Watch Your Words E-Book

Gerald Garutti

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fremdsprachen
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 210

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Never before has humanity done so much talking... But is anyone listening? For that matter, are people ever speaking to each other?

We need to acknowledge that speech, as we know it, has never been so debased. We live in a world full of empty, degraded, and potentially violent speech: a daily reality that confronts us in the workplace, in the media, on the streets, on the internet and in our political lives. Verbal clashes are commonplace, while proper dialogue is rare.

Gérald Garutti pushes for a return to a more constructive and responsible form of speech. He lays the groundwork for a humanistic approach: one which, contrary to the dominant culture of ignoring and humiliating others, emphasizes listening to them and mastering speech as a way of connecting. The arts of speech can contribute to the reconciliation of tensions in our society and to the realization of our full humanity.

Watch Your Words is a stunning manifesto for anyone interested in how we might better communicate with each other.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Notes

Part I The diminution of our humanity: The radical degradation of speech

1. Watch how you speak

Speech as a combat sport

Speech is a weapon of war

Notes

2. The Other does not exist

The end of the Other. Humanity in pieces

The triumph of the cliché. Individuals reduced to stereotypes

Notes

3. Subject not at home

Welcome to Zombieland

Relationships in ruins. Welcome to a world of irreality

Notes

Part II For a humanism of speech

4. Standing by our words

Restoring the full meaning of speech

Restoring the full potency of speech

Notes

5. Elevating speech

Restoring the dignity of the spoken word

Promoting right speech

Notes

Part III Humanity lost, humanity regained: Speech elevated

6. The seven arts of speech: Cultivating our humanity

A new approach. The arts of speech in the strong sense

An organic whole. The seven pillars of speech

An iconoclastic choice. A modern septet

The essential path of development. A heptathlon with humanity as the prize

Notes

7. The Centre for the Arts of Speech

Embodiment

Action

Organizing collaboration

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Begin Reading

End User License Agreement

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Dedication

To all those from whom I have received a legacy and who have made me what I am.

Watch Your Words

A Manifesto for the Arts of Speech

GÉRALD GARUTTI

Translated and with a foreword by Raymond Geuss

polity

Originally published in French as Il faut voir comme on se parle: Manifeste pour les arts de la parole. © Actes Sud, 2023

This English translation © Polity Press, 2025

Foreword © Raymond Geuss 2025

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6730-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024943768

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Foreword

The best manifestos are punchy, pungent, and constructive. They are discursively elaborated and supported rallying cries. They often have a clear tripartite structure: they diagnose some lack or deficiency or defect in our world, they then articulate an aspiration for a better state of the world, and finally they propose a course of action and attempt to motivate readers to adopt it. ‘Proletarians of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.’ This is a good, brief summary of the Communist Manifesto: what is wrong with nineteenth-century industrial society is the very existence of a large group of people who have no choice but to sell their labour as a commodity in order to survive; the aspiration is for a society without classes and the course of action proposed is for the members of the proletariate to unite and act to abolish private ownership of the means of production. The manifesto of the Centre for the Arts of Speech which you are about to read has an equally clear message that can also be summed up very briefly: speaking is acting, so cultivate the arts of speech.

The simple, apparently trivial statement that to speak is to act turns out, on inspection, to be more complicated than it seems and also more consequential. Obviously, if I say to my taxi driver, ‘Stop the car here,’ I am performing an action, and one which intends to bring about a change in the world, but equally if I say to someone, ‘You half-wit,’ I am doing something, namely insulting the person so addressed. Suppose that, when he was Prime Minister, Boris Johnson had announced that Brexit had increased the UK’s GDP. If I then, the next day, had published statistics that indicated a decline in GDP, I would have contradicted him, whether or not I had intended to do so. This does not mean that there is no difference between intentionally contradicting someone and doing it unintentionally; these are different actions, but still both are acts. I can, of course, abstract from the immediate action-context of what someone says. It is perfectly possible to create practices (or even institutions) that allow one to focus merely, for instance, on the correctness of the statistics I have gathered, irrespective of the political uses to which they can be put. One can argue about how complete the hermetic isolation from immediate action can ever be, but even if one were to grant for the sake of argument that the Institute for Statistics was a kind of Platonic Academy, the discussions there would not be non-actions, but especially complex actions.

