Another chapter in Speech & Writing

Burke is another chapter in the long strange relationship between speech, writing and language. Where we originally looked at the politics and traditions that grew out of each field, we now see the fragments of what once was umbrellaed as rhetoric interact in new ways and in effect create new knowledge. Burke in “What are the Signs of What?” takes the oral and written traditions and put them back in conversation with the more abstract idea of language—words become names, objects become symbols. According to Burke, our mode of communication is really a series of disjointed symbols bound up by context. Like I pointed out last week, this is the sort of theoretical underpinning that shapes Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia. Barthes contributes to the postmodern view of language (a term that really doesn’t “fit” anymore) when he defines text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146).  But it is the clashing and blending that language is actually formed. And language mediates culture.

            We see an example of this clashing and blending and how it informs our thoughts in Foucault’s essay when he troubles what we mean by “work” (103 and again on 104).  But this is a micro example when we begin to take in the much larger picture. Not only is this the difficulty we encounter with a single word; it is also the problematic nature of language (words, phrases, sentence structure, etc.) and, on an even larger level, culture. As Burke notes, “The world is run on the commonsense realistic assumption that there is a fairly accurate correspondence between the realm of everyday sensory objects and the vocabulary that names them” (375). Things get complicated when we begin to question them.

            The study of discourse is broken down by the postmodernists, yet there still seems to be this implicit pursuit of truth (maybe not with a capital t). And in the pursuit of truth new fields are created—like semiotics and cognitive linguistics (generic linguistics gets a shout out from Barthes on page 145). These are more voices adding to the heteroglossic mix of voices that together form perceptions (and hence also form themselves) as well as a sense of society.

            In Lit Theory we’ve been looking at how structures are defined inherently by their differences. That is, we look at the paradoxes that populate a structure and we see that those contradictions are the self-same things that give it its shape. It seems to be much the same for language with its divisions of speech and writing. When examining Cixous, I have to note that she opens the essay with “I shall speak...” (1524). Yet, she is writing. I do not think this is a mere oversight or the clumsiness of everyday language (i.e. “I was talking on facebook”). I think rather that Cixous is examining the contradictions of both traditions as she writes about writing and speaking. All of her thoughts, her language as a whole (both written and spoken)—all of the things that make her her—manifest onto the page. She means to do both. And she draws our attention to it by stating “It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language” (1527). Acting in the same vein as Bakhtin, Focault, and Barthes (dare I include Woolf?), Cixous breaks down the codified systems by which we consume culture and reappropriates them to create some understanding of our practices.