The Revolutionary History of Media

Pre-seminar note:

The paper isn’t finished yet, but I’ll say a few things first anyway. I’ve run into some difficulties with this paper,

which have stalled its progress. In fact, this section is quite an important part of my doctoral dissertation plan. Here I am trying to establish a connection between the history of technology and the history of science, linking philosophy of technology → history of technology → history of science → philosophy of science into a single chain. But the ambition of the framework is rather large, and so I ended up letting the conclusion come first, while the material has not kept up. Relying mainly on Walter Ong alone seems insufficient to complete the mission of this chapter. Of course, Walter Ong is very interesting; he is more of a phenomenologist than McLuhan, cites Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others more directly, and his formulations about externalization through technology and the like are also quite intriguing. But under the burden of my conclusion-first mission, it seems hard to integrate them. The transformation from speech to writing, rather than being a paradigm revolution, is perhaps more accurately a pre-paradigm → paradigm shift; using it to explain the essence of scientific paradigms may not be the most apt. How to handle things next is also giving me a headache. Further unpacking the details of Ong’s thought seems to be some kind of deviation from the planning of my doctoral dissertation, or perhaps Eisenstein should be inserted here—I’m still thinking about it. Of course, the main problem is still that I haven’t worked hard enough before, and I haven’t yet absorbed enough of the material.

Post-seminar summary:

For a paper like this one that I threw together in a rush, today’s seminar worked pretty well. Professor Wu, Senior Brother Donglin, and all the classmates gave very helpful suggestions. Basically, I feel that the link between media history ↔ paradigm theory can indeed be established, but directly corresponding media environments to paradigms may be somewhat misaligned. Media environments may be a more fundamental level than scientific paradigms; we can use media environments to explain the origin of paradigms, but a direct one-to-one correspondence still needs to be carefully considered. Of course, we can also consider abandoning paradigm theory altogether and directly rebuilding a historiography of science from Heidegger’s and Klein’s phenomenological tradition; that is also the direction of Jin Shixiang and others’ work, and I fully support it. But I still feel that although Kuhn is not yet profound enough, within the field of history of science and philosophy of science he is ultimately still a figure who stands up; his theory has depth, that is, enough interpretive room. There is no need to go around him; one can introduce a more profound historiographical program through revisions of Kuhn, rather than starting from scratch. Interpreting paradigms as a “media environment” is indeed somewhat bold, but if it weren’t bold, it wouldn’t be called a “strong program” of media history. Of course, in addition to theoretical construction, it is also necessary to collect and analyze some concrete historical cases.

The History of Revolution in Media

McLuhan regards media transformation as the driving force of history: oral media incline toward an acoustic space, while written media incline toward a visual space; under different media environments, people live in different “worlds,” and both perception and cognition differ, often making mutual communication difficult. The characteristics of modern thought—abstract, linear, objective, disenchanted, isolated, analytical, static, and so on—are precisely the consequences of people migrating from an acoustic world into a visual world.

We may as well understand the media environment that determines different modes of perception and thought as Kuhn’s “paradigm,” and this has two implications: first, the media environment is “a” paradigm, possessing all the features of the paradigm Kuhn discusses, such as priority, stability, and incommensurability. Further, the media environment “is” the paradigm—not merely an application of Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, but a supplement or an interpretation: Kuhn’s paradigm is nothing other than the media environment.

Although writers and researchers in the media ecology school often talk about concepts such as “media revolution,” they rarely consciously pursue the meaning of the word “revolution,” let alone borrow paradigm theory to interpret the characteristics of media revolution. On the other hand, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn introduced the concept of “paradigm” in a very broad sense, only to narrow it continuously in later defenses, finally limiting the meaning of “paradigm” to “universally recognized scientific achievements”[1]. Although this definition is more precise, it also weakens the concept’s revelatory power. Therefore, discussing the problem of paradigms from the perspective of media history, on the one hand, helps us grasp media revolutions; on the other, it is also an advance in Kuhn’s philosophy of science.

