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It seems to be a matter of fact that there is text everywhere, we are surrounded by documents, stories and tales. And what is more, there are some who say that, at birth, we are thrown into a spoken world. It is even said, as Jesús Ibañez did, that the social is the order of saying, that it is made up of dictates (what must be said) and prohibitions (what is forbidden to be said). The first Wittgenstein warned us (although he later retracted) that what we can not speak about, we must pass over in silence, that the limits of language are the limits of the world, that there is no limit outside language. It is said as well that human consciousness arises from language, that the structures (Saussure said it) of language are the structures of our perception of the world.

Many things have been said about «saying», because saying envelops us, we inhabit it and it inhabits us, and behind the collapse of language, says Fernando Colina, there is psychosis. Language, even when we pulverize it through schizophrenic glossolalia, haunts us and gives us no respite. What a Hell! it is even said that in the beginning there was the verb, that God said this and this was done, just like that, out of nothing, that what God said was said and that he never ever went back later on his Word.

In fact, since Hellenism and throughout Modernity, philosophy has abandoned the question of being (what being consists of, what being is) for the question of the validity of the statement. It is far away left behind the metaphysical question that Felipe Martínez Marzoa calls the attempt to say the game in which all saying moves and inhabits from the very beginning.

Much later, it was said that since Plato, what has dominated thought is the metaphysics of presence, presence and no more, with no shadow that would be nothing less than mere appearance. And when the phenomenon of language takes on a presence and prominence and is over-dimensioned, the presence of things becomes as innocuous and obvious and manageable as a word written in pencil on an ocean of blank paper. And then mathematics is the language of nature, DNA is the language of life, thought and the world works through metaphors and in the post-truth era facts say nothing more than what is wanted to be said about at any given moment. It seems then that now what we say we are and what we do is more important than what we are and what we do; it doesn’t matter if the frame is blank, if it’s surround it by speech it can mean anything it is been wanted to. If you say that this is a fact, I can say that I have an alternative fact.

Well, at this point, when we cannot even agree that what has been done is a fact, and we no longer remember that we are what we do with what has been made of us, as Sartre said, nor what Simone de Beauvoir answered him, that sometimes what has been made of us weighs too much, nor what Judith Butler later added, that, whatever it may be, we can undo what has been made of us, let us return to the beginning. This was supposed to be a writing against the Word. But the approaches to the linguistic phenomenon that we have pointed out seem to fly over the phenomenon itself, and we believe that this is because they confuse it with writing, with text.

Writing is, as Pablo Navarro Sustaeta says, a device of virtual interaction, like cinema, radio, money or the Internet, turbines of intentional dissipation, which undo the objects that our intentions make, and which generate dissipative structures that constrain society and our consciences. The price of increasing the possibilities of interaction is the increase in social opacity, which the social sciences, each in their own way, try to clear up. But at this point in history, so many things have already been said, so much has been published, there is so much bibliometric noise that one has the impression that everything has already been written, that what I don’t know, surely someone will know, that even the unknown and unknowable, that which is beyond the limits of knowledge, can be known, that knowledge is only one possibility among others, one opinion among others. It is as if we had forgotten what ancient philosophy proposed and failed in its attempt to say it: the game in which all saying moves and inhabits; because by saying it, the game stops.

Let us ask ourselves then: What if language has always been the vehicle that consciousness uses to be conscious of other consciousnesses and of itself? Is it possible that we have reached the absurd point of considering more relevant the car we’re in than the journey and those who travel in it?

Well, if that is so… let us observe a minute of silence for the death of… silence.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons