epistemontology

I think you pose an interesting question Ruthie (in your response to my 'Thucydotus' post). Does the fact of these works' composition indicate a major shift in the subjectivity of humankind? Are people with oral history so different than people with written history? I agree that Havelock's work -and Parry's, and Ong's, and especially McLuhan's, etc.- is/are brilliant; this is a very interesting object of study. I guess we'll get even deeper into this when we look at the printing press stuff, with Eisenstein... I wonder though, if we aren't making a kind of error here; what I've been trying to argue for is that while the means, the mechanisms, whereby culture is transmitted might change, and while we might identify a series of major epochal shifts in our historiography of these changes, this doesn't necessarily mean that what is being transmitted has changed as much as it might appear. In other words, while the means and modes of transmission have indeed undergone a series of stochastic mutations, and while this series of formal ruptures has undoubtedly had profound effects on human history, I still think that it is quite possible -and indeed, I think it is probable- that the meanings of these messages, the substance of human culture itself, its semantic content, has not in fact undergone a similar series of discontinuities, but has actually evolved much more continuously than our research would lead us to believe. I think that Latour's work supports this view, for example; I guess we're getting there...
To take another tack: when we identify these discontinuities in the technical sphere, we impute their structure onto lived experience itself, thereby seemingly to demonstrate that lived culture is not as continuous as we seem to believe, on the basis of our personal experience. So we are using history to demonstrate a level of discontinuity beneath the supposedly smooth surface level of our lived experience. This approach has perhaps emerged and constituted itself as a necessary corrective to the whiggish classical historiography of the post-enlightenment period, in which where all evidence was gathered in to the eurolinear scheme of progressive evolution...
But doesn't this approach, by taking this eurocentric, hegelian continuity of whig history its enemy, so to speak -the object of its motivating anxiety- actually privilege the very assumption of lived continuity that it purports to problematize? In effect, by saying, "look, history is not as continuous as the present!" do we not thereby fall for the 'trick' assumption precisely of the continuity of the present?!
So identifying these ruptures in history, in a way, only strengthens the basic illusion that it is intended to dispel: namely, that the present moment is immediately present to consciousness, and that on the basis of the information available to us 'here and now', we might approximately (with a reasonable, computable margin of uncertainty) make judgements about the truth of states of affairs inhering elsewhere, on whose interference our own identities must depend, and vice versa. In short, do we not have to raise this, not only as an epistemological issue, but as an ontological one as well? What are the natures of occurrence and determinacy? These questions are far from settled, especially in the realms -like physics- where they are studied in a rigorously scientific fashion... More on this perhaps, a bit later... I'm currently reading Ilya Prigogine's "The End of Certainty", which I highly recommend for a beautiful exposition of the contemporary scientific status of these questions about time and occurrence; he points to deeply-set, persistent habits of thought within which we cannot possibly handle these matters effectively, and suggests a fascinating solution...