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receiving it. Even if the voices of each group composed a sonic landscape a site of sounds
that was easily recognizable, a dialect an accent can be discerned by the mark it leaves on
a language, like a delicate perfume; even if a particular voice can be distinguished among
countless others by the way it caresses or irritates the body that hears it, like a musical
instrument played by an invisible hand, there is no unique unity among the sounds of presence
that the enunciatory act gives a language in speaking it. Thus we must give up the fiction that
collects all these sounds under the sign of a "Voice," of a "Culture" of its own or of the great
Other's. Rather, orality insinuates itself, like one of the threads of which it is composed, into
the network an endless tapestry of a scriptural economy.
It is through an analysis of this economy, of its historical implantation, of its rules and the
instruments of its success a vast program for which I shall substitute a mere sketch that
one can best begin to locate the points at which voices slip into the great book of our law. I
shall try simply to outline the historical configuration that has been created in our society by
the disjunction between writing and orality, in order to indicate some of its effects and to
point out a few current displacements that take the form of tasks to be accomplished.
((133))
I want to make clear at the outset that in referring to writing and orality I am not postulating
two opposed terms whose contradiction could be transcended by a third, or whose
hierarchization could be inverted. I am not interested in returning to one of the "metaphysical
oppositions" (writing vs. orality, language vs. speech-acts, etc.) concern-ing which Jacques
Derrida has very correctly said that "they have as their ultimate reference . . . the presence of a
value or of a meaning (sens) that is supposed to be anterior to difference.i3 In the thought that
asserts them, these antinomies postulate the principle of a unique origin (a founding
archeology) or a final reconciliation (a teleological concept), and thus a discourse that is
maintained by this referential unity. On the contrary, although this is not the place to explain
my reasons in detail, I shall assume that plurality is originary; that difference is constitutive of
its terms; and that language must continually conceal the structuring work of division beneath
a sym-bolic order.
In the perspective of cultural anthropology, we must moreover not forget that:
1) These "unities" (e.g., writing and orality) are the result of reciprocal distinctions within
successive and interconnected historical configurations. For this reason, they cannot be
isolated from these historical determinations or raised to the status of general categories.
2) Since these distinctions present themselves as the relation between the delimitation of a
field (e.g., language) or a system (e.g., writing) and what it constitutes as its outside or its
remainder (speech or orality), the two terms are not equivalent or comparable, either with
respect to their coherence (the definition of one presupposes that the other remains undefined)
or with respect to their operativity (the one that is .productive, predominant, and articulated
puts the other in a position of inertia, subjection, and opaque resistance). It is thus impossible
to assume that they would function in homologous ways if only the signs were reversed. They
are incommensurable; the difference between them is qualitative.
Writing: a "modern" mythical practice
Scriptural practice has acquired a mythical value over the past four centuries by gradually
reorganizing all the domains into which the Occidental ambition to compose its history, and
thus to compose history itself, has been extended. I mean by "myth" a fragmented discourse
which is articulated on the heterogeneous practices of a society and
((134))
which also articulates them symbolically. In modern Western culture, it is no longer a
discourse that plays this role, but rather a transport, in other words a practice: writing. The
origin is no longer what is narrated, but rather the multiform and murmuring activity of
producing a text and producing society as a text. "Progress" is scriptural in type. In very
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