The “scientific revolution” in Kuhn’s sense is plural; its scope can be large or small. It includes both “that one” scientific revolution that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the important turning points that occur in specific disciplinary fields. Of course, the fundamental scientific revolution from Aristotle’s ancient world to Newton’s modern world is also the most striking example of paradigm theory. In media ecology, “revolution” can also be large or small: down to the appearance of each new technology, which creates a “new environment,” under which all things will be viewed against an entirely new background. In this sense, every new technology is a paradigm revolution. At the same time, from the perspective of media ecology there is also one (or several) fundamental revolution, namely the revolution from speech to writing (and the print age and electronic age are sometimes also regarded as equally important revolutions).

McLuhan has discussed many differences between the oral age and the literate age, but the one who more comprehensively and deeply explored this topic is McLuhan’s student and friend Walter Ong. The discussion below will mainly cite Ong’s accounts.

Walter Ong was McLuhan’s master’s student in English literature. He and McLuhan both shifted from literary studies to media history at the same time; they were teacher and friend to one another, inspiring each other, and can roughly be counted as belonging to the same generation.

Ong called the comparative study of “oral culture—written culture” a “theorem”[2]; it does not belong to any “school”[3], but can provide a “reference framework” for research in various schools. He pointed out that “the diachronic study of oral and written cultures”[4] not only concerns the two successive historical ages of speech and writing, but also helps us understand print culture, electronic culture, and so on.

Ong believed that the media shift from speech to writing to the electronic, “will inevitably bring about changes in social, economic, political, religious, and other structures,” but this was not the issue Ong directly focused on. Ong’s research targeted the different “mindsets” of oral and written cultures[5].

The Chinese translation’s “mindset” may perhaps be more appropriately rendered as “habits of thought,” which includes the sense of habit and pattern, and is also easier to relate to “paradigm.” But translating it literally as mindset is not wrong. Ong, like McLuhan, studies media-environment change not from social structure, but from the influence of media’s sensory bias on people’s psychological states.

The two habits of thought under oral and written culture are not mutually exclusive. Ong points out that “many cultures and subcultures preserve to various degrees a great deal of the mindset of primary oral culture, even in a high-technology environment.”[6]

In other words, the transformation from oral culture to written culture does not happen all at once at some key moment, but develops in stages and to varying degrees. Ong uses “oral—written” as a dimension for measuring history or culture. He notes: “The up-to-date transformation from magic to science, or from the so-called ‘prelogical’ to the increasingly ‘rational’ consciousness, or from what Lévi-Strauss called ‘wild’ thought to domesticated thought—all these labels can be explained by the transformation through stages from oral culture to written culture… many differences between so-called ‘Western’ viewpoints and other viewpoints seem reducible to another reflection: the contrast between deeply internalized written culture and the more or less oral remnants in consciousness.”[7]

On the surface, this seems to negate the idea of treating the shift from oral culture to written culture as a paradigm revolution, because this shift appears gradual. But in fact, Kuhn’s theory also faces a similar problem: he instead dissolved “that one scientific revolution.” In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn did not treat the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a key example, but excerpted at least four parts of it as separate cases for analysis[8]. In this way, it seems as though a series of local changes replaced a single total revolution. Coen mentions that in Kuhn’s later essay “The Mathematical and Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science,” Kuhn, by giving the basic distinction between “classical physical science” and “Baconian science,” offered a schematic division of the history of science: all the classical sciences underwent drastic changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while it was not until the nineteenth century that the classical scientific tradition fused with the emerging Baconian science. To some extent, this “restored” the historical status of the “age of scientific revolution.” But the problem still remains: what happened in this so-called revolutionary period was all local and gradual. The development of Baconian science and mathematical science was independent of each other. If we regard the eventual integration of modern science as the result of the Scientific Revolution, then this revolution seems to have lasted from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, and many paradigm changes occurred in between.

But this does not mean that Kuhn’s thought is contradictory. After all, Kuhn never promised to explain that one scientific revolution as merely the product of a single decisive paradigm shift. Kuhn used the concept of “revolution” consciously to draw an analogy between scientific development and political revolution[9]. Political revolutions are always launched within some community, but they also rarely happen all at once. In reality, they are more likely to be a convergence of local revolutions launched in multiple regions, or a revolution divided into several relatively independent battlefields or stages. Some revolutions fuse communities that were originally unrelated, while others first establish independent regimes in peripheral regions and then gradually absorb the old territory. And even after a new regime achieves unity, remnants of the old forces may continue to survive in many localities… Such revolutions may find some emblematic events, but they are hard to describe as one-time total overthrows.

