murray jardine, sight, sound, and epistemology

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXIVII

Sight, Sound, AndEpistemology: theExperiential Sourcesof Ethical Concepts*MurrayJardine

&CHARD BERNSTEIN HAS RECENTLY argued that much of post-World War I1 thought can be understood as an attempt to get beyond thedualism of "objectivism and relativism." By objectivism, Bernstein meansroughly the idea that all acceptable knowledge must take the form of exact,impersonal, context-neutral "facts." Relativism is simply the flip side, orlogical conclusion, of objectivism, since if we take the objectivist modelof knowledge as our standard, we will eventually conclude that, since noknowledge claims meeting this standard can be found, there is no trueknowledge, or at least that rival knowledge claims are incommensurable.Objectivism has been the dominant epistemological model of modernity,and the relativism of late modernity is, as Bernstein sees it, the logical out-come of this paradigm (Bernstein).Ethically and politically, as the twentiethcentury has witnessed, objectivism has often resulted in hyperrationalistictechnocratic tyranny or, as it has deteriorated into relativism, destructiveirrationalistic nihilism (Spragens, MacIntyre). To a large extent, currentdebates in philosophy, theology, and related disciplines have been con-cerned, at least implicitly, with escaping the objectivist/relativist dichotomyby developingnew models of knowledge and new modes of discourse.Murray Jardine is visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803-5433. "This article is based o n the revision of a cha pter in the autho r's Speech and Political Practice (State University of New York Press, forthcoming); used here with the permission of SUNY Press.


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2 Journal of the American Academy of ReligionIn this essay I will sketch out one possible approach to this project byapplying the literature on the differences between oral and literate, andmore recently, electronic-image cultures.' This literature has many impor-tant implications for philosophy and theology but has received surpris-ingly little attention from writers in these fields2 I do not intend todiscuss it systematically, but I will employ some of its most basic find-ings. The crucial implication for my argument is that the heavily visualmodes of consciousness typical of literate and postliterate cultures canmake an objectivist paradigm highly probable. That is, in a literate cul-ture, objectivist conceptual frameworks are likely to manifest themselvesin many, often very subtle, ways. Hence, any attempt to escape the objec-tivistlrelativist dualism must address the question of the fundamentalsensory orientation of a culture and thus the experiential basis of its epis-temological assumptions and the ontological,ethical, and political vocabu-laries that those assumptions influence.I will apply this insight to recent discussions of the role of narrative inethical reasoning and practice. Narrative has been given considerableattention as an ethical model by theologians, philosophers, and politicaltheorists such as Stanley Hauenvas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and HannahArendt. If escaping objectivism implies, among other things, a partialredirection of our sensorium away from vision and toward the orallaural,then oral narrative traditions may contribute to such a reorientation, andin this sense narrative may be said to offer an epistemological alternativeto the dominant modern conception of knowledge.The discussion will have two main parts. First, I will briefly make thefirst argument introduced above, i.e., that a literatelvisual culture is likelyto conceive knowledge in objectivist terms. I will not pretend to give anexhaustive demonstration of this claim, since this would require a muchlonger discussion than space permits here, but I will attempt to show aplausible connection between literacy and objectivism. Then I will applythe argument to ethics by giving some examples of how a literate/objec-tivist framework has affected philosophical discourse and by sketchingvery roughly some ideas about how an oraVaura1 narrative orientationcould provide an epistemological basis for resolving some fundamental

The basic textbook in the field is Ong, 1982 . See also Ong 19 58 , 1967 , 1971, 19 77, 198 1. Nextto Walter J. Ong the best know n w riters in the field are probably Eric A. Havelock and Jack Goody.See Havelock 19 63 ,197 6,1 97 8,1 98 2,19 86 ;Goody 1 968,19 77, 1986 ,1987. Other sem inal worksin the field include Carothers: Lord; Boman; McLuhan.In g eneral, only a few scattered references exist in philosophical an d theological journals. Anexcellent treatment of Ongk work is Walhout, although this discussion focuses on broader issuesthan just oral-literate differences. Other recent works that apply this literature include Achtemeier;Conners; Crusius; Jun g; Kelber; Kurz; Lentz; Waugh; Wiebe.


