The Seventh Function of Language

He is up against a fairly young speaker. She responds that all one need do to verify that we are not in a dictatorship is read the newspapers (like Le Monde, earlier this week, which ran a headline about the government reading: “Failure across the board”; and there have been more severe criticisms than that…), and she offers as proof the attacks by Marchais, Chirac, Mitterrand, etc. For a dictatorship, there is a healthy amount of freedom of expression. And, talking of de Gaulle, let’s not forget what was said about him: de Gaulle is fascist. The Fifth Republic is fascist. The Constitution is fascist. The Permanent Coup d’Etat, etc. Her peroration goes on: “To say that Giscard is a fascist is an insult to history; it is to spit on the victims of Mussolini and Hitler. Go and ask the Spanish what they think. Go and ask Jorge Semprun if Giscard is Franco! Shame on rhetoric when it betrays the past!” Prolonged applause. After a brief deliberation, the judges declare the young woman the victor. Looking thrilled, she shakes her opponent’s hand, then gives the audience a little curtsy.

There is a series of debates. The candidates are happy or unhappy, the audience applauds or boos, there is whistling, there is yelling … and then we come to the climax of the night: the “digital duel.”

Subject: The written word versus the spoken word.

The old man rubs his hands: “Ah! A metasubject! Using language to discuss language, there’s nothing better. I adore that. Look, their levels are shown on the board: it’s a young rhetorician challenging an orator so he can take his place. So it’s the rhetorician who goes first. I wonder which point of view he’ll choose. There is often one argument that’s harder to make but if you want to impress the jury and the audience it can be a good idea to choose the difficult one. With the more obvious positions, it can be harder to shine, because what you say is likely to be more straightforward, less spectacular…”

The old man stops talking. The match is about to start. There is a fevered silence as everyone in the room listens intently. The aspirant orator begins his speech confidently:

“Religions of the Book forged our societies and we made their texts sacred: the Tablets of Stone, the Ten Commandments, the Torah scroll, the Bible, the Koran, and so on. To be valid, it must be engraved. I say: fetishism. I say: superstition. I say: dogmatism.

“It is not I who affirms the superiority of the spoken word, but he who made us what we are, o thinkers, o rhetoricians, the father of dialectics, our common ancestor, the man who without ever writing a single book laid the foundations of all Western thought.

“Remember! We are in Egypt, in Thebes, and the king asks: What is the point of writing? And the god responds: It is the ultimate cure for ignorance. And the king says: On the contrary! In fact, this art will breed forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it because they will stop using their memories. The act of remembering is not memory, and the book is merely an aide-mémoire. It does not offer knowledge, it does not offer understanding, it does not offer mastery.

“Why would students need professors if they could learn everything they need from books? Why do they need what is in those books to be explained? Why are there schools and not just libraries? Because the written word alone is never enough. All thought is alive on the condition that it is exchanged; if it is frozen in place, it is dead. Socrates compares writing to painting: the beings created by painting stand in front of us as if they were alive; but when we question them, they remain petrified in a formal pose and don’t speak a word. And the same goes for writing. One might believe that the written word can speak; but if we question it, because we wish to understand it, it always repeats the same thing, down to the last syllable.

“Language produces a message, which has meaning only to the extent that it has a recipient. I am speaking to you now; you are the raison d’être of my speech. Only madmen speak in the desert. And the madman also talks to himself. But in a text, to whom are the words addressed? To everyone! And thus to no one. When each discourse has been written down for good and all, it passes indifferently to those who understand it and those who have no interest in it. A text without a precise recipient is a guarantee of imprecision, of vague and impersonal words. How could any message be suited to everyone? Even a letter is inferior to any kind of conversation: it is written in a certain context, and received in another. Besides, both the author’s and the recipient’s situation will have changed later. It is already obsolete; it was addressed to someone who no longer exists, and its author no longer exists either, vanished in the depths of time as soon as the envelope was sealed.