The key point is that paradigm revolutions always occur within the scope governed by the corresponding paradigm. Paradigms can be large or small, but they are always located within some boundary—that is what a “community” is.

Kuhn admits that the term paradigm as he uses it is “both actually and logically very close to the term ‘scientific community.’ A paradigm is, and only is, what members of a scientific community share. Conversely, it is precisely because they possess a shared paradigm that they constitute this scientific community.”[10]

In other words, paradigm revolutions always occur within a certain community. In a broad sense, events that cause the dissolution or formation of a community can also be called revolutions. How large a background a revolution should be examined against depends on which community we are actually concerned with. The size and level of a paradigm correspond to the size and level of a community. Within a large community there may be many small communities. These subcommunities share a certain paradigm at some more basic level, yet each possesses its own independent paradigm.

But Kuhn thought he had fallen into the error of circularly defining paradigm and community. He believed that “to give a good account of the word ‘paradigm,’ one must first recognize the independent existence of scientific communities.”[11] He believed that the academic world would soon propose systematic methods of identification to define scientific communities, and he himself offered some intuitive explanations of how to identify scientific communities—for example, “there is relatively ample internal communication, professional views are also relatively consistent, and much of the same literature is absorbed…” These explanations are either too simple or still overlap with the concept of “paradigm,” that is to say, in fact Kuhn did not solve this problem of “circular definition.”

The concept of community is, in essence, a question of dissemination/communication. As the name suggests, a community is a group sustained by communicative activity; to identify a community is essentially to identify the way communicative activity is clustered together. The members of a community always share a communication platform.

And the fundamental insight of media ecology, namely “the medium is the message,” means that for society and culture, the formal characteristics of the medium itself are more important than the information transmitted by the medium. Therefore, to distinguish different communities and understand their different characteristics, the medium of communication on which these communities depend for their existence is more crucial than the specific content they communicate.

It is hard to say that there were clear, lasting communities in ancient science. Rather than saying that a scientific paradigm had not yet been established and therefore communities could not form, it is better to say that communities could not form and therefore paradigms could not be established. Of course, in manuscript culture some scientific traditions still took shape, and scientific communication proceeded in very limited forms—for example, the agora in Athens, Plato’s Academy, the “Mouseion” in Alexandria, the “House of Wisdom” in the Islamic world, the monasteries and universities of the Middle Ages… In short, the communication of premodern scientific communities was limited to a particular time and place, and the lineages established around classical manuscripts were extremely unstable. Therefore, premodern science naturally had few unified paradigms, and even if there were some paradigms, they were exceedingly unstable. Only with the advent of printing did it become possible to form the scholarly communities of the modern sense[12], with book and journal networks assembling scholarly circles and constructing the “republic of letters” as a whole. Only then did the paradigm of modern science have the chance to govern the entire field.

The “incommensurability” between different paradigms is, of course, the “communication barrier” between different communities. People from different language and cultural backgrounds can ultimately still converse, but such mutual understanding is never complete. Each side has its own different worldview and values, and cannot find a common measure between the two to achieve fusion. Kuhn often analogizes communication between paradigms to communication and translation between languages: two languages can be translated into each other, but their vocabularies can never correspond exactly.

The word Paradigm also includes the meaning of “paradigm chart” or “inflection table”: word forms in a language often follow certain rules, but they are also full of ambiguities and exceptions, so people cannot master inflection merely by adhering to fixed rules; they must instead acquire it through extensive exposure to examples, mastering these usages in actual practice. Therefore, the concept of “exemplar” especially emphasizes this “pre-rule” character. That is to say, a scientific community does not achieve consensus by obeying a set of explicit rules from the same textbook, but by reaching consensus in the examples of actual rule-use. This consistency is, of course, manifested in rule-governed usage, but what is more decisive is precisely its manifestation in anti-rule and supra-rule usage. Merely obeying textbook grammar rules in a rigid, literal manner is precisely proof of being an “outsider”; while those truly inside the community care very little about grammar rules.