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3ardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemologydilemmas in contemporary ethical theory and practice. My main pur-poses are to make scholars in such disciplines as philosophy and theol-ogy aware of some of the findings about oral-literate contrasts and toindicate one of their many possible applications.Essentially, I will argue that the superordination of visual experiencebrought about by literacy provides a very powerful experiential source forthe objectivist conception of acceptable knowledge. The crucial connec-tion between literacy and objectivism is that, with literacy, people tend totake objects in three-dimensional visual space as their model of what is"really real" and tend to regard other kinds of experience, and otherforms of knowledge, as derivative or even unreal. More specifically, withliteracy, people tend tacitly (or even explicitly) to conceive of reality as alarge but finite "text" and thus think that language gets its meaning bysomehow "corresponding" (at least when it is purged of the sloppinessand vagueness of everyday speech and usage) to this text, so that eachword has a specific, contextless "meaning-in-itself." This conception issometimes referred to as "language realism" and has its origins in Plato, atleast as he is conventionally interpreted.) Adequate knowledge consists inconstructing statements that correspond correctly to discrete states ofaffairs in the objective world (i.e., ones that correspond correctly to thetext). This, of course, is essentially what is entailed in the objectivist para-digm. Further, if such correspondence cannot be established, then, logi-cally, language cannot have meaning, and a relativistic stance toward thepossibility of knowledge ensues.Perhaps the single most important feature of objectivist modes ofthought, as critiqued by recent philosophers, is that objectivism attemptsto abstract knowledge from concrete contexts. This is the later Wittgen-stein's main point in his critique of his own earlier picture of language ascorrespondence. Similarly, revisionist philosophers of science havepointed out that one of the principal failings of positivism was its ten-dency to understand science in terms of the static, completed body ofknowledge making up classical mechanics rather than in terms of theactual process of scientific discovery at the leading edge of various scien-tific disciplines, which is to say that it attempted to understand knowl-edge abstracted from the context of discovery. Conversely, the variousattempts to construct a non-objectivist ethical paradigm, such as those ofMacIntyre and Hauenvas, all recognize the fundamental importance ofcontext. The central difference between oral and literatelvisual orienta-tions is the vastly greater capacity for abstraction from context broughtabout by literacy, illustrated paradigmatically by the correspondence the-ory of language mentioned above. Hence, by examining this principaldifference between oral and literate orientations I will argue that the


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4 Journal of the American Academy of Religionobjectivistlrelativist dualism may be something (at least partly) generatedfrom the heavily visual orientation produced by literacy. From this basicinsight it can be concluded that one way to begin to escape the objectivistparadigm and its inevitable relativist denouement is to redirect our sen-sory orientation away from vision and toward oraVaural experience, witha corresponding restructuring of our espistemological, ontological, ethi-cal, and political vocabularies. If this is our objective, it follows that oral(although perhaps not written) narrative traditions can be an importantmodel for and experiential source of such a reorientation. Both MacIntyreand Hauenvas have stressed that a recovery of morality and civility willrequire the formation of local communities informed by narrative tradi-tions. My argument gives an epistemological account of why or how suchcommunities could be successful-because, or to the extent that, theyactually do recover a sense of the oraVaural from the concrete practice ofdeveloping a narrative tradition, they can escape the experiential basis forthe objectivist paradigm that has destroyed our capacity to understandwhat morality is about.

I should note immediately that the above brief description may strikemany readers as counterintuitive, since the work of Jacques Derrida andothers has identified writing as something that breaks up, rather thancauses, an objectivist orientation. I shall discuss this matter briefly later inthe essay, but for now I will simply point out that scholars who havestudied oral-literate contrasts agree that, in this respect at least, Derridadoes indeed seem to be mistaken.Finally, before I begin a detailed discussion, I should mention that myexamination of oral and literate cultures and of the effects of literacy isquite simplified. Specifically, I have drawn mainly on the work of the firstgeneration of scholars in this area, represented by classicists MilmanParry, Alfred Lord, and Eric Havelock, anthropologist Jack Goody, andespecially literary critic Walter Ong, whose work in part has synthesizedthe main early lines of research. The earliest writers tended to emphasizequite sharply the differences between oral and literate cultures and to pre-sent the effects of literacy as a matter of linear causation. A second gener-ation of scholars has urged that the claims of Havelock, Goody, and othersneed to be qualified and has given considerable attention to the ways in

which oral and literate modes of communication intera~t.~or my limitedpurposes, however, the simpler model of the earlier writers is probablyadequate, partly because it will keep the discussion to a manageablelength, and partly because it will bring out most clearly my main points.See Graff 197 9, 19 87a, 198 7b; Cole an d Scribner; Scribner an d Cole; Finnegan; Street; Thomas.


