Agonistic mentality of oral cultures – and digital orality
Walter Ong: "In oral cultures a request for information is commonly interpreted interactively, as agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently parried."
The total engagement and status competition are accompanied in orality by an agonistic mentality, as Walter Ong calls it. He writes: “Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle.”[1] An excerpt from Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
Ong illustrates agonistic mentality through a story:
In oral cultures a request for information is commonly interpreted interactively, as agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently parried. An illuminating story is told of a visitor in County Cork, Ireland, an especially oral region in a country which in every region preserves massive residual orality. The visitor saw a Corkman leaning against the post office. He went up to him, pounded with his hand on the post office wall next to the Corkman’s shoulder, and asked, ‘Is this the post office?’ The Corkman was not taken in. He looked at his questioner quietly and with great concern: ‘’Twouldn’t be a postage stamp you were lookin’ for, would it?’ He treated the enquiry not as a request for information but as something the enquirer was doing to him. So he did something in turn to the enquirer to see what would happen. All natives of Cork, according to the mythology, treat all questions this way. Always answer a question by asking another. Never let down your oral guard.[2]
In a literate culture, knowledge is detached from the person, and it is possible to establish status by possessing better information and sharing or withholding this information. In an oral culture, one establishes their status only through others via either cooperation or rivalry with them. The oral utterance is designed to resonate, to be affective and to be engaging. Oral speech-behaviour is always intrusive. Emotionality, which is needed to convey affect for better cooperation and memorization, additionally intensifies the agonistic nature of speech-behaviour.
Since the function of an utterance in orality is not just to convey a subject matter but also to utilize the listener, everyone constantly decides whether he or she should comply with others’ requests. Should one benefit from subordination to the other or challenge them to maintain their own social status and respective privileges?
The constant request for affirmation by everyone to everyone – the request for your time – creates psychologically quite an aggressive environment. Even compassion and empathy, which are innate in the conditions of total collective exposition, are agonistic and intrusive – they oblige. Accepting a gift, an invitation or hospitality with insufficient enthusiasm may lead enmity and war. This is where the honour system takes its roots. “But you ask without respect, you don’t offer friendship, you didn’t even call me godfather.”
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that everyone stands not just for themselves but also for the good name of their family or kin. Orality created a society regulated by honour, a regulative force opposite to both the concept of law and the concept of conscience (both emerged as effects of writing). If the relational bias of orality fostered loyalty and, to some extent, empathy, then the agonistic mentality fostered hubris, a personal and political trait much fought against by the Greeks as soon as they developed alphabetic literacy, as the Greeks believed that hubris underlies tyranny.
According to Ong, “By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle.” Proverbs and riddles are used not just to store knowledge but also for engaging in verbal combat. Bragging about achievements or enduring is obviously a status-seeking speech-behaviour and as such is highly agonistic as well. Friendly or hostile name-calling is a legitimate sport in orality. In the same manner as a true sport, a name-calling contest sometimes substitutes for fighting. Or else, ritualistic insults legitimize real fighting that follows – they create the ground to morally justify escalation and physical altercation.
Ong writes that the name-calling contest is a “standard in oral societies across the world” and has even been given a specific label in linguistics: flyting (or fliting).[3] Contests based on mutual insults were widely practiced on the battlefield or in public speech. After writing, they survived there and spread, though in rather more exquisite forms, in rhetoric, politics, jurisprudence, diplomacy, and beyond. Although Ong may not have witnessed it in his time, competitive name-calling has also found artistic expression in rap battles, a descendant of oral poetry. Grand events in this genre are called “epic rap battles,” as if keeping a reference to primary orality.
On the opposite side of agonistic name-calling or vituperation is, according to Ong, “the fulsome expression of praise which is found everywhere in connection with orality.” [4] From the point of view of literacy, the fulsome praise in oral or residually oral tradition sounds “insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentious,” in Ong’s words. Similar to name-calling, the oral tradition of fulsome praise survived the advent of literacy and holds on in some areas of social activity. Toasts, congratulations, and celebratory speeches are exceedingly praising and bombastic in cultures with strong residual orality. In others, their intensity is significantly reduced by literacy but is still detectable.
Whether it is a song by an African griot or a toast by a tamada (the master of ceremonies) at a Georgian wedding, the praise carries its oral agonistic character anyway. It is still a status contest and a competition of competences.
Marshall McLuhan did not use the term “agonistic mentality,” but he certainly saw it as an effect of retribalization. In a 1977 TV interview, McLuhan dismisses the romantic expectations of the host regarding the Global Village:
McManus: But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.
McLuhan: Oh, no, tribal people… one of their main kinds of sport is a sort of butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies... The closer you get together the more you like each other? No, there is no evidence of that in any situation we’ve heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savagely impassionate with each other.[5]
The retrieval of the agonistic mentality has only intensified in the digital realm. On social media, everyone seeks affirmation from others on a scale unheard of in human history. Not only is the agonistic mentality making a comeback, but it also threatens representative democracy (by amplifying polarization) and people’s mental health.[6] Here is what McLuhan said about these conditions in 1967:
The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquility were the properties of the global village. It has more spite and envy. <…> The tribal-global village is far more divisive – full of fighting – than any nationalism ever was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth all the time.[7]
McLuhan sounded his proximity alert 50 years ago.
Read more about features of primary orality retrieved into digital orality in: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
[1] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 43. Conversely, people from oral cultures might perceive those from literate cultures as too pretentiously “nice” and smiley, which could be interpreted as a facade concealing hypocrisy and insincerity.
[2] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 67. The case is told with the reference to: Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1923). “The problem of meaning in primitive languages”, in: C. K. Ogden, and I. A. Richards (eds), The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.
[3] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 43.
[4] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 44.
[5] Marshall McLuhan in Conversation with Mike McManus. (1977). 1:22.
[6] Se: Mir, Andrey. (2022, Winter). “The Medium Is the Menace. Ubiquitous digital media offer potent rewards—but at the price of eroding our sensory and social capacities.” City-Journal.
[7] McLuhan, Marshall. (1997 [1967]). “The Hot and Cool Interview” to Gerald Stearn, p. 57-58.
Explains our current deep and violent global discontent, in spite of amazing technological innovation.