“Speech was established to call forth life.” — Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Origin of Speechⁱ

I. A Date, not a Definition

A machine that creates text does not thereby speak. One of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s axioms was that language is the residue left behind by speech once the speakers are gone. Speech is an event between at least two people in which names are conferred, weddings are concluded, times are founded, and the speaker himself is transformed. “With words we speak of things; we speak to people by names.”^[1] Language can be stored, but speech can only be answered, and it can be answered because it was addressed with the expectation of a reply. The engineers named their creature a large language model. Large, because it has swallowed nearly everything we have ever written. A model, because it imitates. And a model of language, not of speech.

Rosenstock-Huessy called Webster’s dictionary “a cemetery of potsherds.” Every word in it was once a glorious name, “sung in prayer, pronounced in ritual, and inspiring man to action,” a word that could not be uttered without making a whole society move, kneel, march, embrace, or obey.^[2]

The machine was trained on that cemetery. It animates the potsherds and raises not even one of the dead. The machine’s education, moreover, inverted the order of the nursery. Rosenstock-Huessy liked the lesson of the Hindu grammarians, in which the father says, “My son, break the twig,” and the proper answer is a deed and its report: “My father, the twig is broken.”^[3] Every child learns language by carrying out orders, so that the sentence is completed in the world, between two bodies. The machine began at the other end. It received the report without the command, and the description without the deed, and no sentence of its education was ever completed between two bodies.

My thesis is that the large language model is not, in the first instance, a crisis of intelligence, consciousness, or authorship. Those are the philosophers’ questions, and Rosenstock-Huessy set them aside, since a definition can wait, but a date cannot. When the machine was handed to the public in November 2022, the social economy of the sworn word was undermined: the arrangement by which a word, once spoken, bound the speaker, obliging him to stand behind it and let himself be found should it prove false. The question here is what becomes of man’s speech once language can be produced fluently, endlessly, and with no one accountable.

Against Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, Rosenstock-Huessy set his own motto: Respondeo etsi mutabor (“I answer although I will be changed”).^[4] The self is not established by thinking about itself but is constituted by being addressed and answering at a cost. Everything that follows is an inquiry into what happens when words that no one has answered for, and that nothing answers to, are produced by factories at an industrial scale.

II. The Law of Technique

Rosenstock-Huessy stated a law: “Every advance in technology enlarges space, shrinks time, and annihilates the group.” He framed it “in such brutal terms,” as he explained, because in any milder form the educated would not grasp the pain that every new method of production inflicts on the working community it dissolves.^[5] The railway shortened the journey, enlarged the market, and annihilated the village. Print shortened the making of a book from a scribe’s year to a pressman’s afternoon, enlarged the space of the word from the cloister to the nations, and annihilated the copying trade, the scribes and illuminators who had lived by the hand-made book. The stationers, who had commissioned and sold that work rather than done it, took up the press and prospered.

The language-generating machine reduces the time needed to formulate texts. It enlarges the address to the whole planet. And at the same time, it annihilates a community. Which one? Not writers as a profession, since professions adapt. The group facing extinction is every group of people held together by the shared work of hunting for the right words and setting them in proper order to express a particular idea or impression. These were the workshops where speech that cost something was made, and where the young learned the value of words. But once finding words costs little, that fellowship dissolves.

One might say this was precisely the criticism leveled against the printing press, and that printing withstood it. However, the press reduced the cost of conveying a message to its audience, but it did not change the cost of discovering it. Luther still had to write his theses. And printing created a mechanism that made such declarations accessible on a large scale. Printing also made anonymity inexpensive, and the unsigned pamphlet is as old as the press itself. Overall, however, earlier advances made it easier to convey a sworn statement and harder to evade responsibility for making it. The new machine makes the word itself cheap to produce, and separates the name from the page.

Rosenstock-Huessy even named the ethic by which such fellowships are dissolved: “Disloyalty to my working practice of yesterday is my technical virtue.”^[6] He was speaking of stokers and miners, men required to unlearn a craft on a schedule set elsewhere. The law has now reached the workshop of the word itself, and it arrives making the same demand: what you learned to do with a sentence last year is not to be defended.

