Biases of the Ear and Eye

Daniel Chandler

'Great Divide' Theories

In the early 1960s several influential books and papers were published on the theme of oral versus literate cultures. These included The Savage Mind by the French structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, a paper on 'The Consequences of Literacy' by the English anthopologist Jack Goody and his colleague the literary historian Ian Watt, The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan, and Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock. These works and many others since brought to prominence the theme of what came to be called 'orality and literacy' in cultural debates. It is a stimulating but controversial topic with considerable implications for anyone concerned with literacy. It sheds light, for instance, on some of the influences framing the widespread and dominant paranoid myth of the so-called decline of literacy (see Graff 1987).

Someone once wittily remarked that the world is divided into those who divide people into two types, and those who don't. One of those who do asserts that people are either ear people or eye people (Tardif, cited in Synnott 1993, p. 129). This usefully introduces both of our main themes here: dichotomies versus continua, and the ear versus the eye. Indeed, some theorists have argued that an increasing obsession with the visual is what has led us to favour dividing things into tidy categories. For instance, it's only a categorical convention that we have five senses.

Theorists involved in the comparative analysis of modes of communication frequently assume or refer to a binary divide or dichotomy between different kinds of society or human experience: 'primitive' vs. 'civilized', 'simple' vs. 'advanced', 'pre-logical' vs. 'logical', 'pre-rational' vs. 'rational', 'pre-analytic' vs. 'analytic', 'mythopoeic' vs. 'logico-empirical', 'traditional' vs. 'modern', 'concrete' vs. 'scientific', 'oral' vs. 'visual', or 'pre-literate' vs. 'literate'. Such pairings are often also regarded as virtually interchangeable: so that modernity equals advanced equals civilization equals literacy equals rationality and so on. Lucien Levy-Bruhl created a storm of protest early in this century by labelling as 'prelogical' the thinking of people in hunter-gatherer societies. This was hardly surprising, because the apparent implication that some people are intellectually inferior has alarming political potential.

Binary accounts have been referred to as 'Great Divide' theories. Such theories tend to suggest radical, deep and basic differences between modes of thinking in non-literate and literate societies. They are often associated with attempts to develop grand theories of social organization and development. Dualities are prominent in the commentaries of structuralist theorists. Like any form of simplification they can be interpretatively illuminating. However, the sharp division of historical continuity into periods 'before' and 'after' a technological innovation such as writing assumes the determinist notion of the

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primacy of 'revolutions' in communication technology. And differences tend to be exaggerated. Reviewing the research literature, Ruth Finnegan comments that 'it is difficult to maintain any clear-cut and radical distinction between those cultures which employ the written word and those that do not' (cited in Olson 1994, xv).

One defence of a great divide theory by Jack Goody suggested that to deny any significant distinction between non-literate and literate societies involved adopting the widely criticized stance of cultural relativity (Goody et al. 1968, p. 67). Goody argues that 'general' rather than radical differences still exist between non-literate and literate cultures which are greater than the differences one may find between various literate practices. Another reaction to criticisms of a great divide is offered by David Olson and Angela Hildyard. These commentators, convinced of the key role of literacy in developing intellectual competence, declare that if there is no difference between pre-literate and literate mentality then we could hardly justify compulsory schooling (Olson & Hildyard 1978 cited in Street 1984, p. 19). They would clearly prefer not to acknowledge that a primary function of schooling is social control in the interests of ruling elites (see Graff 1987).

Harvey Graff refers to the 'tyranny of conceptual dichotomies' - such as literate and illiterate, written and oral, print and script - in the study and interpretation of literacy. He declares that 'None of these polar opposites usefully describes actual circumstances; all of them, in fact, preclude contextual understanding' (Graff 1987, p. 24). The interpretive alternatives to Great Divide theories are sometimes called 'Continuity' theories: these stress a 'continuum' rather than a radical discontinuity between oral and literate modes, and an on-going dynamic interaction between various media (Finnegan 1988, pp. 139, 175).

