Page 47 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

22 Guy Poitevin

alien subject prompted by a will to power through accumula-
tion of the past in order to modify it as per one’s own models.
Re-appropriation, capitalization and conquest are the attributes
of the script to the service of states or hegemonic classes.

The relevance and extent of the difference which oppose the spoken
oral traditions and their written textual re-fabrication may further be
stressed in reference to three typical sets of socio-cultural processes
that often support processes of domination (Irigaray 1985). They can
be distinctively articulated as follows:

1. First, with regard to the mode of transmission, the written tends
to overwrite the oral, the script turns the speech obsolete, the
print puts the voice aside, the text obliterates the body, the lan-
guage makes the gesture redundant. ‘This results in putting at a
distance the lived body (traditional and individual) and, there-
fore, also all that in the people remains bound to the soil, to a
place, to orality and non-verbal tasks’ (de Certeau 1990: 205).
2. Second, with regard to the carriers, the educated agent represses
the illiterate vulgar. Learning to write in school is the initiation
par excellence into a progressive, capitalist and developing
society. The modelling of a modern child is essentially achieved
by scriptural proficiency. Literacy increasingly becomes the
basic asset of social hierarchy and discrimination and imparts
all privileges nowadays to the technocrats as yesterday it did to
the ‘bourgeois’. Control over language patterns and linguistic
material (rhetoric or mathematic) is for the dominant classes
the medium of their reproduction and, on the whole, the key to
social distinction, authority and power.
3. Third, with regard to the gender parameter, the written remains
often a prerogative of the male as one more asset to overpower
the female (Irigaray 1985). Accordingly, women’s literacy
allegedly becomes the key factor of women’s uplift and liberation
(in the image of men’s ascendancy).

Often these three sets jointly operate as united domination patterns
under the guise of the superiority of the classical and written—the
pure and refined—over the popular and the oral—the crude and rough.
Critical queries are particularly relevant here: