Who can speak?
Episode 3
"Speech needs the surrounding
presence of others",
wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Speech, if you recall, is a specifically
human level of language.
It draws us towards others,
towards our fellow man,
it incites us to share our experiences,
to try to understand one other,
and to convince others,
and ultimately, it allows us to build
and to live in a common world.
Speech is what makes us political animals,
but speech is fragile,
and language can be perverted,
and manipulated by some
to subjugate others.
The miracle of speech
can be turned into a misfortune.
This instrument of emancipation,
this tool for achieving freedom
can be used as a weapon to subjugate.
Speech is therefore not
a strictly private matter,
but also a political matter
in terms of how society
is organised,
how we live together,
and the role we accord to speech.
What political form is there
that then can accommodate
and protect speech
if it is not democracy
as initially intended by the Greeks?
Democracy provides a sanctuary for speech
by giving everyone the possibility
to express themselves, and to speak
in a central public space,
which does not belong to anybody
in particular, but to everyone:
this is what the Greeks
called the 'Agora'.
In this common space,
we are all considered equal
regardless of our wealth or status
outside the Agora.
This is the essential prerequisite
for ensuring free speech.
The precept of democracy
could not be either to order
or to obey,
because if all individuals are equal,
they cannot be a servant to,
or a master over
their fellow men.
By instituting speech
at the heart of the city,
democracy provides an alternative
to physical violence,
and promotes the art of convincing
over subjugation.
Democracy therefore constitutes
the rule of speech
in two respects:
firstly, because it creates,
and ensures the prerequisites
for exercising free speech,
as we just saw.
Secondly, it does not advocate violence
as a driving force of history,
but promotes speech as a mode
of action and intervention
in the world, and over the world.
Let us just stop for a moment
on this second crucial point.
Words are speech acts
which produce effects.
Words are gestures of thought
which produce effects.
These are referred to
as 'performative utterances'.
Language is a creating force.
Let us consider a specific situation:
I say 'Yes, I do'
before the registrar.
On pronouncing those words
"yes, I do", my status changes.
I go from being a fiancé to being a husband,
and my fiancée becomes my wife,
which creates a number of legal
obligations towards each other,
a number of duties.
Let's take the same situation again,
but let's make it more political in nature.
The Catalan people were asked to vote
on the question of independence in 2017,
i.e. 'yes' or 'no' to Catalan independence.
If the result had been recognised
by the Spanish king and government,
then Catalonia would have ipso facto
become a sovereign and independent state.
As you can clearly see,
words are not only used
to designate, describe,
communicate and inform,
they also help create
the world that we share.
By using words to name, classify,
structure and to organise,
words influence our perception
and change how things fit into the world,
both for better and for worse.
There is clearly an ethical relationship
that is formed between the word
and the thing it designates,
and this ethical relationship concerns us,
all of us, as the speaking subject.
This concept may appear somewhat abstract,
so let's think of some very specific
situations to help us understand.
Let us consider the terms:
'asylum seekers',
'refugees', 'illegal immigrants',
'exiles',
do they designate the same thing?
What view of the world
is conjured up by each of these terms.
Let us now consider the terms:
'unemployed',
'on the dole', 'job seeker',
what do these words convey?
I will leave you to think
about this question,
and decide for yourself.
By acting on, and influencing
words and language,
we influence our representations
and our emotions.
And who knows, we are perhaps
influencing our thoughts,
getting into each other's heads,
and affecting our thoughts.
This is the bold hypothesis
formulated by George Orwell
in his famous dystopic novel "1984".
As well as his popular
'Big Brother' imagery:
"Big Brother is watching you",
George Orwell formulated
the following hypothesis:
Through the impoverishment
of language functions,
the state can exert absolute
control over the people.
This 'destruction of words'
is adeptly described by one
of the agents of the regime:
"A word contains its opposite in itself.
Take 'good', for instance.
If you have a word like 'good',
what need is there for a word like 'bad'?
'Ungood' will do just as well – better,
because it's an exact opposite,
which the other is not.
Or again, if you want
a stronger version of 'good',
what sense is there in having
a whole string of vague useless words
like 'excellent' and 'splendid'
and all the rest of them?
'Plusgood'
covers the meaning,
or if you want something stronger still.
there is 'doubleplusgood'"
This 'Newspeak', this destruction
of words is designed
to limit the freedom of thought,
and to prevent the very idea
of freedom or revolt,
from germinating in minds
which have become docile and numb.
Allow me to read you another passage:
"How could you have a slogan
like 'freedom is slavery'
when the concept of freedom
has been abolished?
The whole climate of thought
will be different.
In fact there will be no thought,
as we understand it now.
Orthodoxy means not thinking
—not needing to think."
Such is the world that
George Orwell describes.
Language is no longer
an alternative to violence.
It is a fact of violence.
By looking after words,
by looking after language,
we are also looking after
what makes us free and equal,
but some 'traffickers' of language
distort speech for personal gain.
These included the sophists,
denounced by the Greeks,
these include the demagogues.
I will let you complete this list.
These traffickers of words,
these speechmakers of empty rhetoric,
undermine the very cornerstones of democracy,
since "it makes speech futile",
as Giorgio Agamben brilliantly put it:
"The connection to language weakens,
and the ethical and political pact,
that sustains society,
crumbles."
However, if democratic speech is undermined,
then tyranny is not far behind.
If one form of speech fails,
then another will quickly take
its place, and impose itself.
This new language will ensure
that it is believed and obeyed,
i.e. it is the language of
the chief, the commander,
the language of Mussolini,
the language of Hitler.
In addition to the well-known techniques
of propaganda used by totalitarian regimes,
anyone who experienced such times,
whether partisans or opponents,
torturers or victims,
would have been contaminated
by the mortiferous and hysterical language
of Fascism, and above all Nazism.
It was this contamination
that Victor Klemperer
endeavoured to describe in his work:
"The Language of the Third Reich: LTI",
a classical work,
written during an absolutely
extraordinary context:
Victor Klemperer was a Jew,
married to an Aryan women,
who lost his position at the university
with the advent of the Third Reich.
He was also prohibited
from visiting libraries,
and would have been deported
if he had not been married
to an Aryan women.
Since he had to go
to the factory every morning,
he took the time, at 4 a.m.,
to write down in his diary
the words and expressions
used by the Nazis.
He used the abbreviation 'LTI'
to stand for "Lingua Tertii Imperii",
i.e. the language of the Third Reich.
For Klemperer, the Nazi language
was characterised
by its impoverished language,
and paradoxically, this
was made it so powerful.
Everyone immediately reacts
to the words of this language
without having to think.
Klemperer wrote in his diary:
"Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic:
they are swallowed unnoticed,
appear to have no effect,
and then after a little time
the toxic reaction sets in after all."
LTI, the language of the Third Reich
is that of the leader,
which trickles down from top to bottom,
and which infiltrates the whole of society.
Its style is the invocation:
"Everything is speech,
and everything is public".
Its form is based on repetition,
on hammering home its message,
regardless of the meaning of the words,
regardless of the facts,
language is the Regime,
and the Regime is everything.
Even if democracy and
the totalitarian regime
both believe in the power of the language,
the status accorded to speech
is dramatically different:
while totalitarianism is shrouded
in the fantasy of an
absolute form of speech,
one which delights in itself,
and which is not overburdened
with reality or facts,
democracy acknowledges
the insufficiency of language,
the inability of words to express everything,
and to espouse reality
as a constituent part of our human experience
and the force that draws us
towards one another.