One apologist for a great divide theory insists that continuity theories suggest 'that orality and literacy are essentially equivalent linguistic means for carrying out similar functions. Psychologically their differences are not important... The role of literacy is more social and institutional than it is psychological or linguistic.' On the other hand, great divide theories argue 'that orality and literacy, whilst importantly interactive... allow old functions to be served in new ways and to bring new functions into view. In doing so, they realign psychological processes and social organization' (Olson & Torrance 1991, p. 7).

The crosscultural cognitive psychologists Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner in their important book on The Psychology of Literacy (1981) have avoided both the stance that thinking in oral and literate modes is basically the same and also 'the Great Cognitive Divide'. They note more moderately from their research amongst the Vai people of Liberia that literacy there appeared have no general cognitive consequences. Their research contradicted the common view that literacy leads inevitably to higher forms of thought. 'On no task - logic, abstraction, memory, communication - did we find all nonliterates performing at lower levels than all literates... We can and so claim that

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literacy promotes skills among the Vai, but we cannot and do not claim that literacy is a necessary and sufficient condition for any of the skills we assessed' (Cole & Scribner 1981, p. 251). They also found that schooling rather than literacy appeared to be the significant cause of some changes in cognitive skills involved in the logical functions of language. They argued that 'the tendency of schooled populations to generalize across a wide range of problems occurred because schooling provides people with a great deal of practice in treating individual learning problems as instances of general classes of problems'. They emphasized the importance of considering the use of literacy in different social contexts, and concluded only that 'particular practices promote particular skills'. Patricia Greenfield declared that Scribner and Cole's study 'should rid us once and for all of the ethnocentric and arrogant view that a single technology suffices to create in its users a distinct, let alone superior, set of cognitive processes' (cited in Olson 1994, 20).

Some commentaries refer to idealized types of society as if 'orality' and 'literacy' were dichotomies or polar opposites. Dichotomies and polarization are often intended to simplify accounts of cultural diversity. So cultures characterized as representative of 'orality' are small-scale, rural, communal, nonindividualistic, authoritarian and conformist, whilst those characterized as exemplars of 'literacy' are large-scale, urban-industrial, individualistic, heterogeneous and rationalistic. Contrasting societies can be illuminating, especially in making us aware of our own taken-for-granted cultural assumptions. But the distinctions between literate and non-literate societies (or phases in our own society) are not as clear-cut as is often assumed. And some characteristics of non-literate societies cannot simply be attributed to non-literacy.

Those in non-literate societies do not necessarily think in fundamentally different ways from those in literate societies, as is commonly assumed. Differences of behaviour and modes of expression clearly exist, but psychological differences are often exaggerated. Although one commentator, Peter Denny, argues that 'decontextualization' seems to be a distinctive feature of thinking in Western literate societies, he nevertheless insists that all human beings are capable of rationality, logic, generalization, abstraction, theorizing, intentionality, causal thinking, classification, explanation and originality (in Olson & Torrance 1991, p. 81). All of these qualities can be found in oral as well as literate cultures.

It is important to be aware of the similarities as well as the differences between non-literate cultures and our own. Nor should we exaggerate the similarities between various non-literate societies, or indeed between literate societies, as such labels encourage us to do. The differences between non-literate societies can be as striking as any between literate and non-literate societies. And there can be a great variety of modes of 'orality' and 'literacy' within a single society. Even the practices of individuals in their use of these modes may exhibit considerable variety from situation to situation.

There is a real danger that seeing non-literates societies as different from ours may be associated with seeing those who live in such societies as inferior to ourselves. The

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notion of 'primitive mentality' is now rejected by most anthropologists, though it survives amongst some conservative theorists. And the alternative danger of romanticizing 'oral' societies as more 'natural' than those in which we live is no less a problem.

