In the first week of August I woke up with no voice. I’d been out the previous night, hosting the reading series that I organise with friends, and throughout the evening I’d sensed my voice growing hoarser, fainter. Laughter tapered off into a shrill screech. I went home feverish and the next day I couldn’t speak at all. My tonsils and larynx were a swollen yoke around my neck.
You don’t realise how essential speech is until you lose it. How hard it is to put something into words without words. Watch a baby trying to communicate; the sounds, the facial expressions, the ways we all grasp painfully towards language, the delight when we finally reach it and the frustration when we don’t. Use your words, we say to children when they lose their temper and resort to the speech of the body, to stamped feet and outbursts of tears. Use your words. Take language away and it’s like you don’t exist. Sitting on the parched grass in the park or curled up on the sofa I felt invisible, as if being unable to speak had exiled me from society, rendered me a castaway in my own home.
Physically and figuratively silenced, I spent a week on antibiotics communicating via Notes app and gesture. Futile charades brought me to tears, especially when the person I was communicating with simply turned away from the conversation. After that, my voice came back, but for the rest of August it would intermittently cut in and out, like the radio when you drive through a tunnel, breathy static and blades at the back of my throat when I coughed. Almost as soon as the laryngitis left, my impacted wisdom tooth — the five year bane of my life that I’m still too scared to get removed — swelled up in response, and now I’m once again struggling to talk, to eat, to smile. The dentist I saw for an overpriced emergency appointment last week told me that there was so much thick scar tissue in my mouth that if it continued building up I’d eventually struggle to open my mouth. I can see so many bite marks, she said. It must hurt so much.
Every time I speak I am hurting myself, which feels ironic. I have spent the last few years trying to make a career off my ability to use my words. As an essayist, or a critic, or a writer more generally, and to some extent as a historian, my work is concerned with the precise and intentional deployment of language to create meaning and affect. I have always been proud of my command of language, at least on the page, and despite the fact I have never meaningfully studied either writing or English Literature. To use words in this way — and to be praised for it — feels good.
Lately, though, I’ve felt uneasy with words. There’s a line in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? where Eileen writes to Alice that ‘My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence’. I think about this frequently, when I go grocery shopping, or take out the bins, or walk by the river after a storm, plastic like an oil spill skimming the surface of the water, and I feel sick. My own theory — less elegant and imaginative than Eileen’s — is that human beings lost the instinct for meaning in 2020, when lockdown combined with the introduction of short form video content on social media. Physical isolation alongside digital immersion in an endless noise of other people’s voices, other people’s opinions, other people’s words. Each nugget of data essentially meaningless when combined into the algorithmic flow, videos of children dying next to recipe videos next to your colleague’s heavily filtered vacation boomerang. Context collapse. It’s hard to remember what social media was like before 2020, when the previously quiet online world suddenly became incredibly loud. Why does your phone always do that? my mother asked me at breakfast the other day. She was talking about the loud burst of sound which echoes when I open Instagram first thing in the morning with the volume too high. Do you remember the last three videos you watched? B. and I sometimes ask each other as a reality check. We rarely do. So much of it is meaningless, disguised as meaning.
No longer the shock of the new, just the shock, and even that is wearing off. It’s difficult not to feel desensitised, moving through public space, both online and off. On a train journey recently the couple in front of me played TikToks on full volume and held a lengthy speakerphone conversation in a crowded carriage. The conversation kept cutting out, and they rarely finished a whole TikTok, so the effect was one of surrealist staccato, a pick ‘n’ mix of bizarre banalities. For some reason they kept re-playing this one particular post, a cooking video: Don’t tell anyone but if you boil a sausage with spices and then bake it in the oven….Don’t tell anyone but if you boil a sausage with spices and then bake it in the oven…Don’t tell anyone but… I wanted to lean over and scream: Then stop telling everyone on the fucking train! but my tooth hurt too much to open my mouth and speak.