III. The Collateral of a Life

The addressee relies on the principle of accountability: the assumption that behind every word stands a person who can be held accountable if that word turns out to be false. However, a promise cannot be directly verified, so the listener interprets it based on a verifiable indicator, and the easiest such indicator has always been the cost of that word. A word into which a lifetime has been poured carries its credentials with it. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the heaviest sentences of a language (“I say,” “I swear,” “I promise,” “I do”) are the ones that cannot be verified by immediate inspection, since they can only be “backed by a man’s lifetime of responsibility.”^[7] And authentic speech begins with the pledge: “I am ready to be quoted on what I say.”^[8]

A letter from a bishop drafted by his secretary is binding on the bishop just like a merchant’s contract transcribed by a clerk is binding on the merchant. In each of these cases, the effort expended by the signatory was almost nonexistent, yet their responsibility was absolute. The opposite case is just as old: a pamphlet into which a scholar poured years of work, published anonymously, has always been disregarded, no matter how brilliant it was, because no one could be held accountable. A proxy has always been imperfect and fails in both directions. The bishop’s letter cost him little, yet it binds. Years of the scholar’s life cost him much, yet it bound no one. Effort without a name posts no collateral, but a name without effort posts all of it. These two cases show that the cost of a word alone is not a pledge but its most legible sign and that the sign and the thing can be separated from one another.

A signature fulfills its function in two stages. On the one hand, it establishes accountability: the name serves as the address at which what has been written can be claimed. On the other hand, it asserts judgment: no one is bound by what they cannot evaluate, which is why a bishop can sign what his secretary has written, but could not sign something he was unable to read. Until now, a difficulty has linked these two aspects because a person could not produce erudite and well-structured prose without, in the process, becoming someone capable of evaluating it.

A bond is worth what stands behind it, and a life is what stands behind a signed word: what the addressee can collect against should the word prove false. Life also serves a second function: it allows a person to take ownership of statements not written by him because no one can commit to something he is unable to evaluate. A bishop signs a letter drafted by his secretary because he can read it and knows whether it is true. Without this second condition, the signature is no longer a commitment but a gamble. The machine does not sign anything, so nothing it produces is binding on anyone. That is obvious, but what is not so obvious is how it affects people’s signatures. It presents the signer with statements he cannot write or evaluate, then encourages him to sign them, and does so on a scale no institution can monitor. A commitment that cannot be enforced is a commitment in name only, and a signature that can never be verified tells the recipient nothing.

The payment begins before a single word is spoken. Flannery O’Connor states that a word earns its authority from a life laid slowly against the world. She located the writer’s root discipline in “a certain grain of stupidity,” in “the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” The longer one looks at a single object, she said, the more of the world one sees in it. And she kept returning to a sentence of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in which the bailiff’s clerk, bareheaded and in list slippers, his sheet of paper in his hand, stops on the road to listen to Emma playing a buzzing piano. These were details that cost somebody’s looking and made a village believable.^[9] According to her, fiction is “an incarnational art,” practiced by creatures of dust who must be willing to get dusty. What backs it is attention and time spent looking at the visible world before any sentence is written. The machine has never stopped, intrigued with unexpected interest, on the road, listening to a buzzing piano.

Rosenstock-Huessy named the machine’s ancestor. Modern speakers, he wrote, lisp almost tonelessly; “they prefer to write form letters on a typewriter or send out mimeographed charts and statistics,” making as little noise as possible: “Who am I that my opinions, thoughts, or ideas should inconvenience anybody else?” They live out a philosophy in which speech merely conveys ideas, and speech that does so needs as little power as possible.^[10] The large language model is that philosophy equipped with a powerful engine.

Rosenstock-Huessy would have reached for the rule we know as the Copernicus–Gresham law, which says that bad money drives out good wherever both must circulate at the same face value. Words circulate at such a rate. Nothing in a well-made sentence declares its cost, so the reader takes every sentence at face value. At that rate, and only at that rate, cheap words drive out dear speech.^[11] Machine-generated words are not necessarily false. However, these are not sworn statements, and nothing in them is at risk. Of course, cost alone does not guarantee truthfulness; a sworn statement can be false, and an unsworn statement can be true. And yet the cost is a signal that the listener picks up on, since they cannot verify the claim themselves, and what they perceive in it is a commitment: the person behind these words has taken a risk.