There are several books which offer excellent correctives to the wild generalizations of some less critical writers on literacy and orality. I recommend in particular Ruth Finnegan's Literacy and orality, Brian Street's Literacy in Theory and Practice, Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner's The Psychology of Literacy and Harvey Graff's The Labyrinths of Literacy. Whilst emphasizing the primary importance of close studies of actual uses of orality and literacy, Finnegan concludes that 'looking for recurrent patterns and differences can still be illuminating in the study of human societies even if one has to treat them with caution, and (as I would urge) avoid the idea of universally applicable causal mechanisms based on specific technologies' (Finnegan 1988, p. 168).

Spoken word Written word

aural visual impermanence permanence fluid fixed rhythmic ordered subjective objective inaccurate quantifying resonant abstract time space present timeless participatory detached communal individual

Some dichotomies of the ear and eye

(Sources: McLuhan 1962, 19; Ong 1967, 34, 73, 92; Postman 1979, 35). Note that whilst speech is often presented as ‘warm’ and writing as ‘cold’, McLuhan reversed this.

Clearly, there are fundamental technical differences between the medium of writing and the medium of speech which constitute 'constraints' on the ways in which they may be used, but I do not wish to adopt the stance of hard technological determinism according to which such features would determine the ways in which they are used.

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Whatever the technical constraints of the medium, it is useful to remind ourselves of the social context of its use. We need to consider the overall 'ecology' of processes of mediation in which our behaviour is not technologically determined but in which we both use a medium and can be subtly influenced by our use of it.

Phonocentrism

In the media theories which one encounters it is important to note interpretive biases such as those concerning orality and literacy or the ear and the eye. It is also important to consider what our own biases may be. We cannot write 'without bias', but we can learn to become more aware of our biases, to make them more explicit for others, and to reflect critically on their implications. This is an aim which tends to distinguish social science from such arts as literary criticism.

Deeply reflecting an oral tradition, St. Ambrose of Milan noted that 'Sight is often deceived, hearing serves as a guarantee' (in Ong 1967, p. 53). In the twentieth century linguists shifted from an earlier stance in which they had tended to give priority to writing to one in which writing was seen as merely a 'reflection' of speech. Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), one of the most influential linguists of the first half of the twentieth century, declared that 'writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language' (1933: p. 219). In such declarations, 'language' clearly refers to spoken language. Many communication theorists still overtly or covertly privilege the spoken word over the written word. Clearly the use of the spoken word developmentally precedes any acquisition of reading and writing, whether by individuals, particular cultures or the human species. But where speech is given a higher status than writing in general this is a 'phonocentric' bias.

Linguists such as Saussure and Bloomfield identified language with speech. Some theorists refer to speech as 'primary' and to writing as 'secondary', but if what is meant is

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that writing is 'speech written down' this is far from the case. The assumption that writing is speech written down involves a bias which equates writing with alphabetic writing. But as Roy Harris points out, 'the development of the alphabet is a comparatively late event in the evolution of writing. Various civilisations with a long history of writing never developed systems comparable to the alphabet' (Harris 1986, p. 27).

Some writers refer to speech as more 'natural' or even closer to 'reality' than writing. An implicit bias is found in references by some authors to speech as 'language' but to writing as 'written language'. Phonocentric writers may also tend to stress that writing is a technology but speech is not, and may be implicitly anti-technological.

Marshall McLuhan argued that there was a shift during the Renaissance from a primarily oral/aural way of perceiving the world to a primarily visual one. He saw this shift in what he called the 'sense ratios' in the 'human sensorium' as being precipitated primarily by the spread of printing. 'With the advent of the printed word, the visual modalities of Western life increased beyond anthing experienced in any previous society' (in Sanderson & Macdonald 1989, p. 36).

Phonocentrism is often linked with a romanticization of 'pre-literate' cultures or of the 'pre-literate' phase of childhood in a literate society. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b 1908), notably in Tristes Tropiques, nostalgically associates the acquisition of wriitng with a loss of innocence. This romanticization of the 'wholeness' of non-literate modes of being by some Western intellectuals has been plausibly linked with a sense of psychic alienation which may owe something to the autonomous nature of printed texts (Eric Leed, in Woodward 1980). McLuhan insists that 'In dialogue... lying is much more difficult than in writing' (McLuhan & Watson 1970, p. 30).

