Today in class we talked about a lot of really cool ideas that I wanted to digest briefly after class and before going to work at the Writing Center. We read Sommers’ “Between the Drafts,” an essay by Perl, and Fishman, Lunsford, et al’s article on performative writing. What Andrea Lunsford said Saturday at the conference was key: There is a continuum, and on one said, you are writing, and on the other side, you are being written. This is what I get from Sommers’ essay, although she uses different terms: on one side you are authentic, and on the other side, you are inauthentic. My belief is becoming: You can never be wholly authentic/writer and you can never be wholly inauthentic/written. Sometimes it is a choice of where to be. Sometimes we are forced or forcing our way toward one end or the other.
Of course, I believe that most of the time we should be more authentic. This does not mean there is a singular authentic self. Just as I have multiple roles in life, I have multiple authenticities, multiple voices, multiple perspectives. None is talking by itself at any one time; they are constantly at work with and against each other, in conflict and in cooperation, each voice in my head fighting against and with each other voice. When I sit down and write an “academic” paper where there is supposed to be no “personal” voice, my voices fight each other, finding ways to each one get a word in here, a word in there. It is entirely performative—in my head, on the page. It is juggling all these performativities(?) that I can get the words on the page in a way that might satisfy me (and the professor).
In class Shobi used the metaphor “come out of the closet,” and I snickered because of the queer connotations with that phrase. Aren’t we all trying to come out of the closet: becoming more authentic, finding our multiple voices, chosing to write instead of being written. When someone/something else writes us, don’t we let them restrict, form, mold us into a very small, confined space: a closet, of sorts?
How do we get students to come out of the closet – to write themselves in multiple, liberating ways that fight against constraints that inform them they can’t do something or don’t have an ability?
Your point about being authentic or inauthentic is important – because we can never be perfectly authentic anywhere – and, as you point out, authentic implies a single self, whereas we have multiple personae to be authentic too. Just as we participate in multiple overlapping discourse communities, so we have multiple speaking/writing voices. I’m feeling this is connected to what Andrea Lunsford said about ‘being written” or being created in the act of creating/speaking/writing – so that we can be authentic (or not) in a particular discourse (or community) – yet, if we are constantly changing, we could only be authentic for that moment anyway. And if, as someone (whose name I ought to recall but cannot) says – I don’t know what I think until I see what I say – one might be surprised to discover one’s unexpected authenticity. Michael, your collage model is right, because we are the sum, and more than the sum, of parts.
Hmm – this is going to take more thinking.