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5ardine: Sight, Sound, and EpistemologyWhat follows, then, should be read with several caveats in mind.First, I am not claiming that literacy is the only source of objectivistthinking. Clearly there are many sources. Nevertheless, literacy can beregarded as an important source because it affects our thought processesin very subtle ways at very fundamental levels. Second, I am not arguingthat there is an inevitable chain of causation from literacy to objectivistthinking; literacy only makes objectivismprobable. That is, literacy createsan experiential context in which objectivist modes of thought becomemore likely. The arguments that follow are not intended to be interpreteddeterministically. Finally, the fact that I will emphasize some of the waysin which literacy can restrict our imaginations should not be taken as anindication that I want to romanticize oral cultures or advocate anythingso absurd as returning to a nonliterate state. My purpose is to point outsome potential limitations imposed on our thinking by literacy, so thatwe can be more aware of these limitations and use the knowledge thereofas a starting point for further reflection.

SOME SALIENT CHARACTERISTICS OF ORAL COMMUNICATION I have already indicated that literacy tends to superordinate visualexperience over oraVaura1 experience and in so doing can cause us tothink in the kinds of categories characteristic of objectivism. In fact, thisis a simplification. As Walter Ong points out, literate people do not usetheir eyes more than nonliterate people; people in "primitive" culturesare generally much better at visually detecting details than highly "civi-lized people. What is different is that writing, and particularly printing,

links a particular kind of visual experience to verbalization and commu-nication, a situation quite different from what prevails in oral cultures.Specifically, for the literate person, the relative stasis of the written orprinted word-its status as an object in three-dimensional space be-comes paradigmatic for visual experience, so that through vision thedynamism of the lifeworld can be stopped and subjected to detaileddescription and analysis. Nonliterate people, lacking the paradigm pro-vided by the written word, cannot abstract themselves from the life-world's dynamism, which results in the apparently paradoxical situationthat, although they usually are very good at noticing visual details, theyhave a very difficult time giving accurate verbal descriptions of visualphenomena. Hence, the fundamental difference between the oral and lit-erate noetic situations is the centrality of a particular mode of visual ex-perience for literate perception, communication, and thought processes(Ong 1967:49-50).


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9ardine: Sight, Sound, and EpistemologyoraVaura1 experience; the crucial aspect of this superordination is the waya particular aspect of vision is linked with verbalization. But even thissimplifies, since different types of literate media link vision and verbal-ization differently, or to different degrees. Early forms of writing, such ascuneiform or hieroglyphics, which employ picture-symbols, do this onlyto a limited extent. Pictographic writing systems such as these are not thesame thing as mere pictures, because a given picture could mean manythings or many words, whereas writing systems "determine the exactwords that a reader can generate from the text." But these writing systemsstill retain a great deal of the sound-dimension of words, because theymust represent each word with a picture of some concrete thing or eventthat exists or occurs in the oraVaura1 lifeworld, meaning that the meaningof the word can only be understood by fairly direct reference to its exis-tential context, which in turn means that words will still tend to beunderstood as events rather than signs or referents (Ong 1982: 83-93;Havelock 1976: 9-43).

The really fundamental change in this regard comes with the inven-tion of the alphabet, or, to be more exact, the Greek alphabet, which con-tains vowels as well as consonants. Since each letter represents only onesound (or at most a few related sounds) , rather than entire words, thecrucial connection with the oraVaura1 lifeworld is broken, or rather, dras-tically attenuated; a written word as written word has no obvious con-nection to anything in the lifeworld. With its connection to existentialevents broken, an alphabetically written word becomes a set of abstractsymbols in static, quasi-permanent space rather than a dynam ic event.The context, which is so important to oral communication and still rele-vant to pictographic writing and even syllabaries and the Semitic alpha-bet (which do not indicate vowels in the same way as the Greek alphabetdoes, and thus leave the identity of a given written word somewhatambiguous and therefore dependent on existential context), tends torecede greatly into the tacit or even unconscious background. Once thishappens, situational thinking will tend to be replaced by abstract think-ing , and modes of expression will be less closely linked to the lifeworldand more oriented toward abstractions. For exam ple, we have seen thatoral people inevitably understand the world (including nature) in per-sonal terms, since for them communication is always tied to an actuallyexistent, and present, person. Writing dissolves the immediate linkbetween a person and his or her words and thus allows the reader tounderstand words, and thus reality generally, in an impersonal fashion,i.e., abstracted from the personally spoken words that give reality mean-ing (Ong 1967: 166-169). At the same time, separated from actuallyexistent persons and locked into abstract visual space, words themselves