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a founder of linguistics, saw the spoken word as fundamental to thinking. The origins of such a stance can be found in the writings of Plato. Plato, in the Phaedrus (c. 411-404 BC) saw the technology of writing as an external threat. It was a threat to the importance of human memory. 'Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources.' In other words, as critics often say of TV today, it makes users too passive. It was 'folly' to suppose that one could 'transmit or acquire clear and certain knowledge of an art through the medium of writing.'

For Plato, writing was a threat to the system of education. Students depending on written text would 'receive a quantity of information without proper instruction.' And textbook writers would have problems because the written word was 'quite incapable of defending or helping itself'. Ironically, Plato put his words in writing. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau declared that 'Books teach us to talk about things we know nothing about' (Emile 1762), and argued in The Origin of Language that writing would dehumanize language by separating authors from their texts. Rousseau's perspective was

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phonocentric. 'Writing is nothing but the representation of speech' (cited in Olson 1994, 8).

The perspective of rhetorician Walter Ong is basically phonocentric. He emphasizes that unless we regard primitive scratches as writing, 'speech is ancient, archaic. Writing is brand new' - having been with us for only about 5000 years, or 0.5% of humanity's existence (Ong 1986, p. 34). Ong repeatedly refers to orality as 'natural' and to writing as 'artificial' (e.g. Ong 1982, p. 82). And although on several occasions he admits that 'to say that writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it' (Ong 1982, p. 82), noting that music too is a technology which is hardly dehumanizing, his basic sympathies are clear. He alludes to written text as 'dead' and even to speech as more 'real' (Ong 1986, pp. 31, 30; 1982, pp. 81, 101).

Ong declares that 'Sound is more real or existential than other sense objects despite the fact that it is also more evanescent. Sound itself is related to present actuality rather than to past or future. It must emanate from a source here and now discernibly active, with the result that involvement with sound is involvement with the present, with here-and-now existence and activity' (Ong 1967, p. 111). He adds that: 'Voice is alive' (Ong 1967, p. 309).

The idea of speech as more real appears to relate to a sense of speech as involving less mediated access to the external world. Ong notes that 'writing separates the knower and the known' (Ong 1986, p. 37), and although he admits that all uses of language do this, including speech, he insists that writing deepens this separation. He grants the advantage of doing so, suggesting that 'it promotes "objectivity"' (Ong 1986, p. 37). But he insists that 'in all human cultures the spoken word appears as the closest sensory equivalent of fully developed interior thought. Thought is nested in speech' (Ong 197, p. 138).

Ong notes that 'We are so literate in ideology that we think writing comes naturally. We have to remind ourselves from time to time that writing is completely and irremediably artificial' (Ong 1978, p. 129). Elsewhere he expands on this: 'By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write "naturally". Oral speech is fully natural to human beings in the sense that every human being in every culture who is not physiologically or psychologically impaired learns to talk. Moreover, while talk implements conscious life, its use wells up naturally into consciousness out of unconscious or subconscious depths... Writing or script differs from speech in that it is not inevitably learned by all psychologically or physiologically unimpaired persons' (Ong 1986, p. 31; see also Ong 1982, p. 82). He emphasizes that writing is 'a technology consciously and reflectively contrived'; 'a matter of tools outside us and seemingly foreign to us' (Ong 1978, pp. 130, 139). 'Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body' (Ong 1982, p. 67).

For a beginner, learning to write involves 'the most arduous discipline', whilst speech 'comes about with far less anguish than does writing... Speech... is not drilled into the

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child with the grim determination that often marks the teaching of writing... Writing... is learned by concentration or application, and it rarely becomes... so spontaneous or flowing as speech' (Ong 1967, pp. 94-5). Ong adds that 'the spoken word... lends itself... to virtually everyone, the written word only to the select few' (Ong 1967, p. 116).

