Ong

In 1986, Walter Ong in his essay _Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought_ writes that "without a deep understanding of /../the noetic economy of humankind before writing came along, it is impoosible to grasp what writing [has] accomplished"

In relation to the ability to "re-begin" again: "[In an oral culture] everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors. Otherwise these truths will escape and culture will be back on square one where it started before the ancestors got the truths from their ancestors. "

"Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. Writing is simply a thing, something to be manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a manufactured product. We recognize here the same complaint that is made against computers: they are artificial contrivances, foreign to human life" (11)

"As Eric Havelock has beautifully shown in his Preface to Plato (1963) Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the archaic preliterate world of thought and discourse. The world was oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive (you needed live people to produce spoken words). It was the world represented by poets, whom Plato would not allow in his Republic, because, although Plato could not formulate it this way, their thought processes and modes of expression were disruptive of the cool, analytic processes generated by writing...." (22)
--> Plato's multiple designations of the Chora seem to suggest a flawed memory. One that cannot remember past designations and thus is always reinventing, misremembering.

"Once reduced to space, words are frozen and in a sense dead. Yet there is a pradox in the fact that the deadness of the written or printed text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a limitless number of living readers. The dead, thing-like text has potentials far outdistancing those of the simply spoken world. The complementary paradox, however, isthat the written text, for all its permanence, means nothing, is not even a text, except in relationship to the spoken world. For a text to be intelligible, to deliver its message, it must be reconverted into sound, directly or indirectly, either really in the external world or in an auditory imagination. All verbal expression is ineluctably bound to sound forever" (23).

[Chora/Writing as (already) Alien] Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the wod. Such transformations of consciousness can be uplifting at the same time that they are in a sense alienating. By distancing thought, alientating it from its original habitat in sounded words, writing raises consciousness. Alientation from natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential fuller human life. (23)