Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

that several of the practices exhibit traits in keeping with what Ong describes as “secondary orality.”²⁷

In our evolutionary journey, speech was the first form of fully matured linguistic communication that all peoples shared as early as 250,000 years ago, and theirs was a world of orality. Orality remains in those cultures around the world for which print is not the dominant mode of communication and to which, incidentally, Western performers in the twentieth-century avant-garde turned for inspiration. Ong interprets orality as imposing total sensory and noetic structures, which McLuhan labels acoustic space.²⁸ In oral societies, people understand their environment through the conglomeration of all their senses: perception is omnidirectional and synesthetic. Peoples dwelling within acoustic space rely upon knowledge that they can remember and retell rather than upon visual proofs of observation and measurement that have to be recorded and referenced elsewhere. Ong believes spoken language as a conduit of knowledge appeals to nonliterate peoples as a “way of life.” Accordingly, in oral societies, one does not sign contracts but takes oaths; one swears and gives one's word as a bond; and above all, one does not lie. Members of oral cultures, therefore, perceive the spoken word as it has been defined in phenomenology: as a living entity, an extension of the self, an action that occurs as an event that emerges from within the living organism and penetrates the interior of another.²⁹ Spoken words, contrary to the semantic cast of Aristotle's thought, are not simply the symbols of mental experience but a mode of action and a part of ongoing existence. In Ong's words, “Oral utterance thus encourages a sense of continuity with life, a sense of participation.”³⁰ In oral cultures, members are kept open to discontinuities and mysteries as they are rooted in tradition, not the empiricism of the visual space of print.

Western cultures living under the heavy cognitive conditioning of print will never return to primary orality because of the rapid technological advances of communication in general. The dominance of the text, if not in books then on the computer, prohibits speech, for a time at least, from reaching its former levels of influence. But the massive use of communication technologies in the public domain, as well as their supplanting