Speak the World: Creating Ourselves as We Speak

Monologues don’t exist.

But sometimes we speak to ourselves, don’t we? And thinking? Isn’t it a kind of monologue? Some other times we apparently speak out in what seems to be a one-way communication. Even if we can argue that monologues do exist, this perceived one-way communication clearly don’t.

That’s because our ability to speak and write are not disconnected to the interactions we have had with the World and other people, other eyes to the World.

The act of communication never starts (in the sense of being born) but rather is an interaction of influences from past and present getting together in an understandable unit at a certain moment. The act of communicating feeds a network of ongoing communication, never starting anew but also never completely repeating itself.

The act of speaking is a contribution for generating the World.

We not only speak to describe, but also to become

‘Speak to become’ means that by communicating we are refining our own understanding of the World, relating with/through/about it, but also we refine what we are in the process.

The act of speech is always a two-way. It changes or maintains the World around us as much as it changes or maintains ourselves.

When we look at the World, we are looking at a mirror

Monologues are not a one-way communication act, but can be a mono-consciousness act. That reinforces the importance of dialogue. Dialogue as a meeting of consciousnesses imply in bringing together multiple, connected but still possibly autonomous views of the world.

Communicating the/our World we can find Ourselves

So we arrived at this: the process of communicating the World tells as much about you than the World you are communicating. When we look at the World, we are also looking at our own Self.

I am reading the book Deleuze, Education and Becoming and came across the quote below, by Laurel Richardson, that explores writing as a way of self-discovery, something I feel represent my process of writing to you now.

Writing is a method of discovery, a way of finding out about yourself and your world. When we view writing as a method, we experience ‘language-in-use,’ how we ‘word the world’ into existence… And then we ‘reword’ the world, erase the computer screen, check the thesaurus, move a paragraph, again and again. This ‘worded world’ never accurately, precisely, completely captures the studied world, yet we persist in trying. Writing as a method of inquiry honors and encourages the trying, recognizing it as emblematic of the significance of language.