In principle, actions can always be evaluated ethically, morally, politically, and aesthetically. Was it right to tell the taxi driver to stop? Was Boris Johnson’s speech elegantly phrased and presented? Was it effective? Was it prudent? Was this a good time for me to draw attention to the failures of Brexit? Some actions can also be evaluated alethetically, that is, some, although not all of them, can purport to assert truths. If I say that GDP is down 4.5 per cent, I can investigate to what extent that statement is well confirmed, well supported, or even (if I care to use that term) ‘true’. Nothing exactly parallel holds for ‘Stop the car here.’ I may have made all kinds of mistakes in issuing this command – I may think we are approaching St Pancras Station, where I can get Eurostar, but it is actually Euston Station – and the injunction may in some sense be ‘wrong’, or ‘misguided’, but it is not exactly ‘false’.

If speech is a kind of action, it, too, is in principle subject to all these multiple forms of evaluation. This is true with the usual proviso, namely that for particular purposes we may wish to act so as to suspend specific kinds of evaluations in certain contexts. The complexity of this kind of action – suspension of our evaluative attitudes – is one of the reasons it is so difficult for us to decide whether or not, for instance, we should, as Simone de Beauvoir proposed, ‘burn de Sade’.1

The diagnostic portion of this manifesto begins by pointing to a series of disagreeable and destructive phenomena, many of which, individually, will be familiar, in one way or another, to people who live in a contemporary Western society. The loss of basic civility in public discourse and the consequent coarsening of public debate has often been noted and is much discussed. To take one particularly egregious example, think of the campaign speeches of Donald Trump, which often amount to little more than the repetition of strings of insulting nicknames for his political opponents and vulgar abuse. The absence of graciousness and common courtesy might seem to be a very minor vice, if it were not for the fact that experience shows us that this form of behaviour is always on the verge of spilling over into threats of and calls for direct violence. No public discussion was, perhaps, ever completely rational (whatever that means), but one has crossed an important frontier and entered a significantly darker world when a British minister can say that people ‘have had enough of experts’ and can glory in this fact. We are in danger of losing the very idea that political actors could be expected to give reasoned, empirically based arguments for the positions they adopt.

This degradation of public discourse seems to go hand in hand with the increasing isolation of individuals, with the intensification of feelings of impotence and lack of agency, with loss of a wider sense of purpose in our actions, and with an impoverishment of all those portions of the human soul, including our very sense of self, that require regular nourishment from sociability.

Part of the originality of Gérald Garutti’s project is to propose a way of seeing all these developments as part of a single complex syndrome. He analyses what is happening as the breakdown of ‘speech’. ‘Speech’, for Garutti, is a technical term which, however, also has direct empirical reference. On the one hand, ‘speech’ (and the terms semantically associated with it) can be used to refer to familiar everyday events such as conducting a conversation at the dinner table, addressing a group of people at a funeral or wedding, explaining to a dentist why you have booked an appointment, telling a joke, or reciting a poem for a group of children. In this sense, ‘speech’ looks like a normal empirical concept, but it has another side or another dimension for which there is no generally recognized designation. Above, I called it ‘technical’, but one might think of it as ‘aspirational’, ‘exigent’, ‘ideal’, or ‘normative’. In this dimension, calling some forms of human verbal behaviour ‘speech’ is not simply noticing some actual properties which they exhibit, but evaluating them tacitly relative to some desiderata, or subjecting them, at least in imagination, to some demands. Speech refers to a large set of properties which human behaviour ‘should’ instantiate. Garutti mentions some of these desiderata: focusing on what other people are saying, listening to them carefully, expressing what one has to say clearly and honestly, waiting one’s turn before speaking. This list is clearly not comprehensive and is not intended to be; in fact it is hard to see how it could be completely comprehensive because it is a characteristic of this domain of human life that it be open to development; the list is there to be added to. We can always imagine listening with greater care, just as we can always imagine that there will be new demands we will want to impose on human behaviour which we cannot concretely envisage now. The ‘aspiration’ articulated here – the second part of a classical manifesto – is that speech be allowed to come into its own and be itself.

A certain kind of philosopher would be likely at this point to say that what I have done is point out an ‘ambiguity’ in the term ‘speech’: it is sometimes used as an empirical concept and sometimes as a normative concept, and so its meaning shifts. This way of approaching the matter obscures an important point by suggesting that concepts like this are in some sense deficient, and should (and could) be replaced by a set of sharply contrasted and semantically more abstemious terms. What this misses is that the whole rationale of concepts like ‘speech’ (as Garutti uses it) is to claim an inherent connection between the two aspects: the empirical and the aspirational. A lot more could be said about the nature of this ‘connection’, and Garutti makes as good a beginning of doing this as one can expect within the narrow limitations of a brief ‘manifesto’. His account is also refreshing and plausible, partly because he avoids a narrow focus on one (purportedly) essential link between the two conceptions and tries to acknowledge the multiplicity of historically specific, and morally and politically significant, connections.

