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Watch how you speak

Speech as a combat sport

When speech dislocates the world

We live in a world of sound and fury; a world dominated by information technology, by the clicks and clacks of a keyboard. A world of rumours, of tweets, of bashing and clashing, of fake news, swipes, and wars of words: of LOL and like. It is a digital world of finger-pointing, governed by a new Index of Prohibited Words, Thoughts, and Authors (even though this Index is no longer drawn up by the Vatican) where a new form of thumbs-up (or thumbs-down) can decide one's fate and with a global pillory in which deviants can be locked and exhibited. The world is now a global network where a single word can kill.

Never before has humanity done so much talking. This situation is historically without precedent and in many respects it represents an almost unimaginable opportunity. Everyone is constantly expressing themselves, letting themselves go, explaining their views at great length, sounding off, taking offence, starting arguments. Constant chattering is everywhere. But is anyone listening? For that matter, are people even speaking to each other? What kind of game is being played here? Who is it who is speaking? Now everyone has a voice, can take a public position, or even shout it from the rooftops. In one sense, that gives everyone a chance to speak, but what kind of chance is that in reality? The answer depends very much on who is speaking, what they are saying, in whose name they claim to speak, whom they are addressing, on the 'how' and 'why' of their intervention.

Just look at how we speak and see how much our humanity has been diminished. How are we using this exceptional power - speech - which we possess? In the contemporary world, we are witnessing a catastrophic degradation of the realm of speech: enunciation becomes denunciation, stigmatization, destruction. Words divide, whether or not they are spoken with destructive intention. For many of us, they have lost their meaning. Speech nowadays is not a domain in which reflection takes place, but one in which linguistic tokens devoid of sense are deployed in a violent game, where the destructive turmoil on the surface actually has the effect of removing important things from our field of vision, and covering over what is essential. For us today, the realm of speech has overwhelmingly become a space of concealment and distortion.

We suffer from verbal inflation; our discourse is devalued; our messages become worthless; what we say is no longer creditworthy. The conditions under which exchanges take place have deteriorated, and the value of the Other has been massively reduced. This, at any rate, is the direction in which things are moving. The flood of words becomes a mere vehicle for the expression of momentary and unmediated impulses. Logorrhoea goes hand in hand with an increasing lack of content. All that is left is blind vanity, which leaves open a place that is occupied by increasingly radical, and increasingly irresponsible, assertions.

Even as it proliferates, speech, in many of its contemporary forms, is undergoing a process of degradation. The result is a trivialization and instrumentalization of one of our most precious resources. It becomes a means of dividing and humiliating people, and of making them cruder and coarser than they were. The destruction of meaning debases the speaker while degrading the listener. The social bond is torn apart.

Speech is essential and must be properly valued and esteemed

This text makes a simple appeal: we must value speech properly; otherwise the current explosion of forms of expression, far from being a sign that we are treating our common humanity as a sacred trust, will rather be an indicator of our social atomization. Who are we and by what right do we make such an appeal? We are artists of the spoken word, artisans of speech in action, workers engaged in the maintenance of the social bond; we tell stories and pass on history, we create meaning and open up spaces in which people can encounter each other directly. We speak in the name of arts that are already three thousand years old. Arts which since the dawn of time have shaped the human heart, and have laboured, over the course of ages, to allow our humanity to emerge and express itself. Arts which even today make us all a very generous offer: they offer us the possibility of transcending ourselves.

We think that the cultivation of speech is more vital today than ever because speech by its very nature is what brings our social existence to life. Understood in the fullest and most substantial sense, speech expresses our quintessence. It is an essential domain which is never irrelevant. This is because it is the place where meaning is crystallized, discourse intersects with action, and thought gets its motivational power. If it is properly thought through and inspired, and appropriately focused on its audience, speech manifests the power of verbal articulation and the resonance of words, and it brings texts to life in the present. When it is shared among the members of a real existing community, it gives each one a public presence, allowing them to take a position and give an opinion; oral presentation is the life-blood of language, what gives it substance. It is multifarious in its functions and uses, and precisely for that reason it encompasses all the dimensions of our life.

Against the impoverishment of speech

We refuse to reduce speech to any of its aetiolated spectres: to mere disruptive shouting or sly insinuation; to the mere conformist repetition of 'what people say' or gossip which purports to give the reader the inside dope; to mere chatter or to just a spray of words that pulverize and humiliate. Speech that is broken up into a mere succession of pitiful slogans, sound-bites, laughable 'messages', and empty platitudes held together by an empty shell of syntax is an eviscerated caricature of itself.

We refuse to allow language and speech to be remade in the sad image of those Four Musketeers of the contemporary world: Fake News, Clashos, Bashos, and Box Office.

We will not make way for those who wish to give the last word to 'the image' on the grounds that it, we are told, 'tells the whole story'. We who are speaking to you know that the visible is not everything; that which is essential is invisible to the human eye. In some sense, even the ear is an organ of procreation because babies come from our using our ears and listening.1

In the beginning was the word, but now in the end it is verbiage that is accumulating. We are not prepared to accept that the globalization of speech must be a process of dilapidation, and language a more and more standardized and homogeneous 'product'. The transformation of speech into a commodity to be bought and sold on the mass market is a form of alienation and degradation. Meaning comes to be atomized, reduced to disconnected elements that are themselves mere grains of nothingness. Thought cannot be reduced to slogans, info-bites, or clichés, as it is in the world of 'two tweets, three seconds, four emoticons, two hundred and eighty characters'. We are not prepared to grant to the medium the unrestricted, sole power to determine all content, and to see in it nothing but a mere flux of constantly shifting impressions.

We reject the culture of the disposable word, fit only to be thrown on the rubbish heap immediately after use. We are people who exert ourselves to the utmost, working patiently day and night to find a way through the mass of empty claims floating on the surface of the Lethe: the River of Forgetfulness. Our goal is to arrive at a place where we can construct, through our work, what the Greek historian Thucydides called 'a possession which will last for all time'.2 Chatter passes away; speech remains, and it is speech which holds us in thrall; which allows us to keep our feet on the ground and maintain our balance; which undergirds the very existence of a 'we'; which connects us with everything.

In a world of universal cacophony, we choose instead the resonance of that which is essential. We choose the passion of interaction over the tyranny implicit in the slogan 'it's all about me'. We prefer the gentle susurrus of language to the loud braying of opinion, the weight of meaning to the emptiness of formulae, the intensity of attention to the inanity of channel-surfing. We prefer to assume the responsibility of articulating a position rather than simply engaging in non-committal palaver. Rather than withdraw behind a computer screen, we choose the communion which is established when different people are physically in one another's presence. The virtual realm is a realm of impunity, but we prefer real embodied experience with all its vulnerability and responsibilities. Instead of the complacency of brute force, we choose conscientious application of skill in addressing one another: we welcome difference instead of being perpetually on the look out for 'deviancies' to reject. We prefer the culture of exchange to the cult of the self; shared humanity to the simulacra of 'community' which the media offer.

We ground our work, our action, our motivation - our very existence - on speech. We cannot but note the denigration and degeneration which speech has had to endure in the contemporary world. Knowing all the facts, we have taken the full measure of the destruction this dire state of...