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10 Journal of the American Academy of Religioncan tend to take on a life of their own in a way they cannot in an oral cul-ture. Specifically, with literacy comes the possibility of what I earliertermed language realism, i.e ., the idea that reality is in som e way a largebut finite "text," and that language gets its meaning by somehow "corre-sponding" to this text. Such a correspondence or referential understand-ing of language would be quite unimaginable in an oral culture (Ong1982: 88-93, 101-103; 1967: 35-47; Havelock 1976: 22-50; Goody1968: 38-44).Ong gives a very useful illustration of the spatializing effects of thealphabet. The alphabet implies that words are present all at once, ratherthan in a dynamic fashion, that they "can be cut up into little pieces,which can even be written forwards and pronounced backwards: 'p-a-r-t'can be pronounced 'trap'." He continues: "If you put the word 'part' on asound tape and reverse the tape, you do not get 'trap', but a completelydifferent sound, neither 'part' nor 'trap"' (Ong 1982: 91). The game ofasking someone to "say 'part' backwards" would be unintelligible andunimaginable without alphabetic literacy Thus, with the alphabet comesa crucial step in bringing about the spatialization of language barelybegun with pictographic writing.

Another way to illustrate this point is to examine the claim sometimesmade in deconstmctive criticism that words "move around" in that theydo not unambiguously refer to or correspond to one thing. This claimmay seem at first to contradict the idea that literacy allows people to takethe relative stasis of the written word as a paradigm for visual experience.Clearly, however, to speak of words as "moving a ro u n d is to conceive of aword as an object in three-dimensional space, and the dynamism invokedis one of visual space, which is quite different from the dynam ism of theoraVaura1 world, where words are sound events in time that are alwayspassing into and out of existence. Hence, the claim that words movearound or that they "carry" an indeterminacy of meaning is parasiticalupon the relative stasis of the written word and the resulting capacity toconceive of a word as an object in three-dimensional space.The discussion so far has begun to indicate how the decontextualiza-tion brought about by literacy can be an important factor in bringingabout an objectivist orientation. The effects of literacy remain relativelylimited, however, as long as writing remains the most advanced methodof communication. There are several reasons for this. First, literacy itselfwill continue to be relatively limited. In societies where pictographicwriting systems are employed, very few people can learn to read andwrite because of the huge amount of time and effort necessary to learnthese complicated systems. The alphabet makes reading and writingmuch easier to learn, bu t as long as reading material remains in relatively


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11ardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemologyshort supply because it must all be produced by the slow process of writ-ing, much of the population will remain nonliterate and thus still tied tothe oral world. Further, the literate elements of the population willremain in contact with illiterates and thus in contact with the oral men-tality Also, the scarceness of written resources means that literates will inmany situations still use oral methods of dealing with the world (forexam ple, oral memory devices) rather than using writing for such pur-poses. Indeed, in a society with writing but no printing, literates retainmuch of the oral orientation even while using writing. Since writtenmanuscripts are frequently difficult to read, reading is normally donealoud, so it can be done slowly enough to decipher the text. Silent read-ing has only been generally cultivated since the advent of printing, withits uniform and easily readable texts. (We are all familiar with Augustine'swonderment at Ambrose's habit of reading silently) And, of course, read-ing aloud does not allow one to spatialize and decontextualize words asthoroughly as silent reading does. The retention of oral thought processesin a literate culture is referred to as "oral residue" and can be found eventoday in (socially or geographically) isolated areas of the most modemsocieties (Ong 1982: 93-101, 103-116; 1967: 53-63, 76-87).

Printing, then, is the final step necessary for the com plete triumph ofa literate mentality, and for reasons I have to some extent just indicated.It makes reading material readily available, thus encouraging universalliteracy and more general use of literate artifacts. This in turn can allowgreater accumulation of information through such things as encyclope-dias. The uniformity of printed items makes indexes possible, meaningthat inform ation can be found faster. (Indexes would make little sense ifonly written m anuscripts were available, since all the labor of creating anindex would have io be repeated for every single book produced.) Theaccumulation of information made possible by printing is the crucial stepin destroying the mnemonically-oriented features of an oral or partly oralculture . Knowledge can be remembered-or rather, stored--even whenit is abstracted from its existential context, so the highly contextual, for-mulaic, rhythmic, and narrative-oriented approach to knowledge charac-teristic of oral cultures tends to wither.