Ong even refers on one occasion to the spoken word as 'the word in its purest form, in its human and most divine form, in its holiest form, the word which passes orally between man and man to establish and deepen human relations' (Ong 1967, p. 92). He adds that 'Voice has a kind of primacy in the formation of true communities of men, groups of individuals constituted by shared awarenesses' (Ong 1967, p. 124). The spoken word is the basis of human community (Ong 1967, p. 310). Also, in contrast to sight, which allows us to see only ahead, 'sound... situates me in the midst of a world, sound conveys simultaneity' (Ong 1967, p. 129). Ong expresses an awareness that 'we must beware of the elusive quest for a lost Eden', but he insists that 'The spoken word... is primary, and yet from the start it was destined - or in another way, doomed - to be supplemented with all the devices and even gadgetry which have reduced it more and more to space' (Ong 1967, pp. 320-1). In such a framework, to the Jesuit Father Ong, writing surely represents the Fall of Man from Edenic existence. He declares explictly that: 'All reductions of the spoken word to non-auditory media, however necessary they may be, attenuate and debase it, as Plato so intensely felt' (Ong 1967, p. 322).

The widespread bias of phonocentricity was highlighted by the French textual scholar Jacques Derrida (1976, 1978). Derrida criticized a romantic tendency among linguistic and literary theorists to value speech over writing, Homo loquens over Homo scriptor. Derrida insists that writing is 'not a supplement to the spoken word'. His 'deconstructionist' stance highlights the emotional resonances of the media of speech and writing. Walter Ong asserts that Derrida and others 'have rendered a great service in undercutting... chirographic and typographic bias' (Ong 1982, p. 166). He says that 'in contending with Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Derrida is of course quite correct in rejecting the persuasion that writing is no more than incidental to the spoken word (Derrida 1976, p. 7)' (Ong 1982, p. 77), adding that 'Derrida is performing a welcome service, in the same territory that Marshall McLuhan swept through with his famous dictum, "The medium is the message"' (Ong 1982, p. 167). 'But,' Ong insists, 'to try to contruct a logic of writing without investigation in depth of the orality out of which writing emerged and in which writing is permanently and ineluctably grounded is to limit one's understanding' (Ong 1982, p. 77). For Ong, Derrida's dismissal of the importance of the spoken word involves throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Graphocentrism

The bias in which writing is privileged over speech has been called graphocentrism or scriptism. In many literate cultures, text has a higher status than speech: written language is often seen as the standard. Until the early twentieth century, linguists tended to accord priority to written language over speech: grammatical rules were based on written

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language and everyday speech was largely ignored; the prescriptive tradition was based on the written word. Marshall McLuhan, using James Joyce's coinage, referred to 'ABCEDmindedness' - an unconscious bias which he regarded as 'the psychological effect of literacy' (in McNamara 1970, p. 8). McLuhan emphasizes print in particular, declaring that 'print... is a transforming and metamorphosing drug that has the power of imposing its assumptions upon every level of consciousness' (in McNamara 1969, p. 175). It reflects a scriptist bias to refer, as many scholars do, to 'oral literature', or to any semiotic systems, written or not, as a 'text'.

Biases in favour of the written or printed word are closely associated with the ranking of sight above sound, the eye above the ear, which Anthony Synnott has called 'ocularcentrism' (Synnott 1993, p. 208). Walter Ong comments that 'Because we have by today so deeply interiorized writing, made it so much a part of ourselves... we find it difficult to consider writing to be a technology' (Ong 1982, p. 82). He adds that 'Freeing ourselves of chirographic and typographic bias... is probably more difficult than any of us can imagine' (Ong 1982, p. 77).

