Historically, speech
has been privileged over writing.
Plato said writing
weakens the memory, ruining true reminiscence and true wisdom.
Socrates said writing
is static, etiolated, defenseless.
Rousseau blamed writing
for isolation, domination, and inequality.
Bergson said writing is
dull, empty, dead.
They all thought spoken
discourse was the site of real meaning. Speech is the genuine,
immediate, meaningful expression of interiority – the true way of
bridging the fundamental isolation of one human from another. Writing
is exterior, passionless, hopelessly distanciated from both reader
and writer.
(I'm cribbing all this
from Ricoeur's
Interpretation
Theory, btw, chapter 2:
“Speaking and Writing”.)
We're
living in an age where the distinction between speech and writing has
been thoroughly blurred. (I dedicate all my Facebook chat logs to
you, Derrida.) In fact, so much of our “spoken” discourse is now
written or in some way recorded – on an almost daily basis I have
conversations via text message and Facebook chat, and I don't even
remember the last time I used my cell phone to call someone
– that maybe it's a whole new category of discourse. People
are discussing this,
and I hope with a bit of time and effort on JSTOR and at the
university library I can find a lot more stuff on the philosophy of
internet-age discourse (recommendations are always welcome,
friends!).
That
said... writing is still my primary mode of discourse.
Writing isn't
just the fact of putting words down on page/screen. It's a whole way
of thinking. I write when my pen meets the paper and when my fingers
strike the keyboard, but I also write when I construct passages of
text in my head (whether they wind up actually written down or not).
In
writing I can express myself without the impediments of physicality.
In writing, no one expects me to decode all the mystifying subtleties
of body language and facial expressions, and no one imputes to me
implications I did not intend based on such subtleties that I was
unknowingly expressing. In writing, no one will call me out for
mumbling, or confuse me with an unexpected question, or look at me funny because I missed a social cue.
Writing
is something I know. Writing is something I am comfortable with.
Writing is something I feel I can control.
In
writing I have time to pause, to reflect, to choose the right words.
Writing slows me down, forces me to be self-critical – not, of
course, that my written discourse is free of error and bullshit; but
it's measurably more so than my spoken discourse. In effect, speaking
merely voices my thoughts: writing shapes them.
