 However, history is not simply a plurality of names. Rosenstock-Huessy argued that it also tends toward a common story, as speakers and listeners are forced by successive catastrophes to become increasingly integrated into common spaces and times and to see the connection between the times and hence between each other. Such a connection can only be a real connection if it takes account of the bloody conflicts and the different responses and causes behind war and revolution as much as the moments and successes of common cause. That is, it must be multi-vocular. However, being multi-vocular is not the same as being an archipelago of hermetically sealed cries; history provides the difference between Babel (the interminable inability to communicate one’s suffering and one’s love, faith, and hopes) and a possible common future. ‘All history is the tale of acts in which some speaker and some listener have become one’ (1970a, 109). It is the formation of ‘we ’. Thus, he says in Ja und Nein, ‘we discover the founding act of life as the shaking up or shock (Erschütterung) of a man so that he is activated, finally activated and called upon to join in the formation of history in his own name’ (1968, 26).