Whilst ranking reason over the senses, amongst the senses Plato accorded primacy to sight (Synnott 1993, p. 131). And when Aristotle decided that we had five senses, he explictly ranked sight over hearing (Synott 1993, pp. 132, 270; Classen 1993, pp. 2-3). In the first sentence of his Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote, 'Of all the senses, trust only the sense of sight'. This general bias in favour of sight and the eye has persisted in Western cultures over the centuries.

Thinking was increasingly associated with visual metaphors: 'observation' privileges visual data; 'phenomenon' owes its origin in Greek to the notion of 'exposing to sight' (Ong 1967, p. 74). The word definition comes from 'definire', to draw a line around (Ong 1967, p. 323). 'Sight is equated with understanding and knowledge in much of our vocabulary: insight, idea, illuminate, light, enlighten, visible, reflect, clarity, survey, perspective, point of view, vision, observation, show, overview, farsighted' (Synnott 1993, p. 208). We refer to clever people as bright or brilliant and to those who are not as dull. Other terms whose roots are visual include: intelligent, theory, contemplate and speculate. Sight and reason were closely associated with each other by Plato and Aristotle and they still are in our use of language.

Our folk sayings tell us such things as 'seeing is believing' and 'believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear'. Our cliches lead us to say 'see for yourself', 'let me see', 'there's more to this than meets the eye', 'I couldn't believe my eyes', and 'I'll believe it when I see it with my own eyes'. We say 'I see' when we understand. We 'see eye to eye' when we agree. We say to our friends, 'it's good to see you' and 'see you around'. One can fall in love 'at first sight' or wonder 'What does she see in him?'. We imagine situations 'in the mind's eye'. 'Draw your own conclusions.' 'See what I mean?'. When students were asked to list the sense they'd least like to lose, 75% listed sight (Synnott 1993, p. 207).

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Many commentators argue that literacy and the printed word have played a key part in the elevation of the eye to such primacy as a way of knowing. The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter asserts that 'literacy orchestrated the senses under a single conductor: sight. It enthroned sight to the point where it alone was trusted. All truth was expected to conform to observed experience... Sight became supreme and all other sense became subservient to it' (Carpenter 1976, p. 42). The pre-eminence of sight has also been closely associated with the rise of science (Classen 1993 p. 6).

Graphocentrism often involves an uncritical equation of writing with progress, growth and development. 'Pre-literate' societies may be seen as a lower stage of development than our own. Non-literate societies and individuals may be defined negatively by their 'lack' of writing. To privilege literacy involves branding half of humankind as 'inferior'. Walter Ong declares that 'Those who think of the text as the paradigm of all discourse need to face the fact that only the tiniest fraction of languages have ever been written or ever will be. Most have disappeared or are fast disappearing, untouched by textuality. Hard-core textualism is snobbery, often hardly disguised' (Ong 1986, p. 26). Roy Harris notes that 'of the thousands of languages spoken at different periods in different parts of the globe, fewer than one in ten have ever developed an indigenous written form. Of these, the number to have produced a significant body of literature barely exceeds one hundred' (Harris 1986, p. 15).

Western educational systems have rightly been accused by Roy Harris of a 'scriptist bias' (cited in Finnegan 1988, p. 179). Our educational institutions are obsessed with the primacy of the written word. Graphocentrism is hard to escape, since we have been shaped by writing. Ong argues that 'The fact that we do not commonly feel the influence of writing on our thoughts shows that we have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence and influence' (Ong 1986, p. 24).

Given the biases which we so often encounter or unconsciously adopt, it as perhaps useful to remind ourselves that writing is no ‘better’ than speech, nor vice versa - speech and writing need to be acknowledged as different media with differing functions.

Logocentrism

A further interpretive bias is logocentrism, which privileges linguistic communication over the revealingly named 'non-verbal' forms of communication and expression, and over unverbalized feelings. Logocentrism also privileges both the eye and the ear over other sensory modalities such as touch (see Synnott 1993; Classen 1993).