In terms of the perceptual effects discussed earlier, the uniformity ofprint also makes silent reading much easier and its elimination of per-sonal idiosyncrasies (i .e ., different writing styles) from the text decontex-tualizes words more relentlessly than ever, thus intensifying the crucialeffects of literacy already mentioned. The spatialization of language,begun by pictographic writing and accelerated by the alphabet, takes aquantum jump with printing. In terms of the history of Western culture,then , although classical Greece shows the definite effects of a significant


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12 Journal of the American Academy of Religionlevel of alphabetic literacy, it is not until after the invention of the print-ing press-indeed, some considerable time after this, as a significant oralresidue remains with even the most educated classes until the eighteenthcentury-that literacy exerts its full force on the Western mind (Ong1982: 117-135; 1967: 47-53, 63-76; Eisenstein).

In any case, by recognizing the extent to which various communica-tions media push us in the direction of a literatelvisual orientation, weshould now have a clearer idea of how literacy can facilitate the over-abstraction that may be the primary feature of objectivism. The essentialproblem is that a literate culture provides a subtly pervasive environmentof decontextualized knowledge, vocabulary, an d, most importantly, every-day visual experience that can cause us to forget context entirely. Althoughthe capacity for abstraction is in m any ways very enabling (since system-atic analysis of any kind requires a certain degree of abstrac tion, and itwould be impossible to do science without the abstraction involved in animpersonal vocabulary), it will become quite possible, if one's vocabularyhas been formed by intense immersion in the relatively decontextualizedexperience of a literate culture , to forget, when reflecting upon ourprocesses of thinking and know ing, that knowing takes place in a context.Indeed, in the extreme case, decontextualization can result in utter frag-mentation of knowledge and thus of the world. The literate world has atendency to become a jumble of mutually unconnected, reductively-conceived "facts."This is precisely the prime failing of objectivism. I havealready mentioned a specific example of this particular pitfall, the (explicitor tacit) language realism that results when one starts to imagine thatwords have a life of their own, i.e ., that they can be abstracted from thecontext of speech (or writing), som ething that can only happen to a liter-ate person. Similarly, such a high level of abstraction can cause us to com-mit the error discussed earlier of m istaking the impersonal vocabulary ofphysical science for an actual description of what the scientist is doingwhen he or she does science.

A particularly striking example of how subtle and pervasive this aspectof literate consciousness can be is given by anthropologistJack Goody. Wehave seen that oral cultures, for a variety of reasons, must locate knowl-edge in the context of narratives, formulaic saymgs, etc. Only with writing(and especially printing) can knowledge be abstracted from these contextsand converted into the forms of (relatively) context-neutral lists, tables,etc., which could never be remembered in oral form (Ong 1982: 33-36,57-62, 69-71). Anthropologists frequently attempt to understand thecosmologies and other beliefs of prim itive peoples by means of such tablesthat show correspondences between various elements of the tribal world-view. As Goody points out, however, tables, as literate artifacts, spatialize


