Page 46 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

From the Popular to the People 21

3. Speech and writing, considered in themselves as practices, tech-
niques or modes of communication, irrespective of historical
configurations, are qualitatively different practices which cannot
be reconciled or subsumed under a third term, as two species of
the same genre, which could be referred to as to their common
milieu of origin. No functional homology nor common measure
exists between them. Their difference constitutes them as sig-
nificantly distinct from one another. Their specific mode of
operating as medium of communication should be assessed.
4. With regard to cognitive processes, the differential assessment of
both the practices cannot remain a purely technical and object-
ive appraisal. For instance, in Western cultural configurations,
orality is defined, relative to the definite writing systems as that
which stands out as its indefinite residual leftover. Script means
linearity, coherence and self-disciplined mental operation. It
aims at cognitive construction, cultural production and social
dominance. Orality is subordinate, inert, expressively redundant
and cognitively opaque. 8
5. The constitutive distinction that differentiates writing from oral-
ity in Western historical configurations consists essentially in
referring to a reality (oral popular traditions) from which writing
has been distinguished in order to transform it. In the text the
world is no more received but fabricated. Writing eventually aims
at cognitive and social effectiveness. It plays on exteriority. Script
is a laboratory device with a strategic function. Information is
received from outside oral traditions which is collected, classi-
fied, imbricated in systems of interpretation that are processed
on the basis of the letter (written characters; philology eventu-
ally supersedes rhetoric). The latter recompose and structure
the former. The result is a scriptural product affected by all the
marks of the imprint process. These marks show the power of
transformation of the writer, a writer bent on ‘writing history’,
that of yesterday as well as that of tomorrow.
6. Written history is constructed as an independent narrative that
directs and commands future actions aloof from the past trad-
itions hitherto passively received. Script is a will not to listen
any more to what is spoken, but to manage, re-process, redo
and conquer. Script is born from a distance put between the
spoken words and oneself appearing in a new role, that of an