For many of us, verbal language is central to our sense of identity: it is not a neutral vehicle for communication but the primary way in which we know ourselves. In any academic discussion of the spoken and the written word romantics may reveal some sense of loss or longing for existence in a pre-literate culture, whilst rationalists may

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champion writing as 'the technology of the intellect' (Goody, 1968, 1977). Romantics echo the poet Shelley in a vision of experience as a mystical sense of oneness, of being within a universal continuum: 'Let us recollect our senses as children. What a distinct and intense apprehension we had of the world and of ourselves... We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute one mass' ('On Life', 1815).

Since such holistic visions emphasize the unity of the knower and the known, childhood experience is portrayed as virtually 'unmediated'. And yet all but the most naive epistemology suggests that our experience of the world is unavoidably mediated. For the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead 'actual experience is for each person a continuum, fragmentary, with elements not clearly differentiated', but 'language... foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverance of experience' (1917, cited in Moore & Carling, 1988: 26; 55). Our apprehension of the world is unavoidably a product of acts of selection, foregrounding and symbolization. Language plays a major part in these acts: it is almost impossible to disentangle what we experience from the categories with which we organize our experiences. As Gabriel Josipovici puts it, 'Language... is never neutral. To make sense of the world we have to impose a pattern on it; to speak is to make as well as to report' (1982: 45). For some empirical commentators (as for Locke) linguistic mediation is expressed in terms of language coming 'between' them and 'reality'. Such a view presents language as 'distorting' an 'objective reality'. But constructivists (in sociology, social psychology and the psychology of perception) emphasize the role of language in the construction of reality (e.g. Berger & Luckman, 1967).

Language creates and separates 'knower' and 'known', 'subject' and 'object'. 'We know what a thing is by cutting it off from other things' (Ong, 1977). We categorize even that which is not clearly discrete or bounded: as in the case of a 'hill' or a 'corner'. Indeed, things do not ex-ist (or stand out) until we call them into being: we create rather than discover the worlds we know through the categories we draw from language. In this sense we live in the word, and all words are 'abstractions': there can be no direct correspondence between the word and the world. 'The world' only exists in language.

We might say that language extends our sense of the world as a thing, whilst at the same time tending to reduce our awareness of its mediation (at least in the apparent 'transparency' of everyday usage). Every routine linguistic reference to a phenomenon refreshes a sense of its independent existence 'out there' but numbs us to the labelling.

Marcel Proust declared that 'it is our noticing them that puts things in a room; our growing used to them takes them away again' (cited in Jackson, 1946: 108). Noticing something represents a fleeting moment of categorical breakdown. Some sensitive and experienced users of language experience a sense of loss in our categorization of the world. Writing in 1905, H. G. Wells lamented that 'the forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it' (cited in Koestler,

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1970a: 174). But, of course, without categories, as the psychologist Jerome Bruner pointed out, we would be 'slaves to the particular' (Bruner et al, 1956). Silvano Arieti also argues that generalization is a psychological necessity:

We tend to perceive what we can subsequently understand or place in some category, and we tend to overlook all the rest. If we did not do so, we would be overwhelmed by a flood of irrelevant stimulation. The newborn infant experiences nothing but sensations. The world around is still a buzzing and blooming awareness of unorganized stimuli. That is why we cannot remember our infant experiences. (Arieti, 1976: 40)

Language extends our 'grasp' of the ungraspable. 'If the past, the future, the distant, the abstract are to exist, there must be signification systems to create and reference them' (Anderson and Meyer, 1988: 16). However, the use of language can either enhance or inhibit the evolution of ideas. Arthur Koestler suggests that 'often some promising intuition is nipped in the bud by prematurely exposing it to the acid bath of verbal definitions; others may never develop without such verbal exposure' (1970b: 56).