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13ardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemologyknowledge and turn w ords into referents in ways that are quite foreign tothe nonliterate mind. Their use is thus likely to be misleading at best(Goody 1977: 52-73). The anthropologists here are suffering from a prob-lem comm on to all literate people: literacy so deeply imprints certain pat-terns in our thinking that we normally find them entirely "natural" andcan scarcely imagine anyone not thinking in these ways.By the nineteenth century, Western societies, or at least their dom i-nant elements, had become thoroughly visualist in orientation, duemainly to an almost exclusive reliance on writing and especially prin tingas means of communication. In the later nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies, however, a num ber of technological innovations-telephone,radio, and television being the most notable-have occured that mayhave increased the exten t to which Western culture relies on hearing forcommunication. This has prompted certain commentators, most notablyMarshall McLuhan, to argue that we are entering a new age of "sec-ondary" orality, which will recapture many of the elem ents of earlier "pri-mary" oral cultures.Ong and other writers have considerable doubts about this proposi-tion, for a number of reasons. First of all, the new sound-oriented mediaof communication themselves are products of a literate culture andrequire literacy and visual constructs generally to make them work.Indeed, many of the new electronic media, such as the computer, are notsound-oriented but work mainly through print. Second, the new types ofelectronic media actually increase our use of print and stored informa-tion, so that oral memory, such a fundamental feature of primary oralcultures, becomes even less important to us. Ong argues that the elec-tronic media of this century have actually increased to new levels ourvisual orientation (1982: 135-138; 1967: 87-92 , 256-260, 290-291,301-303), and, indeed, there is beginning to develop a literature whichargues that television, far from increasing our oral orientation, asMcLuhan thought, dramatically intensifies our visual orientation and isbringing about what might be best described as a postliterate visual cul-ture of images.As with the literature on oral-literate differences, a thorough discus-sion of the literature on electronic-image media is beyond the scope ofthis essay, but in term s of primary perceptual effects, the available evi-dence seems to strengthen, or perhaps extend, my thesis. Briefly, itappears that a postliterate visual orientation offers the worst of all pos-sible worlds-that is, it embodies the worst aspects of both oral and lit-erate cultures. Neil Postman poin ts out that as passively-received imagesreplace the text, which the reader must actively examine, analyticalcapacities decrease. At the same tim e, however, the capacity of television


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17ardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemologyof the relevant historical context. When Havelock analyzes various fea-tures of Plato's thought, e.g., the Forms, as products of an emerging liter-ate consciousness, he employs conventional interpretations of Plato. Hisinnovation consists in his thesis about the origns of the Forms in literateconsciousness, not in any new idea about what Plato meant by the Forms.Whether or not such interpretations are what Plato really intended, theyare the way literate people have understood him. Thus it can be con-cluded that, whatever Plato meant, the conventional interpretations ofhim show the effects of literacy on our thinking. What could be regarded,then, as the foundation of objectivist thinking, is, one way or another, atleast partly the product of literacy.

Mention of Plato's critique of writing can lead to an examination ofthe effects of literacy in contemporary attempts to escape objectivism.Since literacy tends to induce objectivism in subtle ways, we may actuallystill be thinking in objectivist terms precisely when we think we haveescaped such an orientation. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than inthe work of Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionists. Derrida's workattacks objectivism as it manifests itself in what he calls "logocentrism,"which corresponds closely to what I have termed language realism. Der-rida and other deconstructionists argue that the written (or printed) textbreaks down logocentrism by show ing the extent to which words do notunam biguously correspond to or refer to objects of some sort, sincewords in a text can take on many meanings or have many implications.Logocentrism itself, however, is, according to Derrida, derived from"phonocentrism," which takes the spoken word as in some way funda-mental and in some way corresponding or referring to objects. The West-ern philosophical tradition has made a fundamental error in debasingwriting compared to speech, thinks D errida, because a focus on writingcan break up such a referential conception of language in the mannerdescribed above.As Ong points out, however, "recent work on the orality-literacy contrasts . . . complicates the roots of phonocentrism and logo-centrism beyond the textualists' [i.e ., deconstructionists'] account"(1982: 167). Specifically, the description of the spoken word given byDerrida is one that only a literate person would hold ; nonliterate peopleattribute fundam ental importance to spoken words, but they understandthem as events or actions, not as referents of some sort.What Derrida calls phonocentrism results from projecting a literatelanguage realism onto the spoken word. That is, Derrida's criticism of theWestern philosophical tradition for taking the spoken, rather than thewritten, word as a model misses the poin t, because the philosophical tra-dition was actually taking the written word as a model and imputing its


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18 Journal of the American Academy of Religionproperties to the spoken word. Derrida's criticism of the philosophicaltradition-for focusing on the spoken word, because it supposedlyescapes the ambiguities of the written word-is misleading, becausewhile it is true that words spoken from one person to another are typi-cally less ambiguous than words written for no one in particular (Ong1982: 101-103), the notion that words could somehow correspondunambiguously to fixed objects is, as we have seen , very much a productof a literate consciousness and would be quite foreign, if not unintelli-gible, to the oral imagination. The philosophical tradition understood thespoken word as privileged over the written word precisely because itimputed to it the qualities of the written word.