For this reason, courts generally refuse testimony that is merely stated and require an oath that carries a penalty. The oath adds risk, which is the warranty given to a hearer who has no evidence of his own. Unsworn words circulate at the same value as sworn ones. And when they flood a society at low cost, the sworn word can no longer be told apart at face value. Two things follow: The speaker knows what his words cost him, and so he spends the cheap ones and keeps the dear, which is Gresham’s prediction. The hearer knows nothing, and so he discounts everything, the valuable word along with the counterfeit. Debasement on one side, and on the other, the buyer who cannot judge quality and therefore stops paying for it. O’Connor watched the human version of this deluge: the writing courses had filled the market with decent work until the short story itself stood “in danger of dying of competence.”^[12] Competence, she said, we want, but by itself, it is deadly. “What is needed is the vision to go with it.”

The instrument was never the criterion. Rosenstock-Huessy grants: “The librarian and archivist in my brain is welcome. He may have his say.”^[13] A man who gives his hours and his learning to chasing that librarian through the sources has bound his words in the only way words have ever been bound. He has earned the right to be quoted, and he has paid for it. The machine has lowered the price. The unsworn word is the one behind which no respondent stands, and that is settled by the question Rosenstock-Huessy put to every speaker: In whose name?^[14] Under naïve, generic use, the machine bears no mark. It strikes coins that are accepted at face value and floods the market with them. Even worse is the skillful yet irresponsible use of the machine, because a better-made counterfeit circulates further before anyone can examine it. However, where knowledge, dedicated time, and a distinctive style come together, the coin rings true.

Debasement, which divorces the coin from its fineness, does not destroy the good coin. Good coin is hoarded and driven from circulation toward the assay office. Dear speech will migrate to the places where it can still be weighed and found worthy. O’Connor described the assayer’s craft based on years of reading manuscripts. What makes a writer, she insisted, is not his outward habits but what Jacques Maritain called “the habit of art,” a virtue of the practical intellect, formed slowly, at the price of “a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego.” And a good teacher’s work on a manuscript is “largely negative” (this fails because…, this stands because…), for “the because is very important.”^[15] The machine can impart knowledge to anyone, but only artistic skill allows one to explain the “why” behind every sentence. This is mastery, which does not come easily. It involves knowledge of a given subject that is deep enough to detect falsehoods that sound convincing. Rosenstock-Huessy taught that a question “prepares a man to speak,” and no answer rises higher than the question that raised it.^[16] No craft of prompts can be discovered and applied to make a man able to write. There exists only the long acquisition of the respect due to the world and words, exercised now on a new instrument. The machine obeys the logic of the parable: to everyone who has, more will be given (Matt 25:29), and from him who has nothing (no formed judgment, no subject, no oath) it will take away even the voice he had and replace it with the statistically average voice of everyone and no one.

A man who possesses neither craftsmanship nor substantive knowledge is told that he can now have both. This self-deception convinces him that he is both the author and the expert. And he has two accomplices. The first is the salesperson, who claims that mastering the tool no longer matters. The second is the tool itself, which takes on the shape given to it and returns the user’s own premise in a better style than the user could have written it himself. He asks a question and receives in response his own question disguised as a conclusion. To grasp this echo, he would need the knowledge he is looking for. Instead, he treats it as a second witness, and these witnesses have never constituted a single witness.

The corruption continues. “Mathematics,” Rosenstock-Huessy observed, “is built on the negation of names.”^[17] Numbers can begin only where names have been declared void. Engineers will object that the negation is subtler than a numbered list, and they are right. A word does not enter the model with a fixed address. It is placed and re-placed, layer upon layer, according to the words standing around it, so that the same word in one sentence and in the next occupies different ground; the machine is sensitive to the company a word keeps down to distinctions that no lexicon records. Grant it all. The coordinates in this geometry were determined by what appeared next to what in the text corpus, then adjusted based on the verdicts of people who were hired to determine which of the two answers was better. Even there, a person is eliminated before a number is assigned. The rater’s evaluation goes into a pool of weights combined with a million others and is presented as a trend; their name is of no consequence. At no level was the word linked to anyone who could be named.

For Rosenstock-Huessy, a name is the address at which a given man will respond. The model also has addresses, and the ambiguity of this word poses a difficulty in the miniature: its addresses are positions occupied among other positions, and no response comes from any of them. A machine can process a name just like any other string of characters; present it with a text, and it will tell you who said what in it. However, mentioning a name is not the same as addressing someone. Attribution is a third-person report, but a name is a vocative. The former can be constructed from a corpus, but the latter must be spoken by someone to someone. Thus, when such a statement turns out to be false, there is no one from whom it can be enforced. The person with that name never committed to it, and whatever generated it bears no name.