One of the prime ways of communicating medical and scientific knowledge to ordinary people in the early modern era was the ‘book of secrets’, collections written in the vernacular which purported to share a glimpse into the workings of nature, the body, and the cosmos. In practice, these were how-to books, containing household advice, culinary tips, and medical remedies, but they were couched in the language of wonder and mystery. The ‘secrets’ shtick spoke to a society in which inquiring into the world around you could shed light on the magnificence of God’s creation, yet where specialist knowledge was part of a hidden arcana held by exclusive social groups such as the university educated or clergy. Books of secrets operated as a tool of intellectual social mobility, opening up these arcana for Europe’s burgeoning literate middle classes. Yet ‘secrets’ was also good marketing. Humans are social animals, which means we’re biologically predisposed to be nosy, in both the pursuit of knowledge and of gossip.
Don’t tell anyone but. Did you know that. They don’t want you to know. People won’t tell you this but. Short form social media content trades in the rhetoric of secrets spilled. Often, those secrets are conspiracy theories, inflamed rhetoric, or fake news, if not just simple exaggeration. In a never-ending, personalised feed, influencers and marketers have to grab your attention to ensure you watch on. Ways to make the meaningless meaningful. In his new book Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, which I reviewed for the LARB last month, the etymologist and influencer Adam Aleksic talks about some of the tricks of his trade, such as ‘uptalk’, in which syllables toward the end of a sentence rise in intonation, and ‘macroprosody’, or the excessive stress of unnecessary words. These ‘floor-holding strategies’ serve to grab and hold our attention in an online marketplace where that attention is a hot commodity. They also, at least in my view, have served to cheapen the quality of online speech. They talk down to the listener, the way you might to a child, except instead of Use your words it’s endless Peekaboo! Look at this shiny new thing. You’ve seen it before, but we’re going to pretend you haven’t, and you’re absolutely going to buy it (probably in both senses of the word).
Lately, I’ve noticed this sort of language infiltrating Substack too — the AI penned self-optimisation drivel, the endless listicles, the secret-spilling, the manufactured drama. Something weird going on with sentence structure, where paragraphs are short, sharp, and little more, keywords bolded for emphasis like SEO search terms. Everything is Punchy with a capital P, everything has a Point. I try to avoid this sort of rhetoric, with its surface level assumption of authority and total lack of depth, but it’s a seductive shorthand to fall back on, just as name dropping theories you’ve only read half a Wikipedia page on is. Maybe I’m just too academia-pilled, but God, does no one on here know how to use citations?
In a brilliant, witty, and delightfully self-aware recent article for the New Yorker, Zack Helfand explores the history of the magazine’s fact-checking department, an institution which so invites the use of the word ‘vaunted’ that I just typed the inevitable adjective entirely accidentally. What I took from Helfand’s article is that we no longer have a culture which produces people who care — really care, in an obsessive, all-consuming way — about truth. People like fact-checker Martin Baron, for whom accuracy was so important that ‘if a Shakespeare play was mentioned in a piece, he would have to go and check the author’s name’. Facts, Helfand writes in his piece, are everywhere: ‘Names and figures are facts; commas can be, too. Cartoons, poems, photographs, cover art—full of facts. Opinions aren’t facts, but they rely on many. Colors are facts’. Yet as anyone who spends any significant amount of time consuming media knows, facts have lost the essential grounding in truth which once gave them solidity, which provided the known or at least accepted realities by which we could structure our live and societies. There is a plasticity to fact in online discourse, an essential malleability to the construction of meaning, in which anything can mean anything, as long as it’s said with enough authority, if it has enough aura. If it can hold our attention long enough, snag us in the content slipstream, it must be true. Why else would we accept the advice of influencers over experts, the health warnings of self-professed lifestyle gurus over those of scientists, the workout tips from people who built their bodies with plastic surgery and filler?
The problem is, if you build with plastic bricks, the centre rarely holds. Deepfakes and fake news at one end of the spectrum, the slow, steady erosion of genuine meaning through the ironies of context collapse and low level misinformation at the other. The seemingly minor transgressions we’re all guilty of: I read it in an article when we really mean I saw it in a Tweet. The protagonists of the latest Substack plagiarism scandal, conducting turf wars over AI-generated zingers, and the politicians for whom terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘self-defence’ are little more than rhetorical morning stars swung at the ankles of their opponents, may be strange bedfellows in this post-truth media landscape, but bedfellows they are.
