ABSTRACT
For the past ten years, I have been exploring, with others, the hypothesis that any act of communication can be metaphorically understood as a form of ventriloquism.1 Ventriloquism, as we know, is the activity that consists of throwing one’s voice in such a way that a dummy or puppet—what ventriloquists sometimes call a figure—appears to be speaking in front of an audience. Although metaphors always have their limits, I have been mobilizing this image to highlight that communicating basically is about “making one speak” (faire parler in French). By throwing her voice, the vent—the name ventriloquists sometimes use to speak about themselves—is making a dummy, puppet or figure speak; that is, she makes it say things that are supposed to arouse laughter in the audience.
