RafaelFajardo

Language is presented to us as basically informative, and information as basically an exchange. Information is measured in abstract units. But it’s doubtful whether the schoolmistress, explaining how something works or teaching spelling, is transmitting information. She’s instructing, she’s really delivering precepts. And children are supplied with syntax like workers being given tools, in order to produce utterances conforming to accepted meanings. We should take him quite literally when Godard says children are political prisoners. Language is a system of instructions rather than a means of conveying information. TV tells us: “Now we’ll have a bit of entertainment, then the news…” We ought to in fact to invert the scheme of information theory. The theory assumes a theoretical maximum of information, with pure noise, interference, at the other extreme; and in between there’s redundancy, which reduces the information but allows it to overcome noise. But we should actually start with redundancy as the transmission and relaying of orders or instructions; next, there’s information—always the minimum needed for the satisfactory reception of orders; then what? Well, then there’s something like silence, or like stammering, or screaming, something slipping through underneath the redundancies and information, letting language slip through, and making itself heard, in spite of everything. To talk, even about yourself, is always to take the place of someone else in whose place you’re claiming to speak and who’s been denied the right to speak. […] How can we manage to speak without giving orders, without claiming to represent something or someone, how can we get people without the right to speak, to speak; and how can we restore to sounds their part in the struggle against power?