Speech, science and rhetoric

The opposition between speech and writing is one of the most important oppositions that built Western metaphysics. According to the general view, speech possesses all the equipment that ensures the realization of meaning here and now. It therefore allows meaning to be realized more fully. Writing, on the contrary, because it cannot provide the temporal and spatial encounter that the realization of meaning requires, continually defers and postpones meaning. And this process of deferral and postponement works as a powerful weapon for those in power to establish and maintain dominion over illiterate masses. That is why, as we noted on a previous occasion, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has important analyses and theses on oral and written culture, for example, drew a direct connection 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 satisfactions of the mind in the fields of science or the arts, is a secondary result of its invention, and may even be no more than a way of strengthening, justifying or concealing its primary function."

In the logic at work here there is in fact the affirmation and sanctification of the power and advantage attributed to speech in the whole of Western metaphysics. In fact, once again a eulogy to a familiar oral-traditional culture or to the power of oral expression. According to this logic, writing, by its nature, is an institutionalization that only urban people carry out after passing through a certain cultural discipline, conforming to a certain order, taking part in a convention. Writing, which requires a discipline whatever its nature, while providing the necessary ground for the spread of all the established hierarchies of urban life, establishes its first power over the rural people who cannot adapt to it, from this basic level on. What comes after is built as it is built anyway. This is the most basic logic of the necessary meeting of written culture with power.

The famous French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida explains that this liberating dimension attributed to speech is a complete Western myth. He says speech is much more prone than writing to nourishing despotic relations of power. For speech, on the ground where it is uttered, does not leave its addressee at ease; the tone of voice, 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 does not allow the addressee to understand it other than as the speaker wants. He claims that the meaning we suppose is realized during speech is in fact nothing but an event in which people impose their authority on one another.

Because rhetoric, hierarchical or charismatic superiorities, which inevitably come into play in oral relations, decide what is right. Speech gains validity not because of the truth it contains but according to the position, the talent, the rhetoric, the skill, the humor of the speaker. 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 unilaterally, and it is much harder to resist it.

When there is a legal dispute, it is much harder to resist oral authority. Yet written law constitutes the reference that will also protect the weak; it offers a possibility, a refuge that can protect people against the charismatic or traditional authorities of oral culture.

Writing has been less a weapon used by those in power against the illiterate than a possibility that limits power itself, puts it on record, enables its movements to be monitored, and prevents arbitrariness in the exercise of power. Yet there is no force that could limit domination established by an exclusively oral culture, and therefore protect the masses against power.

Writing is in fact, rather than being against the illiterate, a possibility that protects the people's rights against states.

After a long quotation from an earlier article of mine, I would like to say this: just as the move from speech to writing was regarded as a sign of civilization, we strangely observe that the highly advanced civilized world we live in today, through the media, is taking all people back, through the visual and speech industry, to a point behind even oral culture.

A culture of communication that serves to distort reality, that does not realize meaning here and now but brings truth under its tight control through it, twists it as it likes, disguises it as it likes, has become dominant through visual media.

That messages are conveyed through impressive speeches instead of writing does not serve truth; at most it makes some superstitions more persuasive with the tyranny of that oral culture. Being persuasive is not speaking the truth; it is a result that can be achieved merely by having a good mouth for words. If the meaning carried by speech, which is persuasive through the narrator's physical appearance, adornment, aesthetic presentation, story and strong rhetoric, is not truth, the shields that will protect a person against falsehood weaken to the same degree.

The Enlightenment had deployed scientific knowledge against rhetoric. According to this understanding, rhetoric would corrupt scientific character. Nietzsche showed that this position beyond rhetoric that scientific knowledge attributes to itself is an illusion. Today we have come to the point of having to seek that science, scientific thought, be exempt from rhetoric at least to a minimal degree. The rhetoric of oral and visual culture has enveloped the whole of scientific production and theses.

We have almost come to a situation in which scientific theses not expressed through visual media, rhetorical dazzle, effective eloquence and shows are not even counted as having a place in the parsing (iraptan mahalli).

In such an environment, who will hope for help from where, and how, for the lost truth?