Jean Jacques Rouseau:
Languages are made to be spoken, writing serves only as a supplement to speech...Speech represents thought by conventional signs, and writing represents the same with regard to speek. Thus, the art of writing is nothing but a mediated representation of thought.
Jacques Derrida:
Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity inscribed in the very functioning of the sign that the substitute makes one forget the vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements...There's something to a really satisfying conversation with a friend that goes beyond what a linguist can say about it. It's unspeakable, experiential, it's awareness, or something. Something about touching or smelling a rose tells us more than any botanist can. There's just something real about the world and our lives beyond description, no matter how painstakingly nuanced and detailed that description tries to be.
But we run into trouble when we try to communicate that. As hard as it tries, language does not mean what we want it to mean. It helps us differentiate between what we mean and what we don't, but it never brings us to exactly what we really feel or think or perceive about the world, as clearly, or as powerfully as we sense it initially. This is because, I think, language is a social tool, which allows many different people to work with and protect one another. It evolves to suit the needs of the masses, not the one.
So, by way of speech, we take what we feel and turn it into socially valuable currency, into something mitigated for others who do not feel what you feel. Writing, which is a further codification of thought, would, I think, have this effect as well, although I haven't given much thought to how it might differ from speech.
So what becomes of a person who writes more than speaks, and speaks more than thinks? From Derrida and Rouseau, it seems they would begin to inhabit a false reality, wherein their primary means of communication is increasingly removed from their actual sense of reality. Because expression is to enter society, and, necessarily, to work within its constructs of value and meaning, the more wrapped up in layers of expression a person gets, the further they get from a real, genuine, deeply personal understanding of what they experience. They becomes socialized beings, better indications of culture than self. As a person writes and speaks and writes and speaks, it seems to me that there becomes a strong tendency to put thoughts immediately into words, as soon as they come. Life, love, happiness, and pain become only what can be verbalized and explained; our actual experience of them is cheaply socialized. So, then, should we speak and write less? I don't think so. But I don't know why just yet.
