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Paddy Scannell
Being an academic was something that, at the time, I took entirely for granted, but as I got older, I felt an increasing tension between my academic self (me the professor) and my human self (the me-that-I-am, the nonacademic self, a usual person like everyone else). And this tension between my institutional and noninstitutional self runs right through this book. I took the title from a longish review essay, “Love and communication,” that I wrote in 2005 about Speaking into the Air by John Durham Peters (1999). This was and is a book I deeply admire, and especially because it unashamedly brought religious thought into the usual thinking of the academic field I worked in. At that time, it was preoccupied with the politics of communication, the media as cultures of power, and so on. Peters’s book was different. It was focused on religious and philosophical thought in relation to communication, and particularly communication as love, and divine and human versions of it: the difference, as he puts it, between agape and eros. He takes Jesus and Socrates as two paradigm figures who express this difference – Jesus and divine love, Socrates and human love. Their distinctive forms of communication capture the difference between agape and eros.
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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.
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