The good, the Bad, and the Tone Deaf

Question 1: In class, we keep coming back to the notion of aesthetics and "good" vs. "bad" work. In my first post, I talked about the poetic hierarchy and blamed its existence on everyone involved. Yet that didn't really get to the root question--why, exactly, do we fetishize or give critical prominence to certain literary forms, but not others. In Ong's and Tedlock's minds (and mine at the moment), this question comes down to the difference between writing and speaking. According to Ong, we live in a predominately literate or a "secondary oral culture" (11). Because of this, we think of even oral performances as something stemming from a text, which is rooted in the arbitrary symbols we have lurking around in our brains. Tedlock, though, blames capitalism when he refers to the "fetishization of the vertabim quotation" (187). I can't deny either of these things. We do associate sounds with typeface in our heads, even if we're not consciously "seeing" a stream of words go by in our minds as we listen to people talk. And for those of us who have had Standard English ingrained into our heads, we do tend to talk like we'd write, though with slight variations under the constraint of having to formulate sentences faster while talking than while writing. And, of course, for those of us in the scholarly field, or those of us who teach MLA, we know how vital it is to give credit where credit's due, and claim your own written ideas whenever possible.

I can't help but wonder, though, how much the actual writing process works its way into our cultural aggrandization of the written word. Yes, verbatim quotation is awesome, but what about the fact that, as Ong points out, some guy has sequestered himself in a room for a while in order to perfect that exact phrasing? Are we as a culture driven immediately to respect this laborious process even more than the agony of standing in front of a giant crowd of people while trying to blurt out coherent and fascinating speech? I think the answer is yes, but not just because of the process. I'd like to suggest that the tools we have to use during the process--pen, pencil, paper, computer, etc.--are awesome (in the original sense of the word) and are unconscious reminders of the historical process it took to get us to the written word in the first place. Furthermore, since a vast majority of us in literate culture are also computer-literate, we've come full circle back to Plato and his fear of the written word (Ong 78-80) in that writing can no longer be special (or marketable, for that matter) if everyone can do it equally well, according to our aesthetic standards. In short, our standards haven't changed, our technology has. We can't just fetishize the written word--we have to fetishize the words written in a particular way, according to a particular standard (scholarly or social). And to get back to my original statement about process, since we're all (more or less) on equal technological footing, we've begun to value the written words that take much more time, effort, thought, education (formal or experiential) to construct (i.e. have a more specialized, training-oriented process).

Question 2: Can we consider music to be a language, according to Ong's standards?

I've come up with a number of possibilities for answering this question in the positive, but simultaneously, I keep coming up with exceptions. For instance, music is something that can be "spoken" in a series of phonemes (just move your mouth around a bit while holding one note, or even go with "do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do). The written form of music came well after humans had the ability to create music, and music in general has a whole arbitrary system of signs and signifiers. The note "C#" represents a sound, and on a musical staff, it's written with a little dot. When you connect all the little dots on the staff in a variety of ways, you can "read" music. BUT where do all the instruments fit in? And what about the fact that music doesn't come naturally to many, many, many people? Everyone inherently gets at least one language in their dominant culture, but not everyone inherently gets music. Or do we? I can hum to you right now (completely out of tune, mind you), and I'm technically making music, but I'm not really making any sense with it. Along these same lines, what about the "meaning" of music? We get feelings from it, and it can certainly conjure powerful images, but not universal ones.