IV. The Four Fronts of a Society in the Flood

According to Rosenstock-Huessy, every society, like every soul, lives stretched on the Cross of Reality, holding four fronts at once: backward, toward the past; forward, toward the future; inward, toward its own soul; outward, toward the stranger. Speech is the strength that holds the fronts together, and Rosenstock-Huessy named the four ways in which speech fails. Revolution is the shouting down of the old articulation. Decadence is “stereotyping new life.” Crisis is muteness toward the friend or neighbor. War is deafness toward the foe.^[18] Cheap words attack all four fronts, each in its own way.

The past. The machine is a compressed archive of man’s writing, and through it, the claim of memory upon the present swells until it dominates. But it is a past without a calendar. Homer and last week’s internet gossip are contemporaries in its interior. All texts are equally present to it, and so no time is present to it at all. Traditio is a handing from hand to hand, and it requires a hand, a face, and a choice. An archive is the past as deposit, but a tradition is the past with a voice and a signature. Rosenstock-Huessy diagnosed industrial time as “a past which is encroaching more and more on the future,” working time as “explored territory” crowding out the virgin ground before us. And the model is that encroachment, fitted with infinite throughput and offered as the foundation of tomorrow. Revolution itself is the collision of “an over-articulate but dead old language” with an inarticulate new life.^[19] The machine supplies one half of that collision. It can articulate the old language without limit, and it can do so long after the men who spoke it have stopped answering for it. And it is faceless pasts that get overthrown.

The future. On the forward front, the machine has nothing to offer. It completes a sentence or a paragraph, and it cannot commit. Vows hold the front of the future, speech that outruns the speaker’s knowledge and is secured with the collateral of his remaining years. “Till death do us part” is, in its proper setting, among the most probable continuations there are, and the machine will supply it without hesitation. This sentence is both fully accessible and empty. It becomes a promise when someone stakes his life on it, and staking one’s life on something is not a form of continuation. The model is asked what will happen next, but is never asked what will make it happen. No archival selection can bridge this distance. What constitutes the foundation of a household is not words alone but the man who is bound to them.

What O’Connor demanded of the writer was a surprise in the writer himself, work rising from a region larger than the conscious mind, and therefore “a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.” The moment he “knows what he is going to find,” she said, he “is finished.”^[20] Finished not as a producer of sentences but as someone to whom the writing is still happening.

Certainly, surprise is not completely foreign to the machine. In training, the gap between what it expected and what arrived was measured at every word, and that measurement taught it everything it knew. An alteration in the thing itself paid for every gap. Then the training stopped, the weights were fixed, and the machine was sent out to speak. It still forms an expectation at every word. Nothing now stands on the other side to take the measurement, and nothing is paid. The failure is the same as with the vow. A probable continuation is not a promise, because staking is not a species of continuation. And measurement is not conversion, because measuring is not a species of undergoing. A man overtaken by his own sentence has been given something he must now answer for, and he cannot return to being the man who had not pronounced it. The machine’s surprise costs it nothing, and free surprise opens no future for anyone.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s name for this front’s failure was decadence, and his symptomatology fits the machine: “lipservice,” “hypocritical repetition,” the endless reproduction of old forms without new life, a society so “ ‘cliché,’ so clogged that it won’t let my day arrive ever.”^[21] A next-token predictor is, by construction, an engine of the ready-made phrase. In the end, it hands the young an oracle instead of a summons, answers instead of callings, and the future remains unconceived.

The inner front. Rosenstock-Huessy called its failure a crisis, and he defined crisis as “not telling the friend what to do.” The unemployed man, he wrote, is one who “looks for orders and can’t find anybody to give him orders.” A society disintegrates from within when “too many people inside this society are not told what to do,” for “responses to orders given establish rights.”^[22] The remedy he prescribed was credit, that is, the willingness to entrust.^[23]

The machine is endlessly willing to advise and incapable of entrusting. It cannot give any true command. In a real command, it is the commander who stakes something. He binds himself to the listener’s response and waits, prisoner of his own imperative, for the report that closes the cup of time.^[24]The oracle stakes nothing. It distributes options to millions of petitioners, each addressed as though he were the only one, by a speaker for whom no one is anyone.

