Voice Conceived by a Textualist： Walter J.Ong’s Critique of Jacques Derrida’s Logocentrism

As an American media theorist, Walter J. Ong's comments on Jacques Derrida's"Logocentrism"are too specialized to be noticed by Chinese academia. Although admitting Derrida's attention to voice as a medium for the dissemination of information, Walter Ong still regarded the former's standpoint as a"textualist"and called Derrida's'voice'a fiction of textualism. From the research of Renaissance French Logician Peter Ramus, Walter Ong uncovered the transformation of intellectual history caused by early modern Western media transformations:pre-modern Western logic scholars treated the representation of things as the occurrences and disappearances of events, whereas modern writingprint media led to objective modes of representation. Ong tried to discover a"positive"sound medium. However, his"sound-event"corresponds to the representation of things by oral media, while"word-object"corresponds to the representation of things by written and print media, which is still a rigid dichotomy. This binary opposition cannot prevent Ong from committing the same pitfalls of the textualist standpoint that he criticizes. Walter Ong's descriptions of the evolutionary history from audio-oral media to writing-print media is not a real"pole"study, but a biased mapping onto the"intellectual advances"of the modern Western media revolution, which eventually led to the legitimatizing of the leading role of Western civilization and Puritan-American culture in the contemporary media-shaping process. This ideological premise comes from his mentor Perry Miller, and is influenced by the Cultural Cold War of America and the USSR in the 20 th century. Influenced by this political situation, he had to defend both the privilege of sound and the hegemony of writing at the same time, which made his research on media history finally lead to a self-contradictory conclusion