There’s a line from Barthes’ chapter, Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers that nicely captures our tutorial dynamics: “language is always a matter of force, to speak is to exercise a will for power, in the realm of speech there is no innocence, no safety.”
Meanwhile all this talking about writing has prompted me to go back and have a look at Barthes main concept: that writing and speaking exist in opposition and have their own, very different, sets of considerations.
While to speak, he says, is to engage in the battle for power, the act of speaking also puts a person in a vulnerable position. The favoured example here is the teacher, whose speech-based job entails being psychoanalysed by an audience, unable to the gauge how his speech is being received and summarised (read: bastardised) by his students. Given that the teacher speaks to the student, and the student writes to the teacher, what kind of power relations are revealed in this exchange of knowledge and words? Equal to the way the teacher’s speech is summarised into notes, the student’s essay is summarised by one or two crucial letters: F, P, C, D or HD.
In some cases, I think writing and speaking are far more aligned than Barthes' framework gives them credit for. He says “the precise phrase is truly a sentence, a sentential, an act of penal speech”, thus the curse of the perfect speaker is that – jailed by the need to speak with clarity – he doesn’t speak at all, dismissing all discourse as “futile”. But can’t the writer operate in the same self-conscious bubble of fruitless perfectionism? Writer’s block, anyone?
Also, doesn’t writing put us in the same position of vulnerability as speaking? Sure, we can retract words, but if they’re read once and never again, the visual imprint they leave on the reader’s mind could potentially be even stronger then the aural memory of an audience. The public airing of our words – via blogs, twitter, status updates, and the occasional column for Honi Soit – still carries the risk of being summarised, judged, or otherwise analysed by a discerning reader. Not to mention that the reader is invisible; eavesdroppers aside, we generally know who is receiving our speech, but many sites of publication ensure we can never keep track of who is reading – or will read – our words.
According to Barthes the “odour of speech” is located in the “remanence" of speaking, the afterthought during which “one exalts or regrets what one has said” and correspondingly imagines themselves. He adds that writing has no smell, but on this note I beg to differ. I’ve experienced the gamut of reactions in the afterthought of writing, and suspect this is the same process, only delayed; it takes longer write than to speak, and longer to read than to listen, so it follows that the subsequent regret or exaltation takes longer to kick in. For Virginia Woolfe, this was the length of time it took to write, publish and reread her novel, manifesting in the cut-and-paste amendments we saw in the rare books library.
If, as Barthes says, “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible”, then there’s an awful lot that can be written that we wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly utter aloud. What we write stays with us, and can linger like dog poo on our shoe. Surely this is the stench of writing.
I definitely agree that writing is a more "memorable" discourse than speech. The way it can be read, re-read, printed out etc means it becomes a far more vulnerable activity than speaking. I find if I need to remind myself of something, the best hope that I will remember it will be to write it down. For me, words on paper (or on the computer screen) trigger more memory than speech. For aural language to be meaningful for a person, repetition is required which we do not necessarily get.
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting, the part about speaking being more vulnerable. Of course you can revise and rethink your writing, but if it is never destroyed it can always be re-found. Speech may be forgotten, by those who heard it and those who spoke it. I love to talk, a most vocal and verbal person am I. I feel most safe uttering words than writing them down to be criticised later.
ReplyDeleteWhen Barthes was elected au head of Literature at the Academie in France he gave an inaugural speech. In this he stated outright that language is facist. As you can imagine this caused something of a shit storm that is very much anti-facist, and steeped in socialist tradition. But I think he had a point, and it ties into his arguments vis a vis authorship and readership. when we read, or write, our words are not as totalitarian. But when we speak we force the listener, to listen. It becomes a power attack. as he says criticism always leads to a defensive statement or utterance.
ReplyDeleteWhile there is still a tyranny of power associated with reading, ie you can't answer back, i think it is less offensive. It treats power in a different way. What interests me is how Barthes would take to blogs. The flow of statement, comment and response seems like a wonderful balance between reader and writer that functions in a free space. Viva le interwebs.