Words and Things
This post is an excerpt from my essay on Michel Serres’ The Parasite.
What does it mean to speak?
Purely from a physiological standpoint, speaking involves the flow of air over the vocal cords. Vibrating molecules from the vocal cords change the frequency of the sound waves passing over the cords. If the flow of waves emitted can make their way to the auditory and other senses of the listener, and if both parties share the same language, then these frequencies add up to communication, which emerges out of noise.
However, speaking is not simply an uninterrupted flow of air and sound waves. If the flow of air over the vocal cords is open and smooth, all that we would utter and all that we would hear are vowels.
Consonants are interruptions of the air flow. This is precisely the definition that linguists, speech therapists, and phonologists have of consonants: they block, regulate, and/or restrict the flow of air across the vocal cords and into and out of the mouth. Without this interruption and regulation, words cannot be formed because the air is flowing uniformly. We would only emit and hear smooth tonal changes. Purely phonetically considered, a scream is the emission of vowels without the interruption of consonants.
Vowels can certainly communicate feeling and convey frequency waves that we can interpret as emotion, but words require a highly coordinated and adept capacity for stopping and starting the flow of air over the vocal cords and their reception by another’s physiology.
To get from vowel-like utterances to words that ‘suddenly produce meaning,’ requires interruptions of the smooth flow of the vowels.
Give it a try.
Vocalize the short ‘a’ sound as in hat or bat or cat. It flows and will do so as long as you can sustain exhalation.
Now vocalize the sound of the letter ‘d’ and you will experience a build up of air pressure behind the dam formed by the tongue pressed against the back of your front teeth. Releasing the tongue causes the ‘d’ sound to emerge.
We must be careful to not impart svabhava to these distinctions between vowels and consonants. They are not things. There are a host of quasi-vowels that do not block the flow of air. They channel it smoothly but with some restriction. Vocalize the sound of the letters ‘h’ or ‘w’, and you will experience these quasi-vowels that exist somewhere between the pure flowing vowels and the hard separations of the pure consonants.
Making these sounds, however, is not speaking.
Intelligible spoken communication requires a highly coordinated fluctuation of these motions — a coordination that is simultaneously intentional but so rapid that much of the motions do not rise to the level of consciousness. We don’t think about making a ‘d’ sound when we say ‘dog’. It just happens, though we may intend to say ‘dog’.
For Michel Serres, speaking requires parasitism:
Let us return to the white fall. To the wind of the voice, to the yell, to the open, sonorous flow of vowels. Call or complaint, united flow, laminar breath. Articulated language begins with the sowing of consonants. But consonants are interruptions of the voice. Rupture, stopping, bifurcation of this flow. Yes, consonants are parasitic. They block the breath, cut it off, forbid it, close it, propel it, help it, modulate it. They are obstacles and aides, like ordinary parasites. (The Parasite, 188-9)
The ‘return’ that Serres calls for is a characteristic move. It is not a ‘return’ that seeks the purity of an essence as if everything has gone wrong and needs a reset. It is a return that stares into a thing to find its relations as its origins. Later, in L’Incandescent, Serres will refer to this return as a descent, which will involve tracing the current moment back through time by seeing as many of the ruptures, stops, bifurcations of the flow that makes the specific now of the observer possible.
In this case of human language as the observable present, we descend through our physiology to find the origin of language as a parasitic relation of the consonant that interrupts the yell, the united flow, and the laminar voice, none of which require this interruption.
Tracing this descent back to now: once the capacity for interruption becomes genetically coded, recurring and predictable, then and only then can human language form. The communication of tone becomes the articulation of words. This origin does not happen at an instant, nor is it the expression of an exclusively human capacity.
So many arrows of time need to be woven together for this capacity to emerge. Only a very few of these arrows are identifiable as residing in something that we call ‘human.’
How long did it take for the larynx to descend far enough for vocal cords to emerge? How long before neurotransmitters would connect to this descended larynx? How long before these changes became a general feature of the species and not just the mutated characteristics of an individual? How long before the larynx gained its double function — emitting sounds and blocking food entering the respiratory system? How long before these physiological capacities became symbolic information and not just noise? How long before symbolic sounds become words and words become sentences? How long before these words begin negotiating exchanges? How long before these words become assertions of obligations and then of law? How long before exchange, obligation, and law become declarations of war and subsequent treaties of peace?
The flow is first, then the capacity for interruptions of the flow. Even later comes the possibility of labeling these interrupted flows as ‘words’.
We can call this a smooth arrow of time only retrospectively and only by hovering above the messiness of the reality. Where and when along this percolating timeline would we draw the line that demarcates the human essence of language, its svabhava? The choice will always be provisional.
It will also be made through a declarative act of speaking.
The provisional declaration becomes political when this arrow of time is retrospectively smoothed out, and when we believe we can say, ‘There is the beginning of the thing itself. There at that moment and in those features is the human essence.’
Let’s take stock of this descent into the temporality of human speech: At minimum, human language emerges from multiple arrows: (1) the lungs, larynx, and tongue line up so that the smooth flow of the yell becomes (2) interrupted, regulated, articulated, bifurcated by the tongue’s new found capacity to move with neurological precision inside the mouth and for (3) the emitted sound waves to cross an atmosphere that conducts these waves with fidelity across space and time to be (4) received by another who can hear and perhaps respond. (5) None of this happens in single cell organisms, which evolved billions of years before any of this physiology became coordinated.
Language, clearly, is not a thing. It is a coordination of many, many motions that took a very long time to establish their relationships.
Again, this is a smooth arrow of time only if we retrospectively ignore a lot of details.
Read my full post on Michel Serres’ The Parasite.