The consistency of a paradigm exceeds rule-governedness, and Kuhn himself was clearly aware of this. He emphasized that “paradigms are prior to, more binding than, and more complete than any set of rules that could be abstracted from them for study.”[13]

In his later work he thought that this original pre-rule level was even pre-linguistic, indeed prehuman: “What I have been calling a lexical classification system, perhaps better called a conceptual scheme, is here an idea of a specific concept-schema not as a series of beliefs but as the special operating mode of a thought module, a mode that immediately provides and constrains the series of beliefs it can formulate. I think some such classificatory modules are prelinguistic and possessed by animals. Presumably they evolved originally for the sense systems, most obviously for the visual system.”[14]

But here Kuhn seems to have gone too far. In fact, language precedes grammar; the actual use of language precedes dictionaries and grammars. That is already enough to express the prior, pre-rule character of paradigm, without retreating into the domains of pre-language and pre-technology to look for this pre-rule constraint.

In fact, the priority of paradigm over rule/dogma speaks precisely to the priority of medium over message. That is to say, the medium constitutes an environment of communication and life, and this environment exerts a constraining and guiding force on those who live together within it, and this force precedes the specific rules and beliefs that the community formulates through that medium. Before presenting specific objects to us, the media environment constrains the objects that can be presented and the way they can be presented.

Each medium provides a certain pre-rule constraint, influencing people’s sensory systems. And for human beings, one of the most basic media among these is the medium of communication, namely language. Rather than saying that paradigms are pre-linguistic, it is better to say that paradigms are the very form of language itself—before specific grammatical rules and lexical concepts, before the specific content of language, the form of language itself constrains people’s “conceptual schemes” and influences people’s sensory systems.

Linguists have long conducted many studies on the structural features of different languages, but Ong points out that the various schools of modern linguistics “pay very little attention to the difference between primary oral culture and written culture.”[15] Most linguistic research pays attention only to textual analysis, studying language materials that have already been recorded, that is, language materials that have already been regularized. And the few studies that pay attention to oral traditions also rarely compare oral traditions with written culture.

With respect to the rise of science from the Middle Ages to early modern times, Ong also points out that predecessors have paid little attention to this fact: from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, philosophy and science were based on “Learned Latin,” a language that was not anyone’s native tongue for everyday communication, but something acquired through later study; this scholarly language liberated its users from the tempestuous, emotional, unconscious, subjective language of speech[16]. At the same time, however, the vernaculars used by scholars themselves remained within oral culture, and the effects of this divided condition have still not been adequately studied. Moreover, the textualization of popular vernaculars after the advent of print probably did not merely mean changes in the range and effectiveness of knowledge transmission; in fact, these languages also underwent profound changes during that period. Compared with the split between the native tongue and scholarly language, the written form of the mother tongue may have fostered a further “internalization” of the mental habits of written culture. This process of textualization did not come to an end until the Romantic era—that is, after the Enlightenment age of mass education. Ong believes that “compared with antiquity, medieval writing was far more oriented toward writing, but compared with us it was still unbelievably oriented toward speech. … Until the Romantic era, all Western culture included a pronounced oral character.”[17]

The triumph of written culture and the retreat of oral culture took place gradually in Western history, a line of development stretching from ancient Greece all the way to the Romantic period, while the current age of electronic culture is regarded by Ong as a “secondary oral age,” that is, an era in which many features of oral culture have once again been revived under electronic media conditions. But to understand this continuous historical process, we have no choice but to try to understand what the characteristics of oral culture actually are. And this is very difficult, because we are already under the paradigm of written culture; we understand orality according to the habits of written culture, taking speech to be merely writing not yet set down, and calling oral culture “pre-literate” or “non-literate,” which is as odd as trying to understand “horse” through the concept of a “car without wheels”[18]. In fact, the basic concepts we rely on to analyze the characteristics of oral culture, including “civilization,” “paradigm,” and so on, have already been marked by written culture. We must be consciously aware of this incommensurability, strive to suspend the superiority of writing over speech, and draw on certain work in linguistics and anthropology to enter into the mode of thinking of oral culture.