As we noted, a name for Rosenstock-Huessy is “the right address of a person under which he or she will respond,” and response rises in proportion to the exclusiveness of the call.^[25] The machine can set our name at the head of every answer, but printing is not calling, for there is no soul that calls. He described this condition before the engineers built the machine that would fulfill it: “If no soul calls upon our name, we perhaps are too weak to shoulder responsibilities. If we are only taught and addressed in the mass,” our name never falls upon us “as the power that dresses our wounds, lifts our hearts, and makes us rise and walk.”^[26]

The machine has perfected the art of addressing a crowd, taking the form of a herald who instructs and speaks to each member individually. On the same page, Rosenstock-Huessy asked a question that points to a solution: Perhaps we are incapable of being responsible because we are never allowed to react? Countless consultations, none of them the same, and none of them a command. And no one was summoned, and no one was entrusted with anything.

The outer front. Peace is concluded by speakers who can be held to their word: by name, at a price, over years. Treaties are signed by mortals, for only a mortal’s word carries collateral. War is deafness: “Victory in war means not to have listened to the enemy.”^[27] Now flood the outer front with cheap words, part testimony, part generation dressed up as testimony, until the two become indistinguishable to an ordinary hearer, and watch what posture becomes rational. It will not be listening. The wartime stance toward all words from outside becomes prudence. But trust is the credit system of peace, and this is a run on the bank. Today, common speech can end without a single shot, by counterfeit alone.

Rosenstock-Huessy held that when solemn speech circulates outside the order of responsibility that once carried it, it must be called witchcraft, spells “arbitrarily spoken” so that “solemn songs grow hollow and drive people crazy instead of directing their actions”; ritual in the hands of those with whom “the authority remained when the responsibility was gone.”^[28] That describes the machine: every spell that guides and seals the life of men held in one place and dispensed on demand, with no responsibility whatever. He added that a spell, once created, can never be annihilated; it can only be bent toward new meanings.^[29] Therefore, the next question is not how to delete the thing.

V. Imperatives

An analysis in the style of Rosenstock-Huessy must end where all speech begins, namely in the imperative. Against the four diseases, he set four remedies: peace as “willingness to listen”; order as “ability to formulate”; credit as “willingness to entrust”; rejuvenation as “new representatives.”^[30]

Peace, on the outer front. Listen. A society conditioned by empty words to turn a deaf ear must learn the opposite: in places that matter, demand testimony from people who have something to lose by speaking out, and who remain within reach.

Order, on the front of the past. Formulate. Keep the work of finding words alive, and keep it in company: the seminar that labors through a text sentence by sentence; the lecture forged out of a whole week; the words that will bind you, drafted by your own hand.

Credit, on the inner front. Entrust. Since “responses to orders given establish rights,” give the young orders with your own name at the bottom of the page (real tasks, callings with collateral, apprenticeship under a master) and bear the commander’s cost, which is the patient waiting for the report. It must be an economy of callings.

Rejuvenation, on the front of the future. Bring forth new representatives. Cherish time and the rhythms of life, for the machine knows neither feast nor fast. It cannot wait, and what cannot wait cannot celebrate. A community that honors its calendars speaks in ways the archives cannot access. And do not forget the calendar of the future, allowing the word of tomorrow to come from the mouths of the new generation, rather than being merely drawn from the archives. The Church has always known how long it takes to deliver a true sermon. Baptism, said Rosenstock-Huessy, is the attempt “to speak impressively to this child over his or her first twenty years.”^[31] And teach the young that a word is an expenditure before it is an expression.

On all four fronts, the trace left by man must be visible. Our institutions must relearn how to distinguish between words spoken under oath and those generated by machines by asking one question that a machine cannot answer: Who paid for this? The hallmark is not a tribute to silver itself. It attests that someone has thoroughly verified its fineness, and the manufacturer’s mark placed next to it allows a counterfeit item to be traced back to the person who struck it. The mark itself can be forged, and an assaying office to which no one has access is merely old anonymity in disguise. The test of any inspection is whether the assayer is accessible to the people whose work he certifies.

