that was Adam and Eve’s fig leaf girdles.) But the truth is that our world is wholly underpinned by writing, a very old technology whose origins are lost in time, like other ancient, yet still living, technologies – the production of bread, beer, and wine for instance. By writing, I mean the alphabetic system, but not just that. There are two written “languages”: that of literacy and that of numeracy. Writing, with letters or numerals, has a long history to it. But it is clearly a human invention in all its stages, from the emergence of written inscription long ago, to the invention of the printing press, and the breakthrough into modern times and today’s world. I do not mean to privilege alphabetic script (there are a number of them; this is Roman) over other systems of inscription, Chinese for instance.
These two systems of inscription (letter and number) developed separately, but together. We think of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as giants of philosophy because their works are still alive and well today, thanks to having been somehow salvaged, down through the centuries, by writing. And we tend to forget about Archimedes, Euclid, and Pythagoras whose work was also saved. Literacy has until today been the dominant system of inscription. Now, as the internet is taking over our world, numeracy is becoming dominant. Binary digitalization underpins the computer whose analogue interface I use. Writing divided the world into literates and illiterates, minorities and majorities. To be “unable” to read and write became a social stigma, and literacy became the highway out of this state; men of humble origin, like Thomas Cromwell, became powerful because they had literate skills. But today this has changed, and numeracy rather than literacy is the greasy pole to power and wealth. To be a functioning member of today’s world, you need to be numerate because binary language underpins the internet, the horizon of the online world, and its various mediated forms of connectivity. Algorithms rule, ok.
I have had to rethink the relationship between speech and writing (Scannell 2019), and this for a number of reasons, but basically because writing comes before speech, and only with writing does language appear as such. I am not saying that writing comes before language. It comes before speech, which depends on language (but not completely or necessarily, and certainly not in the first place). If learning to talk is the human way of learning to communicate, we should remember that species other than our own communicate with each other perfectly well, to the best of our knowledge, and some even communicate with us, and we respond to their communicative implicatures. (When the cat rubs itself against my legs and makes purring noises, I put some cat food out.) But without writing, language is not apparent. Writing made it visible, available, analyzable. We all know that writing came after speech. Can you imagine language without writing? I can’t, and I have tried. The very ideas of “oral culture” or “oral poetry,” for instance, are literate back-projections (McLuhan’s rear-view mirror) that came retrospectively with writing-as-printing.
Jacques Derrida argued, in Grammatology (1976), that writing came before language. As he put it (at some considerable length) it appeared paradoxical. But it isn’t really. It is, for me at least, the expression of a fundamental truth. My dictionary defines grammatology thus: “The worship of letters; spec[ifically] rigid adherence to the letter of Scripture.” Religions of the book are grammatologies, and Marshall McLuhan is a grammatologist, whose Gutenberg Galaxy (2011 [1962]) is a grammatology of the Roman alphabet. Instead of writing before language, try writing before speech. The origins of language are connected with child development, ab ovo. A child must learn its language, otherwise it will remain dumb. At present, language acquisition is mainly studied in the hinterlands of medicine (psychology, psychiatry, child development), where it is taken as read that language acquisition is passed down from mother to child. Unless a baby is taught by an adult, it will not learn to speak the language of its parents, Muttersprache, the language of the speech community into which any child is born. Without this, the usual child will remain speechless, or what some call feral (see the truly tragic story of Genie Wiley on Wikipedia). Linguists are prone to believe that every baby has an inbuilt LAD, or language acquisition device. I’m not sure I’d go along with this. I’d rather say we all have an inbuilt CAD, or communication acquisition device, and LAD is part of CAD. The point I’m struggling toward is the claim that speech, or preferably talk, is a universal thing that any child, anywhere, anytime must learn if it is to become human. And this is not primarily a linguistic process, although as the usual child acquires its Muttersprache, language (as talk) becomes increasingly important.
Any neonate, or proto-human, is inhuman. It is a tiny bundle of immediate needs that must be met (at least usual adults think so) by those who are its carers. It is learning stuff from day one. But what is it learning, if not how eventually to become a usual adult,1 like everyone else? Learning this is not just learning a Muttersprache, their native language. We do not usually talk about learning to speak, though a child’s first words are a great event. We say she or he is learning to talk. Talk is a term that I am overfamiliar with. I have been working on it for years, but you can work on something for a long time and still not understand what in fact you’re doing. I have only recently come to see that what really got me going all the while was not media and communication in the first place, but talk. By now I have something of a bee in my bonnet about it. Talk is not an academic thing, and for a long time it was for me simply a taken-for-granted aspect of other things – radio, television, etc. (I edited a book called Broadcast Talk back in 1991). I now see talk as an interesting thing in itself, and I want to say that learning to talk is learning to be human, and acquiring a Muttersprache in the process is merely one aspect of it. Learning to be human is not a “language thing.” Learning to talk > learning one’s Muttersprache > learning to communicate > learning to be human. And the key point is that communication and language (both being innate and learned) are not the same. As we will see in the next chapter, the Still Face Experiment shows how a little child becomes a fluent communicator before she becomes a fluent speaker of Muttersprache.
IV
History and writing go together. One of the reviewers of the manuscript of this book wrote that “writing is a technological achievement, while talk is a human achievement.” This is quite beautifully put, and I wish I had thought of it myself. I live in the exclusively human world, and hence I think of myself as a member of historical humanity, and God is not part of it. History began with writing, and this technology was invented by human beings. It made language available. It made it historical. In learning to talk, a child is not learning to write. That is what school is for; a later thing, where we learn our ABC. The skills of literacy have, for quite a while, been the basic infrastructure of the lengthy formal process of education. Mothers, or first carers, are mostly not professional teachers, and learning to talk is an informal process. Why would we let someone without any special training teach the speechless infant to talk? Because, as I see it, the mother is an expert in one crucial way: she is a usual adult and, as such, a usual human being. She is teaching her child not language, but how to communicate with adult others like herself. Learning to talk is a quite extraordinary skill, and it is ultimately about learning to connect with others.
Wittgenstein thought that talk was a primitive thing (Kerr 1997: 114); I think he’s right that human talk is earlier than writing. But that does not mean that it is primitive in comparison with writing. Writing’s telos is not communication in the first place. It is the first and greatest system of record, an archive that gives birth to history as we know it. It is a quite extraordinary human invention, a supervening necessity, as Brian Winston (1998) would say. Men began to make history when they invented writing. Systems of inscription made civilization possible if, like me, you follow Harold Innis (1964 [1951]). It made the language of talk analyzable and made analytic philosophy and linguistics possible. And philosophy as we know it began with Plato’s writings.
V
I do not mean to give technology a bad name, by thinking of it as original sin. In the academic field of media studies though, it was a bad thing, and went by the name of “technological determinism” (or sin by another name).