When the real does not exist, one cannot speak of it

We often reproach certain people for not knowing how to speak about what they live in their relationships. I want to argue that their silence is not always a deficiency of expression, but sometimes the lucidity of someone who recognises that, in their experience, there is nothing to put into words. Distinguishing what I would call an inhabited speech from a fabricated speech makes it possible, I think, to grasp what is at stake.

« You can’t put words on what you feel »

In some relationships, one of the two partners reproaches the other for not knowing how to speak about what they live together. « You can’t put words on what you feel », « Why don’t you say anything when I ask you? », « I’m the one who has to carry everything in this relationship. » These reproaches are generally addressed to people described as reserved or introverted, and contemporary psychology even has a name for it, alexithymia, which it defines as the inability to identify and to express one’s emotions.

My hypothesis is a different one. When someone cannot speak about a relationship, it is not always because they do not know how to express themselves; it is sometimes, and even often, because there is nothing to say. Not that the relationship is empty of events, but what the other wants to hear, what the other wants to bring into existence through words, does not exist in the lived experience of the person being questioned. Silence then becomes the sign of a lucidity rather than of a deficiency to be corrected.

This inversion shifts the very question. We no longer have to ask how to learn to speak better, we have to ask what it means to truly speak.

Speech that accomplishes thought

Modern Western thought, since Descartes, has made language the privileged instrument of the mind. Thoughts are supposed to be already there, formed beforehand, clear and distinct, and language would come only afterwards to express them. This conception still dominates in our institutions, in our therapies, in our communication trainings, and it presupposes that every thought corresponds to a possible formulation, and that every emotion corresponds to a possible putting into words. When this putting into words does not come, we are told, the person has a problem.

In Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty formulates a quite different conception. « Authentic speech expresses; it does not translate a ready-made thought, it accomplishes it », he writes. True speech does not express something that would have existed before it in the mind, it brings into existence what it says as it says it, with thought forming in speech and not before. This conception, which partly joins that of Wilhelm von Humboldt, changes our relationship to silence, because if speech accomplishes thought, then the absence of speech indicates, in some cases, the absence of a corresponding thought, and the absence of a corresponding thought may in turn indicate the absence of an experience to think about.

Silence then ceases to be a deficit. It becomes, in some cases, the sign that there is, at that particular place, nothing to symbolise because there is nothing.

The kernel of the real that resists symbolisation

In his seminar on the real, Jacques Lacan puts forward a distinction that sheds light on this question. The real is what resists symbolisation, what cannot be put into words, what is not exhausted by the account we give of it. It is in this sense that it differs from the symbolic, which is the order of signifiers, and from the imaginary, which is the order of representations.

This distinction is usually mobilised to think about trauma, on the idea that there would be, in the traumatic experience, a kernel of the real that cannot be said and that returns in other forms (dreams, symptoms, repetitions). But one can also mobilise it in reverse, to think about what happens when someone is summoned to speak about something that does not exist in their experience. The summons then bears on the imaginary, the other is being asked to fabricate a narrative, to construct a representation that would make us believe in a shared reality, and silence becomes a fidelity to the real, the refusal to symbolise what did not take place.

This refusal is sometimes experienced as a form of violence by the one who is demanding speech, and indeed it is, because it reveals the inexistence of what the other wanted to bring into being through words. But it is not the effect of ill will, it is the expression of a relationship to the world in which speech remains anchored in experience, in which one does not fabricate reality through words.

Inhabited speech and fabricated speech

There is a kind of speech that hesitates, retraces its steps, searches itself, that stumbles on what it wants to say and lets silence exist. Its formulations are rarely elegant, and it is rarely satisfying from the point of view of communication, because it leaves gaps, imprecisions, open questions. It does not lie, not out of moral concern but because it does not know any other way, being able to say only what is. What it says, it says for real, and that is what I would like to call an inhabited speech, by which I mean a speech that says what has been lived, felt, perceived.

Another kind of speech circulates alongside the first, and often from the same mouth, that is not anchored in any lived experience. Fluid and well structured, it fills the space, provides answers, proposes a coherence, it has all the attributes of successful social speech. But it does not say what is, it says what must be said, or what is useful to say, or what the other expects to hear, and that is where it parts company with the real. It can be sincere from the point of view of the one who utters it, who believes what he is saying, while being disconnected from what he actually feels. That is what I would like to call a fabricated speech.

These two regimes are not distributed according to persons but according to contexts, and the same person can, at one moment, speak in an inhabited way, and at another moment fabricate meaning where there is, at that particular place, nothing to say.

« Tell me you love me »

In human relationships, and particularly in romantic bonds, these two regimes often meet. One of the partners needs the other to confirm the existence of the bond through words (« Tell me you love me, tell me we are a couple, tell me what you feel for me »), and this demand may come from emotional insecurity, or from a more domineering pattern in which the words of the other serve to validate a fiction that one is keeping alive in oneself.

The other partner, if he or she operates in the regime of inhabited speech, cannot answer the demand, and this is neither out of lack of love nor out of excessive reserve, it is because the expected formulation does not exist in his or her experience. He or she may love deeply, and otherwise, may live with an intensity that the conventional formulations could only betray. But one cannot say what is not, and the more one is pressed to speak, the more one sinks into silence, because the demand amounts to being asked to fabricate what one does not know how to fabricate.

The asymmetry then becomes a trap. The one who demands interprets the silence as a lack of love, the one who keeps silent observes that no word fits, and the relationship is lived as a failure of communication, when it is in fact the meeting of two incompatible regimes of relation to speech.

Saying only what one can say

My point is not a praise of silence. There are silences that are forms of flight, others that are forms of refusal, others still that are forms of violence. Silence in itself says nothing, it is its relation to lived experience that qualifies it.

What I would like to defend is the legitimacy of inhabited speech against the social and therapeutic injunction to speak whatever happens. That injunction rests on a presupposition that seems to me too rarely questioned, namely that speaking is always good, and that the one who does not manage to put things into words has a problem to solve. Yet, in certain situations, putting into words what is not lived would itself be the problem, because it would install a fiction in the place of the real.

The ethics of inhabited speech consists in saying only what one can say, in accepting that some silences are necessary, in refusing to fabricate meaning where there is nothing to say. It supposes a trust in the fact that true bonds manifest themselves otherwise than through the words we expect from them, and that those who demand the other’s speech accept to hear, on occasion, silence as a full response in its own right.

The bodiless speech of machines

This distinction takes on a new scope in the age of generative artificial intelligence. These systems produce, by construction, fabricated speech, insofar as they are trained to generate probable formulations given a context, without any anchoring in lived experience, since they have no experience. This does not disqualify them, since they render real services, but it invites us to recognise that the speech produced by machines, however fluid it may be, never says what is, it says what can be said in a given context.

Conversely, this leads us to better recognise the singular value of human speech when it is inhabited, that is to say when it says something that no machine could produce, because it comes from an experience that is bodily, situated, dated. Such speech becomes a marker all the more precious as fabricated speech proliferates.

The concept of inhabited speech is, in this sense, a concept of our time. It would have been incomprehensible thirty years ago, because we did not yet have the massive experience of bodiless speech that we have today. It becomes necessary in order to think what distinguishes, in our lives crossed by discourse, the speech that is anchored in an experience from that which is only a probable assembly of words.