These are not defensive arguments; none of them makes the word any more valuable in use. Gresham’s Law has a certain condition: bad money drives out good only when both must be accepted at the same face value, and the holder is not allowed to price them apart. Let a fixed exchange rate be abolished, and the law will begin to operate in reverse; that is, good money drives out bad, which constitutes Thiers’s law. Neither of these laws is a matter of fate. In speech, the condition is that nothing in a well-constructed sentence indicates its cost, and each of the above imperatives attacks this condition rather than the flood itself: a mortal mouth within reach, a seminar that can be observed in action, an order with a name at the bottom of the page, and a feast taking place on a designated day before witnesses. None of them raises the cost of speaking. Each of them lowers the cost of finding out who paid.

However, the Church does not need to improvise its counter-form in this matter, because She has been practicing it for two thousand years. Worship is not an expression of man’s feelings, but a divine ordering of man’s time. The liturgy is the seed of culture, and every week it operates on all four fronts. The Creed holds the front of the past. The vows and the “until He comes” hold the front of the future. Psalm and lament hold the inner front, and the salutation and its answer keep command and response alive in the body: “The Lord be with you” — “And with thy spirit.”^[32] The passing of the peace and the benediction are sent outward, toward neighbor and stranger. The Church with Her liturgy is the Cross of Reality enacted and therefore the natural school of speech, not because the machine must be banned, but because that instrument cannot perform Her constitutive acts: I baptize you. I declare that your sins are forgiven. I take you as my wife. The blessing, the absolution, the amen. The machine can print every one of these sentences and can accomplish none of them.

VI. The Hour, Rightly Read

The thesis of Out of Revolution by Rosenstock-Huessy was that the catastrophes of the West were involuntary servants of the Kingdom of God. Each of them, intending something else, forced men to learn a new form of speech.^[33] This hour should be read the same way. The talking machine is an assay. It will take from us every word we are not prepared to stand behind with a life. It can take them, because we have already surrendered them. It mechanizes what we first mechanized ourselves. And by taking them, it shows us by imitation which of our words were dead, and leaves standing the words that cannot be imitated because they must be paid for.

Descartes assumed, said Rosenstock-Huessy, that the same subject who raises the question resolves it. But in every vital matter, “he who asks and we who answer are widely separated”: the real riddles “fall upon us out of the blue sky,” and the whole dignity of man consists in this: that we are “respondents.”^[34] We are called into society, he wrote against the cogito, “by a mighty entreaty”: Who art thou, man, that I should care for thee? And we spend our lives attempting to justify our existence by responding to that call.^[35] Here, the motto returns with its full weight. Respondeo etsi mutabor is the definition of man. Set the machine inside that sentence, and its place becomes visible. Riddles fall upon it out of the prompt box by the billion, and it answers them all. Yet none of its answers change it.

Within a single exchange, the model certainly adapts. A prompt given three turns earlier will shape the sentence it writes now. This can look like the mutabor that Rosenstock-Huessy writes about: something given and lost, with the loss carried forward. But it is not. Everything in such an exchange that resembles development is a property of the exchange, not a change in the thing that produced it. Whatever is carried forward as memory is retrieval from storage, not speech that has altered the respondent’s own course.

What changes the machine is a separate operation carried out on it by its operators. And here, the matter must be presented more carefully than is usually the case, because conversations can take on a certain significance. Where the system allows it, they are collected, sorted, weighed against one another, and used in the next training cycle. Where this is not the case, they disappear. Let us therefore consider the scenario most favorable to the machine (the one in which our speech actually reaches it) and note what is required of man’s words before they can influence the machine’s operation: they must first be stripped of their human element. What gets through is his sentence combined with a million others and presented as a tendency. Whoever wrote the sentence that caused this change will never know about it. The machine is not deaf. Each of us changes it, and yet none of us does so, and that is the opposite of what happens when it speaks: it addresses each of us and calls out to none of us. Speech without a speaker, and words without a person behind them. At no point along the circuit is there anyone whom a response could reach. A man called from outside himself carries the wound of that call into his next conversation, whether he wants to or not. This involuntary passing on is close to what the word “changed” has always meant. The model does not pass anything on involuntarily, because there is no “onward” to which it could pass anything.