For the last few months I’ve been thinking about leaving Substack. They say the medium is the message, and I no longer like the medium. Because if it looks like social media and it talks like social media, it probably is social media, even if its founders like to harp otherwise. Substack, as a business, is constantly engaged in a sort of effusive self-aggrandisement, and it wants its writers to be the same, perpetual self-promoters who are rewarded with one-off payments and shiny badges when they hit a certain metric. Peekaboo! I do not want to play this game. Or rather, I do not want to want to play this game. One of my greatest fears as a writer is that I am disingenuous, that I am exaggerating my own intelligence and insights through the command of rhetoric. This anxiety is the product of my education; the Oxford undergraduate tutorial system famously encourages the rapid acquisition of a wide breadth of knowledge and its confident regurgitation. What Oxford teaches you — among other things — is the performance art of intellectual bullshit. Usually, its brightest accolades are the nineteen year old boys who talk loudest in tutorials, before bragging at the pub about how they haven’t done the reading. Often, they go on to serve in the Cabinet.
If you want to pursue a career in letters, however, bullshit doesn’t cut it. Bullshit can stand in for research, but it can never replace the real thing, as anyone who has used Google’s glitchy AI summary service can tell you. Its easy to forget that style and substance are both important, that panache is not the sum total of personality. Like those regurgitated facts, it is forgotten as soon as it is spoken into existence. My fear is that I have learned the lessons of my education too well, and that it is, ironically, serving me ill in the work for which, once upon a time, it was intended, the semi-monastic life of reading, writing, and thinking. The quotidian world in which I exist, too, feels anathema to contemplation. My memory has been so optimised for immediacy that I can’t even remember the last three videos I watched online. Pre-lockdown, I used to get my best work done on the train, deprived of wifi for a few hours, at a table or with my laptop on my knees, the scenery rushing by like a cold, clear wind. Now, even if I’m not looking at Reels on my own phone, I’m subjected to them on someone else’s. When the government’s test of its new emergency alarm went off in the carriage the other day, there was near constant noise for thirteen and a half minutes. Our phones were all out of sync. But they were also so in sync. We were all hearing the same warning and all clicking away.
During my undergraduate and masters degrees, I never experienced imposter syndrome. This, again, was a product of my education. I have highly educated parents, and I went to private school before Oxford, and then I went back to Oxford after Oxford, so I never felt fundamentally out of place in an academic environment in the way some of my friends were made to. I think its important to be candid about that. As I enter the second year of my PhD, things have changed. I’ve experienced a couple of serious academic rejections, the first of my career, and I’ve been facing setbacks in my freelance work. I’m constantly surrounded by some of the most intelligent people in the world, and I don’t know how to speak to them. Sometimes I don’t even know how to speak. I hide in the library or cross the road to avoid having to make small talk I know I will needlessly punctuate with remarks about my own lack of self worth which will make everyone uncomfortable. When my friend’s parents ask about my thesis, I freeze up, and have to be fed softball questions from sympathetic observers. Every single pitch I send seems to get not only rejected but ignored. Dragging on for a month, my toothache and my tonsillitis feel like physical manifestations of my psychological sense of inadequacy, like Freud’s conversion disorder patients with their endless nosebleeds and sore throats. I cannot find the words, so I cannot speak.
One of the harshest comments on the academic journal rejection I recently received was that my claims were too totalising, that I made too many sweeping statements which sounded powerful but ultimately meant nothing. The comment hit hard, because I knew it was true, and because I desperately didn’t want it to be. I am scared that what I write — on here, as a critic for other publications, in my thesis — is not in any sense a significant contribution to the world but the literary equivalent of the single-use plastic floating down the middle of the street, or the blaring digital noise of a single phone alert among many. I have lost faith in my powers of language, and about the purpose to which I have put them. I am afraid, really, that language is all there is. That once you have peeled back all the rhetorical packaging you will find nothing there, not even bones.
