ABSTRACT
When we talk about the use of language for empowerment, when we discuss the issue of language and authenticity, when we talk about the use of a dominant language in a global setting, we are talking mostly about writing. The power of writing in modern times stems from the ease with which writing lends itself to commodification. Books, writing, print, in their material presence, are more obviously exchangeable repositories of cultural capital. Obviously oral knowledge and skill works as cultural capital as well, but not as authoritatively in the postEnlightenment reification of written discourse in the West. Writing assumed power over the oral in western society when the ‘will to truth’, as Foucault puts it, ensured that the ‘enunciated’ assumed precedence over the ‘enunciation’. Once the power of the orator’s discourse was overtaken by the ‘will to truth’, when the veracity of what was said assumed greater importance than the persuasiveness or eloquence of its delivery, the written text became privileged, as a means of fixing what was said. The conviction of the power of the written word in Western thinking becomes linked to its teleological notions of the ‘improvement of mankind’. Lévi-Strauss, a consistent critic of the idea of historical progress, still asserted that the invention of writing made it possible to accumulate the knowledge of each generation as “working capital” for the next (Lévi-Strauss 1969).
