The End of Speech

by

Obododimma Oha

Think of an absurd situation in which people have to carry their ideas and things they want to talk about as enormous luggage on their heads. When they meet other people and want to talk to them, they carry down the luggage and start gesticulating. The kind of absurd situation Lemuel Gulliver describes in his encounter with the people of Laputa.

As you may argue, this kind of world is inconceivable and can only give stalled transactions. But it seems acceptable to institutions that privilege silence, or encourage people to speak less. It could particularly appeal to bee-keepers (who have to maintain silence when approaching honey-bee hives, to avoid upsetting the bees and getting stung). But human beings have to disturb the air acoustically and attach meanings to the sounds they produce, which they call speech.

 Interestingly, too, experts on sound production in  humans tell us  that that kind of process of attaching meanings to sounds comes much later in human development. In fact, they argue that the production of sounds as  a form of communication with other agents is a secondary function of the organs we assign to speech production. They inform us that the so-called speech organs (lips, tongue, mouth cavity, nostrils, etc) were primarily designed by nature to serve our feeding and survival and not for speech, that speech was added by us later. That means that those parts of the body were trained later to produce some sounds and their transformations! So, speech, you are still a late-comer, and should be prepared for the treatment mapped out for late-comers!

Well, it looks like speech has got into trouble out there where functions are strictly policed, maybe partially for coming late. It has got into trouble with those processes with which it has to share the air, like air-borne diseases and their relatives. One may be making light a very tragic situation in the COVID-19 experience if one links up the wearing of protective masks to that idea that speech is a late-comner who has to wrestle to get out of the luggage people carry to communicate ideas and the frightening possibility that it is in trouble in sharing the air and may come to a bad end.

Am I protecting my speech (maybe falsehood or non-chalance) or protecting my life when I wear the mask? Please, I am for safety and not dying due to carelessness, but one has been trained to examine life, for, as the ancient Greeks used to say, "An unexamined life is not worth living." Let us help speech to survive the pandemic, too, for the pandemic seems to force people to mask the exposed parts also used for speech.

If one protects one's speech and prevents it from being infected through the spreading of fear, fake news, and conspiracy theories, one is not doing the objectionable. The fact that modern life involves a deluge of information, which one also has to sort frequently, is itself a pandemic. Many are killed by information that pursues them here and  there. If one has to survive the news pandemic, one has to be in charge of one's mind and not submit easily to everything conveyed in language on the Internet.

I feel strongly for speech as a late-comer. If some useless humans have to be erased and a new world would emerge, then a new speech is needed (to emerge, too). The old speech may come conveying the absurd luggage from the old world. And that is not good. New world, new speech. And this new speech may have a different character and not borrow body parts as speech organs.

Perhaps the new speech has to learn from sign language, even though it has to avoid reminding one about the Swift absurd syndrome.

The end of speech should mean another form of communication free from viruses. Let us understand when the anti-virus would be produced before the creation of the new speech. Let us also be made ready, in the form of training, on how to convey our meanings in it, just like the production of sounds and the funny attachment of meanings to them. Training of the body and of the mind that conceives.

No, no need of the cremation of speech that has been taken by the pandemic. We can build archives to house things of the old life. We can actually use technology to mimic meaning-making in the
old life.

Perhaps the new human will speak through the anus instead. Perhaps the new human will not need to modify the stream of air at any point and will just produce one long guttural sound. Don't ask how meaning can be negotiated. The human being may just see another and proceed to scan the other's mind, to determine intention. It is a new day and a new language is needed.

The end of one speech: the beginning of another.