The parallel is not exact, but for a vague analogy think of our use of terms like ‘democracy/democratic’. Only a particularly narrow-minded pedant would object to someone saying, ‘Ancient Greek democracy was not really very democratic (because it excluded women and slaves).’ We call it a ‘democracy’ because it had some recognizable empirical properties – political decisions were made by voting in a mass assembly – but we deny that it was ‘democratic’ because these empirical properties of the system are valued as ways in which some ideal of ‘the power of the people’ (demo-kratia) or the self-governance of the whole population is realized, and we can see that this was not the case in fifth-century Athens. I note that the Greeks themselves were perfectly aware of discrepancies of this kind. Thucydides writes that during the period when Pericles was most powerful in Athens the city was a ‘democracy’ in name only and actually it was ruled by the foremost man.2 The structures of the democracy operated as usual, but they did not work as exercises of the power of the people. The population as a whole did not really make decisions; Pericles made them. (Thucydides gives this analysis his own particular twist in that he thinks it was actually better for the Athenians to have decisions made for them by Pericles than to have decided things themselves, but that is a further point that is not directly relevant here.) Equally we can perfectly well say, ‘People in this society are talking to each other all the time, incessantly, without interruption, but there is very little speech taking place.’

It is cognitively disadvantageous, then, to make a fuss about an ‘ambiguity’ in the term ‘speech’ because the point of the construction is precisely to emphasize the connection between the two dimensions. Similarly, when I began this foreword by writing ‘speaking is acting’, one might (rightly) point out that this English sentence has no parallel in any single French sentence in Garutti’s text. ‘Speaking is acting’ can be taken in one (or both) of two different ways. First, I act when I speak just as I act when I brush my teeth in the morning, or feed the cat, make a cup of tea, or close the front door. This is ‘act’ in the sense of faire, agir, se comporter, and so forth. However, to ‘act’ in English also has an important second use, and in this second sense ‘to act’ means to perform on the stage, take part in a theatrical production, or play a role. This is jouer, représenter. Again, though, the point is the connection, which turns out to be not too difficult to see, once one has begun to look in the right direction. Anything that can count as the performance of a properly human action is to some extent dependent on something that is very much like playing a role in a theatrical production. It is by mimicking others that one learns to do anything that goes beyond pulling one’s hand out of a fire or searching out the mother’s breast for milk. Thus the relevant centrality of the theatrical models that occur in the book. Those old eighteenth-century dichotomies so beloved of followers of Rousseau – natural/artificial, authentic/contrived, spontaneous/imitative, even sincere/insincere – have their place in human life, to be sure, but it is a distinctly subordinate, not a fundamental one. No version of these distinctions is absolute, catgeorically binding, or set in stone once and for all. Both Montaigne and Nietzsche saw this clearly, and drew the consequences.

To put it another way, truly human action is action informed by and dependent on speech in a variety of ways. Even Robinson Crusoe is not speech-less on his island; he reads his Bible (in English) and the first thing he does with Friday is teach him a language which he himself acquired from other speakers of English. Since language is a shared human practice, it can only be acquired through interaction with other humans who already speak, by a series of actions that are not completely spontaneous, but intentionally shaped in a particular way. Perhaps human beings have in themselves something that can reasonably be called a ‘natural’ impulse to produce sounds and a natural tendency to mimic and imitate, but these result in Mandarin, or French, or Xhosa ‘speech’ only when they regularly and reliably have a structure and form which has been imposed on them by humans in interaction. Herodotus in Book II of his Histories reports that King Psammeticus of Egypt had two infants raised without contact with any other humans, apart from one shepherd who came to feed them. He did this in order to find out what language they would speak, as it were spontaneously or naturally. Psammeticus was told that the noises they produced were a form of Phrygian, because one of the ‘words’ they pronounced had some vague similarity with a Phrygian word that would have been an appropriate thing to say in the context, but we would be more inclined, I think, to take them to be just a form of burbling (on the part of the children) plus wishful thinking (on the part of the adults).

Acquiring a language, even a first language, is, in other, words proto-theatre. I learn to speak by learning to adopt a role, or, actually, many roles, in reality and in the imagination, and only then am I capable of properly human action. Even the mastery of such a simple thing as the use of pronouns requires me to put myself in imagination in your, his, her, its, or their position; otherwise I would never be able to understand such simple exchanges as ‘How are you?’/‘I am fine, and you?’ And if I eventually learn to depart from aspects of that role, or to write a new part for myself, or to improvise – which is acquiring a capacity that most thinkers in the modern world take to be an especially important one – this is because I have internalized a wide variety of forms and modes of speech, roles, and plots, and have learned to go beyond them. Garutti rightly condemns the tendency to reduce the public representation of human life to a series of eight highly clichéd stereotypes derived ultimately from debased theatrical sources, but this criticism is not some kind of purist insistance that drama or literature has – or ought to have – no place at all in the structuring of human interactions, but rather that these are overly simplified patterns of behaviour.

