A paragraph (writing) by Roland Bartes for his inaugural lecture (speech) as the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France on January 7, 1977:
"Language is legislation, speech is code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is classification, and all classifications are oppressive: ordo means both distribution and commination. Jakobson has shown that a speech-system is defined less by what it permits us to say than by what it compels us to say. In French (I shall take obvious examples) I am obliged to choose between masculine and feminine, for the neuter and the dual are forbidden me. Further, I must indicate my relation to the other person by resorting to either tu or vous; social or affective suspension is denied me. Thus, by its very structure my language implies an inevitable relation of alienation. To speak, and, with even greater reason, to utter a discourse is not, as is too often repeated, to communicate; it is to be subjugate: the whole language is a generalized rection."
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