Where is meaning, in a world of plastic and propaganda? In his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo, who lived between 354 and 430 CE, provides an account of his turbulent conversion to Christianity. The first spiritual autobiography, Confessions traces Augustine’s transition from pagan teacher of rhetoric to father of the church. Throughout, Augustine wrestles with what language can and can’t do. Can it make sense of God, and of the soul of man? Or is it just mere ornamentation, the art of persuasion he has learnt and taught?
In Book IX, shortly before Augustine retires from teaching rhetoric, he develops ‘a weakness of the lungs, the result of too much study… [his] voice was husky and [he] could not speak for long at a time.’ The ailment provides him with an excuse to stop teaching, but it also physicalises his new feelings to the profession in which he has been a ‘vendor of words’ and ‘sold the services of [his] tongue’ for his own advancement and that of his students. When he finally secures ‘release’ from his profession, three weeks later, he retires to the countryside with his closest friends and family, to read and study the scriptures prior to his baptism into the Christian faith. What he has abandoned is not words (of course, in the Christian tradition, the Word was with God, and the Word was God) but words as a source of profit and publicity, of fame in the earthly world.
Yet the Confessions remains saturated with rhetorical language; the former rhetorician literally cannot resist a flourish. B., who is somewhat infatuated with Augustine, and is also, strangely enough, born on his saint day, calls this tangle of candidness and artifice ‘an endless game where you are trying to peek through the keyhole to see the real Augustine who knows you’re looking’.1 Early in Book IV, after an account of the death of a close friend in his youth, he asks: ‘But why do I talk of these things? It is time to confess, not to question.’ Yet of course, in posing the question this way, implicitly creating a divide between his former and present selves, he is still questioning. It is the questioning as well as the confessing which brings him closer to God, in part of a search that leads him from the sensual world of material things through a series of ‘false’ doctrines and futile study and eventually to a moment of pure enlightenment.
In a sense, then, the Confessions is about Augustine’s struggle to find a purer form of language, a language which can express that which is inexpressible, which can sum up the infinite, make sense of God’s ineffable being. A questioning language which does not necessarily require an answer. I am perhaps being crude in my summary, but when he finds that language, it does not come from his own tongue. In a deeply moving passage at the end of his autobiography, Augustine writes of a moment of revelation which comes during a quiet conversation with his beloved mother, Monica, the spiritual heart of the text, and Augustine’s life. Unlike in his prior life as an orator and teacher, they are in private, ‘talking alone together and our conversation was serene and joyful’.
While we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it. Then with a sigh, leaving our spiritual harvest bound to it, we returned to the sound of our own speech, in which each word has a beginning and an ending — far, far different from your Word, our Lord, who abides in himself for ever, yet never grows old and gives new life to all things.
If I had been writing this essay ten or even five years ago, I might have ended it with an exhortation to use your words, a remark about how women in particular are trained to suppress our voices, and about the importance of speaking up and out. I still feel those things. Silence = Death remains as important a slogan today as it was during its origins in the AIDS crisis. Yet I now feel that the endless, constant, undifferentiated noise — noise of the sort which now forms the basis of our everyday soundscapes, both online and off — can be its own kind of violence. I saw a post on here the other day which said ‘everyone wants to write on Substack but no one wants to read’. It’s a problem I know I’m part of, that of adding to the noise. If I, like Augustine, am a commercial ‘vendor of words’, what happens to those words once they have been read and discarded?
All of us who work with language have an obligation not just to revel in our command of it but to interrogate the ways we and others use it. A writer — or a speaker — always enters into a relationship with their audience. Communication is always receptive; if it isn’t, it isn’t communication, it’s just talking to your reflection in a dark room and calling it a stage. Social media, of course, gives everyone their own stage, their own fifteen minutes or five seconds of fame. But part of the issue with influencer speak, or with intellectual bullshitting, or indeed with the art of rhetoric, is that it denies that relationship, or rather figures it in a particular way that is top-down, one-sided, unequal. The speaker on a stage peering down upon his audience, purporting to know it all.