The American sociologist Joseph Gusfield accepts that 'reality is too ambiguous, uncertain and inconsistent to correspond to categories which render it unambiguous, certain and consistent' (1981: 69). However, Agnes Heller, a philosopher, suggests that:

The inadequacy of everyday language in the expression of private feelings and private thoughts is... not a fault to be eliminated. Language is only usable, is only 'language' because it is or can be inadequate in this respect. It is only in action other than speech or via the mediation of such actions or attitudes that language can adequately express the subjective state of the 'person'. (Heller, 1984: 179)

Terence Moore and Chris Carling suggest that 'the limitations of language' include 'what we cannot easily say, what we should not even expect to be able to say', and that such limitations 'can never be wholly overcome, only diminished' (Moore & Carling, 1988: vii). 'Words can both help us impose some order on our experience of living while at the same time deceive us into believing this order is greater than it is' (ibid.: 4).

Gabriel Josipocivi argues that: 'To use language at all is to use an instrument which is forged by others. It is not that the purely personal cannot be uttered in [English]; it cannot be uttered in language at all... All languages are foreign languages - foreign to us, that is to say... It is never my language, for "I" have no language' (Josipovici, 1982: 71-2; original refers to Latin). We are born into the contractual obligations of a language already in use. Individuals cannot break this contract, although literary artists may contribute to bending the rules. As Jean- Jacques Lecercle notes, 'language is undoubtedly social and collective. Meaning belongs to the community before I make it mine, and in spite of the individuality of my style I can only state what is made available to me by the system' (Lecercle, 1990: 106).

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Whilst, as Chomsky would argue, most of our sentences are probably unique, the grammatical templates we use are not. In this sense language is a conservative medium, a feature which, whilst tending to discourage radical innovation in everyday use, extends the communicative power of the medium. Josipovici (developing Roland Barthes' perspective) goes further: 'We are in fact being spoken, or being written, by forces outside us. We are not speakers so much as parrots. Of course these forces do not constitute some transcendent being or historical necessity, but rather the multiplicity of conflicting and ever-changing pressures which make up what we take to be "reality"' (ibid: 73).

Bruner (1966) observed that for pre-school children 'thought and the object of thought seemed to be one', but that during schooling one comes to separate word and thing, becoming aware of 'the distinctness of oneself and of one's own point of view'. Some romantics may (at least retrospectively) identify with a childhood sense of growing separation from that which can be described. The verbal description of certain human experiences is widely considered to 'spoil' them. Indeed, people often say 'there are no words to describe how I feel'. As Edward Ballard puts it:

Many of the most typical human experiences, such as experiences of introjection, decision, anxiety, insight, self-awareness, self-identity seem in fact to be resistant to precise and literal description even in languages having the richest logical resources. The immediacy characteristic of these experiences (or aspects of experience)... offers nothing to formalize. (Ballard, 1978: 213)

It is unlikely that there is anyone who has not experienced the frustration of being, on some occasion, 'at a loss for words'. All we can say is that 'I can't explain' or 'I don't know how to say this'. Where I feel obliged to use language which I nevertheless find inadequate, I may feel that language is 'coming between' 'me' and an 'experience'. Or I may feel that I have been lured by language into allowing an experience to be shaped by the words I 'find myself using'.

Lest such occasional frustrations and literary licence lead us to exaggerate the limitations of language for everyday purposes, it is as well to remember that the ways in which speech is used are often more expressive than the words themselves. As an admittedly extreme example, Stanislavski is reputed to have auditioned actors by demanding the expression of 40 different meanings with the phrase 'this evening' (cited in Anderson & Meyer, 1988: 17). And all of us are quite used to 'reading between the lines' in speech: in making meanings out of what has not been directly expressed in the words chosen. Nevertheless, that we are able to say to ourselves that what we have 'put into words' isn't always quite what we meant is a reflection of a widespread acknowledgement of the importance of the non-verbal element in thinking (which was denied by early behaviourists: see Harding, 1974: 172).

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Daniel ChandlerUWA 1994

The preferred form of citation for the online version of this paper is as follows:

Chandler, Daniel (1994): 'Biases of the Ear and Eye: "Great Divide" Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism' [WWW document] URL http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral.html [Date of Visit]

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