‘Cliché’, of course, is an aesthetic category, or rather an aesthetico-ethical one, because it is a formula that by simplifying our perception in a certain way makes it difficult for us to discern highly relevant complications and singularities. To operate with clichés is both aesthetically repellent (because the boredom induced by tired repetition of well-known formulae is the exact reverse of the surprise and excitement that good art engenders in its audience) and morally reprehensible (because perceptual obtuseness is an obstacle to good action). It is another one of the particular great strengths of Garutti’s book that he does not treat ‘aesthetics’ (in the broadest sense) as something separate and distinct that must be kept at a distance, an add-on, a luxury, or an afterthought. The imaginative organization of our action according to tacit principles of euphony, rhythm, parallelism, and symmetry, increasing and decreasing tension and the resolution of that tension, pleasing ideational association, analogy, and so forth, is not an extra that one can take or leave ad libitum, nor is it something that can be left to special occasions, or relegated to special disciplines that chug along their own track without impinging on the serious concerns of living. Whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, ‘aesthetic’ structures are constitutents of the very fabric of human life at a very elemental level, and they thus are part of the way our social world really works.

In the final portion of his text, Garutti outlines some of the projects and initiatives which he has undertaken at CAP, the Centre for the Arts of Speech (Centre des arts de la parole) in Paris, and the immediate action-motivating aspect of his manifesto is to solicit support for enterprises like this one and to encourage people to cultivate the arts of speech in whatever other ways are possible. Some people might find this insufficiently radical politically. The deepest reason, they might claim, for speechlessness, lack of a sense of agency, and disorientation is societal coercion, real deprivation, poverty, oppression, and the only real remedy for that is fundamental socio-economic change of a kind that is beyond the scope of a project like the one outlined in this manifesto.

There are several reasons why this is not really a relevant objection. First, Garutti is not so naïve as to propose the cultivation of speech as a panacea for all social ills. In addition to his other many accomplishments, he is one of the world’s great experts on Bertolt Brecht, so perhaps it is not completely inappropriate to suggest that in reading this book one thinks of Brecht’s poem ‘Die Nachlager’. This poem is about a man during the Great Depression of the 1930s in the US who solicited the ad hoc provision of free accommodation for the unemployed and homeless, one night at a time. The poem continues:

Die Welt wird dadurch nicht anders

Die Beziehungen zwischen den Menschen verbessern sich nicht

Das Zeitalter der Ausbeutung wird dadurch nicht gekürzt

Aber einige Männer haben ein Nachlager

Der Wind wird von ihnen eine Nacht lang abgehalten

Der ihnen zugedachte Schnee fällt auf die Straße.

[The world is not transformed by this/ Relations between people are not improved/ The era of exploitation is not shortened/ But a few men get a bed for the night/ The wind is kept off them for one night/ Snow that was meant for them, falls on the street.]

Cultivating speech is like providing a bed for the night. It is not the universal solution to all our problems – much less to all human problems simpliciter – but it is also not nothing.

There is a second and deeper reason, which reveals something important about ‘speech’. The possible criticism which was just canvassed tacitly assumes that ‘speech’ is to be treated in one or another of two ways, both of which, however, are actually inappropriate. Either good speech is just something like a commodity or consumer good (a bed for the night), or the demand to improve the quality of speech in a society is exclusively a therapeutic one, that is, the demand that one deal with some palpable malfunction in social life. Good speech, however, is not a commodity that can be bought, sold, traded, exchanged for something else, because, correctly understood, it is the kind of thing the value of which is in some sense incommensurable. The second point is that the temptation to fall back on medical, therapeutic, or hygienic models here is almost irresistable, but we must resist it. Pressure toward the medical model seems virtually built into the structure of a manifesto, as I have described it, so I might seem myself to have succumbed to this temptation at the beginning of this foreword when I spoke about Garutti giving the diagnosis of a ‘syndrome’. This way of thinking is attractive partly because it is not completely wrong – degraded speech can be seen as an organic dysfunction in a society – but it leaves out what is in many ways the most important thing. Speech is not just a domain in which defects and obstructions must be removed, so that ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ functioning can be assured; it is a realm that is inherently utopian, the place (which is also ‘no-place’) where we create ways of going beyond our immediate environment and our given selves. It is not merely that it has value ‘in itself’ (as some philosophers might say) and is not just a necessary prop for supporting social reproduction and good decision-making. Speech is what allows the human here-and-now to exist at all, because there is no here-and-now outside a relation to possible other