But there are few secrets left to uncover nowadays. Paradoxically, in an era of globalisation and mass communication, the world can feel smaller, more bounded than it did in the early modern era or in Augustine’s day, when the infinite being of God was thought to lie within and beyond the world. None of the secrets spilled by Instagram influencers — whether a new recipe or a new makeup hack or a conspiracy theory — mean much, in the grand scheme of things, and few of the insights propounded by overconfident Substack essayists (and here I include myself) are really all that. My unease with what words can do is, I think, bigger than me and my own anxieties. It speaks to a society where language has become everything, and yet meaning, fact, and truth a mere accessory. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
At the end of the Confessions, it is when Augustine steps back from his command of language and the claims he had made with it, and engages in a quieter, humbler, more intimate and receptive form of communication, with both his mother and with God Himself, that he finally hears ‘the voice of the one whom we love in all these created things’. ‘In that brief moment my mother and I had reached out in thought and touched the eternal Wisdom which abides over all things’.
You don’t have to believe that truth lies only in God to appreciate the search for it, and for a language which can express it purely, or for a life which is more about meaning than its performance. Equally, you don’t have to believe that man is a fallen being to accept that human language often fails, perhaps especially when it purports to be infallible. There is so much value in that language, but it exists also in the pauses, the stillness, the silence of listening, the acceptance that we cannot always find the words to use, but that one day, unexpectedly, we might. I want to find that language, which is neither certain of its own totalising power, nor silenced by its sense of inadequacy. There must be meaning in between.
After all, my voice finally came back — when I let it rest.
Not really entirely sure what’s going on here. But anyway, I’m not quitting Substack, at least not yet.
Paid subscriptions are particularly appreciated at the moment, so a massive thank you to the handful of you who do subscribe. Enjoyed this essay but can’t afford a paid subscription? You can also show support with a one-off payment through Buy Me A Coffee.
If you’ve read this far, please take an extra moment to read and share this post. My dear friend Eleanor has been fundraising for our friend Maram, who lives in Gaza and has just been diagnosed with vaginal cancer. Unfortunately, Maram’s situation has worsened significantly in recent weeks. This is an urgent appeal for her medical evacuation. Our goal is to get Maram's case seen by anyone who could expedite her evacuation so please do read and share widely. Thank you.
This means that if I have in any way represented Augustine’s life or thought here, I am going to receive a disappointed lecture. Fact checking, baby!
Woww Helena this was a really amazing, and also sobering, read. So many of the feelings and thoughts you've so eloquently expressed here are anxieties and worries I've felt myself. Your ability to tie together the personal with the conceptual with the academic with the social commentary is just remarkable. Regardless of whatever choices you make for your own journey and purposes (and with the full understanding that Substack is of course a seriously imperfect medium and a very weird participant, but participant nonetheless, in the techno-fascist hellscape that is contemporary social media), your voice on this platform would be seriously, seriously missed. Anyway, a long-winded way to say thank you for this post. A really necessary read.
The quote restack feature is glitching on my computer, which is tragic, but it's also fitting that a piece about the limits of Substack as a platform and also of language itself is refusing to let me a) engage with Substack as a social media platform and b) isolate pieces of the language in this from the text as a whole. I'm a college freshman and a literature student and I can relate--on a much smaller scale--to so much of this: the way algorithmic doomscrolling has desensitized me to the strength of language, (feels ironic to mention here but "context collapse" is such an incredible phrase), the academic imposter syndrome, the fear that I'm using my (nebulous) command of pretty words to hide the fact that I have nothing to say. I'm so sick of words, and without them I suffocate. I'm an English major because I breathe language, but right now I'm choking on it.
Anyway. I have nothing of substance to add, but I want to say I'm so glad you're sticking around on Substack for a little while longer. The words you write here do have meaning beyond the language itself--at least to me. So many of your pieces have broadened my understanding of the world we inhabit in a way that's led me to make real, tangible changes to the way I interact with it. (Also, I actually discovered Substack through your writing, and for a very long time you were the only writer I read through this platform, so the medium is definitely not the message in your case.) Thank you for this piece, and thank you for being here.