Movement from Unconscious Speech to Conscious Language

It may be advantageous for this conversation to begin with the extraction of two often-conflated terms: language and speech.   

Differentiation is a very fundamental and primitively nascent mental act, which allows entities the potential to perform the most basic of physical acts, movement.  The unconscious ability to differentiate the body from the environment is such a fundamental and primitively nascent mental act.  This differentiation does not have to be “conscious” as it is well understood that primitive life forms of multicellular scale “move,” yet, odds dictate that they do not partake in the same highly organized, language drenched conscious-state of the human.  This is also not to categorically state that even inert matter, i.e. minerals, elements, atoms, etc., are all non-conscious entities, but it is to state the difference, a la differentiation, of the apparent complexity of the entities. 

The consciousness or "unconsciousness" of an act is not to be debated at this time, as it can be quickly discovered that the amoeba does not use "language" (as will be more specifically defined below) and it most assuredly moves. Humans, e.g. homo sapiens, not only move, but they also move a lot of other stuff.  They are able to do this because they are utilizing the highly differentiated and differentiating mental process or faculty of language.  The more important distinction is that this type of differentiation (a symbolic differentiation) exists on a conscious as well as unconscious human level, the all too human level.

Language is a highly complex term.  The term itself automatically falls within the category of "language" unlike other language terms that can at least be pointed to in the physical world.  For example a tree can be identified in the physical environment as opposed to language occurring "naturally" outside of it's initial human usage that in the act of using language it becomes manifested in the external environment.    

With the complexity of language briefly articulated, I would like to relatively simplify its definition, as "a nearly infinite network of interrelated symbols."  This network, when utilized on a finite scale--i.e. in human speech or writing, is a grammatical rule-bound combination of meaning-laden symbols that leads to the communication of a message.  

Language, heretofore, does not have a commonly held third expressive function—Language is characteristically thought to only manifest in the external or be produced via speech and/or writing.

However, how does language subsist?  That is to say, where does language locate itself prior to that which is spoken or to be, at some point in the future, written?  Language would seem to require a location from which to manifest as speech or writing.  This third “function” is located in the unconscious as language, at times, appears to consciousness to lay dormant yet accessible within the unconscious.  Speech, on the other hand, is the act (sometimes unconscious as in some of the speech expressed in psychosis/talking in one’s sleep, patterned responses/emotional outbursts, etc.) of putting into motion these dormant symbols and can be further distinguished by contrasting it with the act of writing, which could be thought of as a “bridge” that solidifies, makes tangible speech.  

Speech has properties of being both temporality and ephemerality: “I begin and also stop speaking” and “once I have stopped there is nothing left, no ‘trail’ leading back to where I began.”  Writing however provides that trail in the prose, narrative, in the action of altering physical substances—paper/pencil, keyboard/electronic document.   Where as, language, is active in both writing and speech, it, as an abstraction, remains inert to consciousness unless placed in motion by the action of the written or the spoken.  Therefore language is immediately both always/already a part of the actions of speaking and writing and something outside and different from speech and the written.

By Mathew Quaschnick