of the pleasure of hate, the pleasure of owning people,³ star-fucking, the craving to be seen triumphant over those we disdain by those we disdain, schadenfreude, etc. This isn’t irrelevant to the discussion, but it’s a branch I’ll explore later. For now I’d like to contemplate its form.

There are the structural differences between social media posts—the vast majority of which are written⁴—and something like an essay. Length is an obvious one, but that’s not the only thing. Speed is a factor, how quickly the written artifact can be made. There’s also how easily it can be shared, via email or app versus physical distribution. Then there’s the likely disjunction between the appearance of spontaneity and its reality. Social media, especially video, often has the appearance of being unrehearsed even though it is often heavily edited.⁵ Essays, on the other hand, can’t really appear unrehearsed in the same way. An “unrehearsed” essay is probably just a bad essay. The medium itself implies negotiation, between the author and the language, author and audience, audience and language. And more esoterically between the author and the self.

When writing or editing an essay there is a congress of interlocutors. “Is this what I mean to say? Is this what I mean? How will people take this? Is this clear? Wait, what did I mean here? What does this mean? Where did this come from? Is this what I actually think?” In many ways, the essay can’t exist qua essay without this negotiation taking place.

There is another element too. And I’m not sure what to call it. But it’s alchemical. The interpersonal essay, the poem, transmutes time. Synchrony and diachrony enzymatically illuminate one another—reader, writer, self—even across vast distances and irreconcilable differences. A third space emerges out of this relationship. One that is dependent upon, yet transcends the thing itself. This is different from social and visual media which are artifacts of time. Remainders of its passage. This is why home movies are always tinged with melancholy, and social media is readily objectified by symbolic culture. An essay can only be objectified if it is vivisected into memetic morsels.

Social media isn’t just fast, however. As an object it is ephemeral yet endlessly repeatable. This endlessly repeatable ephemera is not altogether different from ritual, which also occupies an endlessly repeatable discrete frame. And like ritual, social media creates a kind of hypereality that feels more real than the original.⁶ If this idea sounds familiar it’s because you’ve either read or been exposed to Jean Baudrillard’s work⁷, or because you’ve watched The Matrix like twenty times, which I definitely haven’t done… Anthropologists and scholars who study this kind of media call it “secondary orality.”

Secondary orality is a play off of the well-known distinction between literate and pre-literate, or oral cultures. Given how saturated the contemporary world is in writing, it’s difficult to keep in mind that literate cultures are only about 5,000 years old. Writing first got going in the Fertile Crescent and along the Nile, more or less around the same time (about 3,200 BCE), and then caught on in the Gangetic plain, and the Yellow River after that, 2,600 and 1,500 respectively.

That may sound like a long time ago, and it is compared to a contemporary nation’s lifespan, but it is less than 5% of the (approximately) 100,000 years we’ve been in the business of producing symbolic culture. Furthermore, for most of that 5,000 year history, writing was the purview of economic and cultural elites. We tend to remember the priestly class and the poets when we think of our literate ancestors, but it was the bean counters who first learned to read and write. They were primarily preoccupied with inventory and exchange. Who owned what and whom? How many oxen for that gaggle of slave girls? Etc. Writing was special. It was an artifact of social power and it conferred social status.

But this was a belated tool. For most of our time on this planet our species has produced oral cultures. We had no paper, no books, no tablets, no reeds, and certainly no screens. It was just bison, and raptors, and wild horses, and jungle cats, and people strung about the earth in long attenuated trade networks, swapping jewelry, bowls, spears, and stories along the Danube and the Mississippi, along the Ganges and the Nile. It’s an open question how far back oral culture reaches into our past. Above I mentioned 100,000 years because that’s generally agreed upon, but archaeologists have found evidence of red ochre production in Kathu Pan, located in South Africas Northern Cape, as far back as 500,000 years ago. That’s right in the middle of the Acheulean tool making cultures, when Homo Erectus was learning to cook with fire and tend to their sick.

What did they need to paint red? How did they decide who got the ochre, when and where was it used? There probably weren’t any permits for it, but I bet the hominid who harvested it wasn’t too happy when his teenage son used it to paint his favorite boom-boom stick. “Get your own hematite, Groog-wiks!”

That means that oral culture is the submerged part of the iceberg that is the history of human cultures. It’s the 90% we don’t see when we’re sifting through the historical record, or parsing the political implications of the populist turn, or critiquing the history of colonialism. In Freudian terms, it’s the vast subconscious apparatus that drives our symbolic productions. For hundreds of thousands of years oral culture, as the primary form of non-biological adaptation, also mediated our relationship to ourselves, not just each other. You’re swimming in it right now and have been as long as you’ve been a you to swim. “This is water,” as David Foster Wallace said, and it’s hard to see it because of that. And it’s not just you, or us, it’s an ocean that encompasses our whole race. From Adam to Armageddon it will always be all of all of it.