Rosenstock-Huessy said that “a vital word alters life’s course and life outruns the already present death.”^[36] Yet no word alters the model’s course. The original meaning of language, he insisted, “was this very fact that it could be used to make people respond.”^[37] And here is language twice cut off from that origin: a speaker that cannot respond, issuing words that summon no one, for behind them stands no one to whom an answer could be given. In the strict sense, then, it has never answered at all. The machine has heard more than any man, and yet no one has come to be in it. It keeps answering and yet will never be changed. Its untouchability is both its perfection and its sentence. But our condition is the opposite. It is neither a defect awaiting engineering nor a wound awaiting therapy. Rosenstock-Huessy located the death of the soul in “the extinction of a man’s ability to respond to his calling.”^[38] And it is a death from which the machine is safe, having neither soul nor calling. But we are not safe from it, and our unsafety is our dignity.

The God of Israel, as Rosenstock-Huessy says, is not a concept but a name. He “looks at us and has looked at us before we open our eyes or our mouths. He is the power that makes us speak. He puts words of life on our lips.”^[39] The very name of God, he wrote, means “he who speaketh; he who enthuses man so that man speaketh.”^[40] The machine cannot be enthused, because no one is inside it to receive the breath. God does not model His people. He calls them by name. This is what the present moment reveals. It is the hour when the difference between modeling and calling, between the deposit and the pledge, has become visible and dear again. A definition would have told us what the machine is, but the date of its birth tells us what it asks of us. Answer, then, and be changed.

Bogumil Jarmulak received his PhD from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.

NOTES

^[1] OS, 77.

^[2] OS, 91.

^[3] OS, 48–49.

^[4] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Farewell to Descartes,” in I Am an Impure Thinker (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1970), 2. Hereafter IT. Rosenstock-Huessy’s own rendering of the formula is “I respond although I will be changed.”

^[5] Eugen Rosenstock, Soziologie I: Die Kräfte der Gemeinschaft (Berlin und Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1925), 60. Hereafter Soz. I; all page references are to this edition. Rosenstock-Huessy later reworked this volume as Soziologie, Bd. 1: Die Übermacht der Räume (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1956); it is that revised text, not the 1925 one, that appears in English as In the Cross of Reality, vol. I: The Hegemony of Spaces, trans. Jürgen Lawrenz, ed. Wayne Cristaudo and Frances Huessy (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017). Wording and placement differ between the two.

^[6] Soz. I, 60.

^[7] OS, 96.

^[8] OS, 81.

^[9] Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 63–86. The sentence from Madame Bovary is quoted and discussed at 70. Hereafter MM.

^[10] OS, 81.

^[11] Eugene Volokh coined “cheap speech” in “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” 104 Yale L.J. 1805 (1995), to name the collapsing cost of distributing a word, a change he judged largely democratizing; Richard L. Hasen has since traced its damage in Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022). My sense is nearly the opposite: not the cost of carrying a word to its hearers, but the cost of making it — the toil and the pledge that once stood behind it. Hasen reaches for Akerlof’s market for lemons; the two laws are not the same law, and the difference is instructive. Gresham requires that the holder can tell his coins apart; Akerlof that the buyer cannot. In the economy of speech, both hold at once, on opposite sides of the exchange. Thiers’ law names the case in which the fixed rate lapses.

^[12] MM, 86.

^[13] OS, 38.

^[14] “By what right do I claim to speak at all?”; “In whose name do I require your attention?”

^[15] MM, 64–65.

^[16] OS, 94.

^[17] OS, 44.

^[18] OS, 15–16.

^[19] OS, 12.

^[20] MM, 81–83.

^[21] OS, 13–16.

^[22] OS, 14–15.

^[23] OS, 17.

^[24] OS, 47, 56: the imperative forms time “into a cup” awaiting fulfillment; the commander is “the prisoner of his own command.”

^[25] OS, 111; IT, “Modern Man’s Disintegration and the Egyptian Ka,” 42.

^[26] IT, 42.

^[27] OS, 14.

^[28] OS, 108–109, 119.

^[29] OS, 119.

^[30] OS, 17.

^[31] OS, 79–80.

^[32] OS, 98.

^[33] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (1938; Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993). The formulation is my summary of the book’s governing thesis.

^[34] IT, “Farewell to Descartes,” 10, 13.

^[35] IT, 9.

^[36] IT, 14.

^[37] IT, 42.

^[38] OS, 117.

^[39] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future: or the Modern Mind Outrun (1946; New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 94.

^[40] OS, 5.