Here it goes. To be completely honest, I keep changing ideas on a central focus every freakin’ five minutes, hours, whatever. It keeps changing on me. Now, at 2:48 in the morning, approximately 11 hours before I have to present, I am finally having my moment of lucidity. I want to focus on the polyphony in your head, in our head, in all our heads (Drawing on Sommers), and on Multivocality (drawing on Olsen, perhaps, and Romano). We constantly write with multivocality. Our tones and voices shift in papers all the time. I had this all flushed out in my head better five minutes ago as I was driving, listening to “Story of My Life” by Reel Big Fish and smoking a clove cigarette.
Gee writes:
“thinking and reasoning are inherently social. But they are also inherently distributed, and more and more so in our modern technological world. By this I mean that each of us lets other people and various tools and technologies do some of our thinking for us” (184).
“My knowledge is not only social, it is distributed outside my body. If you were to assess just my skills playing video games alone in my home, you would underestimate me. You need to assess me as a node in a network and see how i function as such a node. The knowledge I gain playing games, limited as it is for an old babyboomer, is but a part of my functioning as such a node, and it is knowledge that can spread into the network as well. In turn, knowledge flows to me, making me better than your original estimate would have assumed” (189).
Our writings are no longer just collages (who first said that, long before Lance Olsen), but now we are collages. We are a collection of voices and resources. Ironically, as our identities become more and more individualized in this postmodern hyper-individualized world, they also become more blurred, more one with each other. Yes!
If it is true, as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes claim (Daly 5), “that the author is dead, I prefer to imagine that it is the father-author, the author who demanded silence from his victimized dughters, who has died. If this god-the-father-author is truly dead, it might then be possible for feminists, at long last, to redefine the act of authorship” (Daly 7).
“We live nowhere if not in The Age of Uncertainty, The Age of Radical Self-Reflexivity, and so it’s unsurprising that at the nucleus of most of these surprising pieces spins the question of how we can construct our futures, themselves defamiliarizations of our present(s), in ways comparable to how we have constructed and continue to construct – and forever reconstruct, revise – our past(s). How, for example, will the continuing postmodern dissolution of edges, perimeters, ambits – separating say, prose from poetry, ‘creative’ writing from ‘critical,’ genre from genre, page from screen, ‘high’ culture from ‘low,’ ‘literature’ from ‘paraliterature,’ atomic-based formats from digital – affect narrative’s trajectory?” (Lance Olsen, “The Future of Narrative” 378).
“We are all, as Roland Barthes pointed out so long ago, texts, and a text is ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash'” (Lance Olsen, “Avant-Crit and the Advent of Theory…”, p. 568)