So that’s orality, but what is “secondary orality?”⁸ It’s a written artifact with oral characteristics that, most importantly, only emerges from literate cultures. Secondary orality is a consequence of mass media, industrial apparatus, digital infrastructure, all of which require the technology of writing to exist. Its form is literate, but its function is oral. Let me say that again, its function is oral. It’s a manifestation of the 90% that is very, very hard to see because we’re in it and of it. And our fundamental confusion about what social media is, what modern media culture is, what the New York Times is, what Fox News is, what politics is, makes most intellectual commentary on our present moment an unselfconscious organ of the very oral culture it is attempting to analyze. Writing doesn’t necessarily transcend the hurly-burly rush of the everyday when it is instrumental to it. It has to be made to do that.

Next time we’ll figure out how together by exploring how Orwell helps us separate writing from writing.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

1. Social status is (almost) always part of the equation. It’s why science is corruptible and expertise is too often unreliable. This is a problem that can never finally be solved, but must be managed.

2. Endlessly recursive relational cognition is fundamental to certain flavors of continental philosophy, including the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Emmanuel Levinas. An area of rich insight that has found its way into existential psychotherapy, it grapples with the chicken-egg/self-other conundrum that is often left out of Western theories of the self. South Asian theories of self don’t have this issue, as the subject was treated seriously by Nāgārgjuna (2nd century CE) and Buddhaghosa (5th century CE) amongst many others. These theories, like their mathematical progeny, take the fundamental problem of 0 seriously.

3. Volney Gay’s, On The Pleasures of Owning Persons: The Hidden Face of American Slavery, is an immensely rewarding book. Gay uses psychoanalytic literary analysis to explore the titillating perversion that defined the master slave relationship in the United States. It is a very small step from there to the realization that slavery has been a pleasure for thousands of years. Think of the complexity of relations between the Mamlūk (military slaves) or Jāriya (female concubines) and their Sayyid (master) in the Umayyad caliphate, or the prevalence of dominant and submissive fantasy. Given the research, it is very likely that most of the readers of this essay actively participate in BDSM fantasy, if not pornographic consumption. This is deeply relevant to the history of slavery. It’s not all racism and cotton balls.

4. According to ChatGPT 85-90% of posts contain writing, and 30-40% are exclusively written. We shouldn’t take its word for it, but it passes the sniff test. If social media were a baked good, writing would be the dough, and all the other media, both video and audio, would be the inclusions that provide texture.

TikTok is a solid counter-example, however. It uses a great deal of written media in the form of subtitles and comments, but it is clearly secondary to the medium, even more so than Instagram.

5. The appearance of spontaneity is a proxy for authenticity. The sociologist Erving Groffman did a lot to open up the constructed nature of authenticity, which I find far more useful than the unitary critiques that emerge from Foucault, et al. Unitary critiques are the postmodern line that we lack a single authentic self, and that the quest to express our “authentic” self is a capitalist Ponzi scheme that poorly imitates the belief in an immortal pristine, divinely engendered soul, most powerfully argued by Tertullian. Goffman’s dramaturgical model of the self, on the other hand, correctly identifies our performative natures both in public and private. In his model the self is a sympathetic mimesis of our experience of living in the world with others. It isn’t a delusion or an error, or a power relation. It’s a creative feedback loop that improvises on the material at hand.

6. I don’t want to take this idea too far. Social media isn’t the same as ritual, but it might serve the same function in a complex society. After all, it seems to excel at arranging the moral order of those who participate in it. It seems to help large bodies of strangers cohere. It helps transmit knowledge. They seem to bear similar fruit.

7. Simulacra and Simulation, 1981 is probably his most well known book. Baudrillard was part of the troupe of continental philosophers in the late twentieth century carrying on the work of a priestly class, who in a previous age, contemplated the immateriality of human agency amidst the awful grandeur of an omnipotent God. They were doing all of this in a secular context, of course. And most would probably throw up in their mouths a little bit to be described as such, but I’d defend the characterization amongst an army of postmodernists.

Anytime you witness a continental philosopher rhapsodizing about semiotics—that is the study of signs (i.e. repositories of meaning)—they are perched upon the same lightning scorched aery Gregory of Rimini and Thomas Bradwardine were perched upon in the 14th century. These are real questions to be sure. How do we reconcile our apparently volitional choice of breakfast cereals with a vast system of representation and capital that turns wheat into frosted flakes? Every question is serious if treated seriously. And I want people to live in a culture that supports men and women who are thinking about these apparent trivialities because they’re not trivial when viewed in the right light. I just want them, and us, to have a little more awareness of their lineage, and some gratitude for their contingency in a violent universe.

In terms intended to resonate with our time and place. Your plumber gets a vote in the culture wars, and you should respect it, because you can’t manage your own shit.

8. There’s a lot of good and not so good work that draws and expands on secondary orality, but the place to start is Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982). There’s also Marshall McLuhan’s, of “the medium is the message” fame, whose foundational work Understanding Media (1964) is endlessly cited if infrequently read.