Logocentrism causes phonocentrism, not the other way around , asDerrida thinks. As Ong puts it, "it would appear that the [deconstruc-tionist] critique of textuality . . . is still itself curiously text-bound. . . . [It]derives its appeal in part from historically unreflective, uncritical literacy"(1982: 168-169). What this means is that the deconstructionists havesuccumbed to objectivism just as they have thought they had escaped it.Another way to see this is to consider the deconstructionist notion thatbecause language is not characterized by ultimately unambiguous refer-ence, there must be an irreducible random or chaotic or ironic element toit. This conclusion only follows if one has already tacitly made the objec-tivist assum ption that either language must contain some kind of exactcorrespondence with reality or else it ultimately fails to have meaning.But if one drops this assumption, there are other possibilities. Languagecan have ultimate meaning without having some kind of translucent"correspondence" with "reality"These examples should at least suggest that not only has literacyplayed a principal role in forming the objectivist conception of knowl-edge and communication, but also that it has profoundly affected evenexplicit attempts to escape this framework. Hence, I believe the conclu-sion can be drawn that any attempts to escape the objectivist/relativistdichotomy, thus developing new modes of discourse which can beapplied to ethical life, must deal with the effects of literate and electronicmedia of communication on consciousness and must attempt, at least tosome extent, to recover aspects of an oral orientation . This conclusion, intu rn , implies that the recovery of narrative-or at least oral narrative-asa primary form of ethical discourse can be a very powerful tool for such areorientation-which is to say that narrative may well provide a non-objectivist epistemological paradigm for ethical and political theory andpractice. To illustrate this more concretely I will conclude by sketchingvery roughly one possible approach to this project.


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19ardine: Sight, Sound, and EpistemologyORALITY AND PLACE

We can gain an appreciation of what it might mean to use narrative asa means of reorienting our ethical vocabulary by considering the hum ansense of place. It is a common them e of twentie th-century social analysisthat whereas premodern people had a strong sense of place, i.e. , of hav-ing a location from which to orient themselves in the overarching func-tional order of the cosmos, in a particular geographical location, and inthe hierarchical social order, modern people are displaced and thus d is-oriented by the collapse of a sense of an ordered cosmos and by unprece-dented geographical and social mobility The collapse of the premoderncosmos and its attendant sense of place is itself in substantial measure theresult of modern objectivism, which discredits the ritualistic basis ofolder senses of place. It seems unlikely, however, that the ordered, hierar-chical cosmos of the past can be recovered, and, indeed, despite the dis-appointments of modernity, it seems unlikely that we would ever findsuch a recovery desirable.An alternative possibility for recovering a sense of place may reside incertain features of oraVaura1 experience. For example, MacIntyre's dis-cussion of narrative traditions is essentially, as he points out himself, anattempt to find a substitute for the functional cosmos that provides thecontext for Aristotle's ethical theory. And just as Aristotle's cosmos pro-vided a place for humans, the narratives discussed by MacIntyre also giveeach individual a conception of a place in the community An extremelyimportant difference, however, between MacIntyre's conception of narra-tive and Aristotle's cosmos, is that, while the classical cosmos is essen-tially static and unchanging, narratives are dynamic-a differencecorresponding, of course, to the differences between the written and spo-ken w ords. One possible direction, then, for contemporary ethical andpolitical theory would be to articulate the features of a sense of placegrounded in an oral narrative, i.e., to develop a conceptual vocabularyappropriate to the ethical and political place implied in being a memberof a narrative-based communityThe project adumbrated above would require a far more detailedexam ination of oraVaura1 experience than I have given here, but a pos-sible indication of what such a vocabulary might imply could be foundby considering one of the main objections to the idea of grounding virtuein a narrative tradition as opposed to an unchanging functional cosmos.The obvious question that MacIntyre or someone like him must answeris, how can we tell a good story from a bad story? After all, the Nazis hadstories too. Another way to put this is to ask what limitations on hum anaction a narrative tradition can provide. It seems that we can tell a story


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20 Journal of the American Academy of Religionthat will justify almost anything. The discussion so far can indicate howthis question could be answ ered. From an objectivist standpoint, limita-tions on individual or group actions would have to take the form of somekind of general rule or guideline, independent of any particular story ornarrative tradition-a universal, acontextual standard, such as is pro-vided by modern liberal theories of individual rights. Such standardsinvariably turn out to be not universal after all and thus susceptible todeconstructive criticism as tools of dom ination, oi. else so limited in con-tent as to be inapplicable in any concrete situation-or bo th. But fromthe discussion of oral, non-objectivist orientations given so far, with itsemphasis on the contextual nature of the oral world, it would seem thatit would be precisely som ething in the specific context of the narrativethat would set limits to our actions.

