Does Writing Change Consciousness? COML 509 Reflections on a New World Example
Has writing changed consciousness?
It’s a fascinating idea. Does the very fact that writing forces one to crystallize a concept and translate into a form that can be communicated make it more viable? Or does it lessen its value? The fact that it has to be converted from a product of consciousness, may well dilute its essence.
I remember a colleague once saying that an idea is essentially worthless unless it can be articulated. I always wondered if that was too harsh, that the emotional and mental pictures floating in my head about various topics were of no value because I could not spell them out on command in a manner that was easily digested by anyone else. I think the ability for those ideas to be communicated might certainly add to their value. I doubt their captivity in my head makes them any less viable, but I suppose it does make them different.
Earlier in our discussions, something I learned as a kid about the great Cherokee leader Sequoyah came to mind. Much of his tribe’s cultural history, language, traditions, and stories, were in danger of disappearing with their ancestral lands until his development of the Cherokee syllabary. It became a tribal language alphabet and a tool that ultimately save the identity of an entire nation of people. Did the development of the syllabary and the ability to literally “see” the Cherokee language lessen the value of the language? I would say no. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it enriched the language by giving it another avenue. Did a written language alter the consciousness of the Cherokee people? Perhaps.
Father Walter Ong writes:
“Without writing. the literate mind would not and could not think as it does.”
He says writing, and print in particular has a vatic quality. “The author might be challenged if only he or she could be reached, but the author cannot be reached in any book. There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before. This is one reason why ‘the book says’ is popularly tantamount to ‘it is true’.
Not long after the development of the syllabary, in the 1820’s, the Cherokee Phoenix , a bilingual newspaper began publication. The news of the day, written in statements of fact. It was seen then as another example of the Cherokee adopting more of the European culture being imposed upon them. Was that an example of altered consciousness? The adoption of a written language and publication was not the end of the Cherokee’s European cultural assimilation.
Within their newly established boundaries, the Cherokee took the lead in adopting Euro-American ways in the early nineteenth century, establishing schools and a bicameral tribal legislature. In the 1820s, the Cherokee Sequoyah invented a syllabary that enabled his people to read and write in their own language, and a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, soon began publication. Cherokee men and women took up farming of cotton, flax, and livestock, and engaged widely in trade with whites. Some Cherokees even built columned plantation houses and bought slaves. Historians have referred to this period of recovery as the "Cherokee renaissance."
http://uncpress.unc.edu/nc_encyclopedia/cherokee.html
Did the Cherokee consciousness change? It had to. After all, the whole nation was still reeling from decades of disease, war, and relocation. Sequoyah’s syllabary was not likely the sole reason for the change, but the adoption of a written language does stand out in history as turning point toward tribal survival.
References:
Ong : Writing Restructures Consciousness
from Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong, Methuen, 1982
University of North Carolina Press
http://uncpress.unc.edu/nc_encyclopedia/cherokee.html
posted by Jay Rickerts @ 5:32 PM
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