Meaning and authority between speech and writing

Between speech and writing, there is a debate that will always recur over which of the two is better suited to conveying meaning, the correct meaning, to the addressee. In this debate, the arguments in favor of speech are generally more numerous. Because the meaning of speech is a communication that takes place here and now together with the addressee, it is considered indisputably more advantageous than writing. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of writing too is to record a communicative event whose original is speech. All the punctuation marks in writing likewise aim to load the intonations of speech onto the written text in such a way as to eliminate the possibilities of misunderstanding.

Incidentally, it is certain that the recording of the recitation of the Holy Qur'an with the rules of tajwid also ensures that the text is not left in the passivity of writing but continually repeats the power of speech. A person hears with his ears what he reads, and a recitation performed with fixed tajwid rules places the person under the influence of the text rather than letting him establish control over it.

In general, from the moment speech passes into writing, an effort is made to clothe the style of the text with the real communicative setting that may be lost, preserving it as far as possible. However much one may wish it, though, the power of the word realized through speech cannot be loaded onto writing. For the power of speech arises from the fact that the speaker and the listener realize the speech together, in the same setting, within the same reality, interacting directly with one another. In oral communication the realization of meaning is not postponed or deferred. Against the possibility of misunderstanding, the speaker repeats his words with different intonations or different tactics, realizing speech as an interaction, a dialogue.

The writer, too, in fact assumes such a setting of speech and takes measures, in his own way, to ensure that the reader understands what he says at the moment of reading. But from the moment he writes his text, who will read it, what level, capacity, age, gender and experience the reader may have, and at what time he will read it are no longer under his control. The realization of meaning has now been deferred and postponed.

IS WRITING AN INSTRUMENT OF POWER?

In contrast to this power traditionally attributed to speech, a very interesting historiography has seen writing as one of the first instruments of domination. The structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who produced important analyses and theses on oral and written culture, for example, draws a direct link between the emergence of writing and slavery.

"If my hypothesis is correct," he says, "the primary function of writing as a means of communication is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and for the intellectual and aesthetic satisfactions of the mind, is a secondary result of its invention, and may even be no more than a way of strengthening, justifying or concealing its primary function." (Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques: 292).

Where he derived this from is unknown, but it is certain that there is an approach that affirms and sanctifies the power and advantage attributed to speech. It is an unnecessary heterodoxy, or a romanticization of oral-traditional culture. According to this logic, writing is by its nature an institution that only urban people carry out, after going through a certain cultural discipline, conforming to a certain order and taking part in a certain consensus. Writing, which requires a discipline whatever its nature may be, provides the ground necessary for the spread of all the established hierarchies of urban life, and in doing so it establishes its first power, from this basic level onward, over rural people who will be unable to adapt to it. What comes after that goes on however it is established. This is the most fundamental logic behind the necessary pairing of written culture with power.

IS SPEECH MORE LIBERATING?

Considering the historical and social function of writing, and once one is aware of the nature of the realization of speech and meaning, the identification of writing with power turns out to be a very hasty inference. Indeed, Jacques Derrida explains that this liberating dimension attributed to speech is a thoroughly Western myth. He says that speech is much more prone than writing to feeding despotic power relations. For speech, in the setting where it is uttered, does not leave its addressee at ease; the tone of voice, the gestures and facial expressions, and the hierarchical position of the speaker make themselves felt as an element of pressure, and it is of a nature that gives the addressee no possibility of understanding it otherwise than as the speaker wishes. He claims that the meaning we suppose to be realized during speech is in fact nothing but an event in which people impose their authority on one another.

For the rhetorical, hierarchical or charismatic superiorities that inevitably come into play in oral relations decide what is true. Speech gains validity not because of the truth it contains but according to the speaker's position, talent, rhetoric, skill and humor. In oral culture, that is, in traditional culture where there is no written culture, because of the very rigid hierarchies, speech generally produces and spreads truth in a one-sided manner, and resisting it is much harder.

When there is a legal dispute, it is even harder to stand against oral authority. Written law, on the other hand, constitutes a reference that also protects the weak, and offers a possibility, a refuge, that can protect people against the charismatic or traditional authorities of oral culture.

Writing has been less a weapon that those in power use against the illiterate than a means that limits power itself, places it on record, enables its movements to be monitored, and obstructs arbitrariness in the exercise of power. Whereas against domination established through oral culture alone there would be no force capable of limiting it and thus protecting the masses against power.

Writing is in fact, rather than something against the illiterate, a means that protects the rights of the people against states.