As the later Wittgenstein and others such as J. L. Austin and JohnSearle demonstrated, it is the context of a given speech situation thatdeterm ines what can appropriately be said in that situation. Similarly, itmight be the case that a narrative or narrative tradition limits humanactions by providing a context in which only certain acts are appropriate.That is to say it is precisely the particularity of a narrative tradition, or thecontext it provides, that can provide limits, though not the kind of un i-versal, acontextual standard objectivism seeks. This would be perhaps themost fundamental implication of my discussion. An orallaural, contextualframework can possibly provide an internal standard, or set of lim its, forthe actions of communities and individuals within those communities.

I will elaborate this idea by examining one of the main themes of thebiblical stories. Here characters such as Abraham-and even more soChrist-are wanderers with no fixed geographical or social place butrather only the place of responsibility to God. In the biblical understand-ing, the fundamental human place is that of a responsible or faithfulspeaker. And what de termines whether or not a particular action is actu-ally a responsible or appropriate one is the narrative context of the action.Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, for example, could have been a responsible,faithful, and appropriate act only under the highly specific circumstancesin w hich he found himself, while under those circumstances, it was theonly responsible, faithful, and appropriate act. My place as a responsiblespeaker is formed precisely by the contingencies of the specific narrativeswithin which I have developed. This is to say that one is faithful orresponsible by not abstracting oneself from one's contingent situation.Thus a speech-based articulation of place would set limits not by estab-lishing fixed, unchanging institutional structures in a geographical loca-tion or social hierarchy but rather by explicating the dimensions ofresponsible or faithful response to other speakers in contingent situa-


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21ardine: Sight, Sound, and Epistemologytions, that is, by delineating what would count as appropriate actions orinappropriate, abstracted actions. The fundamental ethical and political"standard" derived from a consideration of oraVaura1 experience is thatone not abstract oneself from the context necessary to comprehend one'spossible actions, a standard congruent with the epistemologcal critiqueof objectivism that emerges from an exam ination of the oral world. Aplace in this sense would be an orientation of attunement to the ever-changing ambiguities and nuances of one's narrative context, as theyappear in the persons of other speakers . From this, in tu rn , narrative tra-ditions could be judged on the basis of whether they actually do providesuch places of responsibility

There is at least one striking implication of this kind of place inrelation to the places implied in Aristotle's functional cosmos. While ingeneral a speech-based place would require the cultivation of habitualvirtue, it is also possible that habit could itself become a type of abstrac-tion, as the context of one's actions changes. Aristotle lacks the resourcesto deal with Abraham's situation. Only a conception of place based uponthe dynam ism of the spoken word is adequate for a contingent world. Thisis why a speech-based understanding of place does not necessarily implyrigid social hierarchies, tribalistic territorial loyalties, or ideological fanati-cism. It is also why a narrative tradition that does provide places ofresponsibility may have the capacity to critique and transcend itself.Attunement to one's narrative context, as opposed to abstraction from i t,implies an appreciation of its own contingency

This conclusion, of course, is very similar to what Stanley Hauenvashas argued (1981 , 1983), except that it includes one crucial additionalelement-an epistemological grounding for such a contextual standard inthe distinctive features of oravaural experience. If my argument so far isvalid, we are much more likely to develop such an appreciation of thecontingency of our situation and what it implies for ethical practice if wecan partly recover an oraVaura1 orientation through oral narrative. Anunderstanding of the extent to which a literatdvisual orientation encour-ages objectivism, and of how orality may partially combat it , is one pos-sible way to join narrative ethics to larger epistemological issues. Or, as Istated when outlining my argument at the beginning of this essay, anappreciation of the characteristics of the spoken word, and thus of oralnarratives, can give epistemological reasons for thinking that the forma-tion of local communities based on narrative traditions could successfullyrecover morality and civility.

Although the above themes have been elaborated very briefly, I thinkthey can provide some indication of the implications of my discussion forcontem porary religious, ethical, and political discourse. A recognition of


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22 Journal of the American Academy of Religionthe typical characteristics of oral and literate thought processes can pro-vide both a critical account of (one aspect of ) he development of modernobjectivism and also constructive intimations of possible alternatives.Areorientation of our sensorium may potentially allow us to develop a newand very different ethical language. Oral narrative may provide a non-objectivist epistemological practice from which a non-objectivist ethicscan

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