Operating in the Space between Deed and Word

          
     Plato and Ong both argue that there is a space between the actions and substances of everyday life and the written word.. These result in a substantial difference between oral and written discourse. Oral discourse, Ong argues, is not a thing but an event; an evanescent  moment when discourse is partially coming to be and passing away. Because the utterance is tied to a specific moment, it is more authentic for that moment, more closely tied to the truth of that moment. When the same information is committed to writing, it becomes permanent, but at the same time divorced from the moment. By extension then, the spoken word is present in/with the moment to which it refers and contains contextuality with the event to which the discourse refers.
Writing  allows for interpretation outside the context of the event which inspired it. Because the interpretive experience is at a remove from the immediate truth, there is more room for interpretive play. Words are no longer tied to “that rock right there,” but instead signify an abstracted rock. Now the reader can substitute the rock in his/her yard or the one she/he climbed yesterday. Meaning shifts from something quite specific into the interpretive space of the reader’s experience.
For Plato, this distancing is problematic. Plato is dealing with Truth which for him is objectively knowable. Through oral dialectic this Truth can be pinned. Questions and refutations can be immediately answered to the satisfaction of all. When writing becomes the mode, the text becomes a thing in itself automatically at a remove from  Truth. The focus shifts from the thing in the text to the thing that is the text.
Oral discourse leaves less room for interpretive play as the referential nature of the discourse is tied to a common context in time and in space that both speaker and interpreter share. The language is necessarily more present to the event. Standing near the rock in questions it is far less reasonable to wonder “What rock does she mean?”.  The same information in written form removes itself from a fixed place and time. The reader then is freer to place their own referential framework over the discourse. Interpretation becomes a personal play with the text not circumscribed by immediate dictates of place and time.