Kuhn points out that “revolution is a change of world view”: under different paradigms, people perceive different worlds—even when confronted with the same objects, they undergo a kind of Gestalt switch; the duck before the revolution becomes a rabbit after it, and “scientists’ perception of the environment must be retrained”[19].

But in the transformation from oral culture to written culture, the degree of change in “perception of the environment” can hardly be summed up merely as a “change of world view,” because the concept of “world view” (*world view*) itself is a product of written culture. Ong points out that “in oral culture, their ‘world’ is not something that unfolds before the eyes as a conspicuous thing like a certain kind of ‘view,’ but more like something dynamic and relatively unpredictable, a ‘event-world’ rather than an ‘object-world.’”

“World view” is visual, static, and initiated by the subject; we never say that someone “receives a world view,” but always that he “holds or adopts a world view.”[20] “World view” means that people actively take hold of this world and process it within their own ideas, but “for the ancients the world was something in which he could only participate, rather than an object that could be processed in his consciousness.”[21]

People’s “sense of the world” in oral culture is governed primarily by hearing; such a world does not present itself as a frozen picture at a glance, but within its dynamism and unpredictability still contains order or unity—namely, the world as a harmonious whole. Ong introduces the concept of “auditory synthesis”: the cosmos is taken not as a picture, but as harmony or symphony. “In ancient Greece this harmonious cosmos was still common; the cosmos was imagined as something to which one had to respond, and not merely something to be explored.”[22]

The visual world is destructive: everything is broken down into external relations, whereas interiority is preserved in the auditory world. “Sound can reveal inwardness without physical intervention. For example, we lightly tap a wall and discover a hollow inside it, or ring a silver coin and discover lead within it. If we were to discover these things visually, we would have to open up the thing under inspection, turn its interior into an exterior, and thereby destroy its inwardness”[23].

Oral culture is biased toward hearing, while written culture is biased toward vision; visual space has the characteristics of abstraction, linearity, objectivity, and disenchantment. In this respect, Ong is close to McLuhan, though with the slight difference that Ong places touch near the visual pole (because of its externality), whereas McLuhan treats touch and hearing together. But there is no need to belabor the related details here. Unlike McLuhan, Ong places greater emphasis on the temporal character of orality, and on its relation to memory.

I mentioned[24] Stiegler’s “finite retention” — “every recollection is a kind of forgetting,” and whatever can be forgotten is always also something that can be recalled, that is, something that can be supplemented by some third term. Recording technologies are precisely the capacities of memory. The possibility of “remembering” depends on the possibility of “writing down.”

Ong expressed a similar insight in the most straightforward language: “How can what you painstakingly said be remembered? The only answer is: you are thinking about things that can be remembered.”[25]

In oral culture, the key point is that there is no external apparatus that can fix memory, so “how to keep knowledge stable is the main problem in oral culture.”[26]

Of course, the preservation of knowledge still depends on “tertiary retention,” that is, the technologization of memory, but the technology in question here is more bodily technology, an art of memory that requires training. “In primary oral culture, in order to preserve and reproduce carefully spoken thoughts effectively, you must think in memory-friendly patterns”[27]

What is transmitted in oral culture often carries a strong sense of rhythm, is rich in repetition and parallelism, epithets and formulae, as well as a great many maxims. Ong further summarizes the characteristics of thought and expression in oral culture as follows: “additive rather than subordinative; aggregative rather than analytic; redundant or ‘copious’; conservative or traditionalist; close to the human lifeworld; agonistically toned; empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced; homeostatic; situational rather than abstract.”[28]

This series of characteristics is not just a matter of stylistic form; the mode of memory determines the form of knowledge. In oral culture, “knowledge” as bodily skill stands in sharp contrast to the “knowledge” that, in the print age, becomes black-and-white words on the pages of textbooks. The transformation from oral culture to written culture did not merely alter the content of knowledge; it changed the form of knowledge.

 

 

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.

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