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From: fshck@UMAC on 09/04/2001 11:57 AM
I'm sorry to come late to this discussion, having been in Hong Kong for the
weekend... but for any who are not yet totally burned out with the pronouns...
I think this we question really crystallises some of the biggest ethical
problems facing writers across a range of genres today...
speaking/writing to and with unavoidably involves speaking/writing for and
worse, over, others
let's face it (oops, that was a we hiding under apostrophe) ...choice is limited
on the pronoun front ... one has to speak from somewhere, pretend to be familiar
or familial or aloof or authoritative or whatever, conceal such pretensions,
etc...
i personally don't want to have any less choices than i have at the moment
thinking more of the essay than the poem i think
we is in the difficult necessity category
to be problematised yes - yes - lovely bureaucratic word problematise
(bring this one back when it's been properly problematised will you)
problematised but not ruled out
if only because that ruling out could only be the prerogative of another
invisible we ... for instance the canonising we engaged in the sacred duty of
deciding what a poem can and cannot be
... some earlier thoughts on the subject...
In an interview in 1984 titled "Polemics, Politics, and Problematization" Michel
Foucault says:
I do not appeal to any "we" ? to any of those "we's" whose consensus,
whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and
define the conditions in which it can be validated. But the problem is,
precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a "we"
in order to assert the principles one recognises and the values one accepts;
or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a "we"
possible, by elaborating the question.
It may well be asked whether one, as a writer, gets out of the process of
identification (with readers) so easily. As Jean-François Lyotard writes: "We
are in fact always under some influence or other; we have always already been
told something, and we have always already been spoken. We are weak and the
gods exist because we didn't win" .
We has become a taboo pronoun in scholarly discourse because it has come to
suggest a universalist and imperial subjectivity, one which (like the royal
plural) takes the reader-subject under wing and without bothering with the
trouble of arguing for this privilege. The problem with foregoing the use of
this pronoun is that such a strategy may achieve nothing but the concealment of
the imperial motive which lies in the moment of identification of writer and
reader. Such an identification is elided in favour of a harder to challenge,
often agentless, passivity, characterised by the use of the "dummy-it": It is
widely acknowledged... In these terms common sense, by means of an absence of
modality, delivers a certain world as if it were ours ever-thus.
The we problem does not go away by saying we less or even by the act of
positing the self as never part of a collectivity. Such strategies fail because
we each of us are members of all sorts of insistently spoken collectivities, the
most notable (and least obvious) of which is language. The dialogism of speech
points to the reality that words arise in the fact of a perpetual exchange. The
forbidden pronoun points us in the direction of a forbidden and utopic state:
community; that state which ironically is among us as the pre-condition of our
words.
Scholarly enquiry is neither the accidental result of a failure to act nor
yet the effort of a lonely enquirer bereft of the guidance of others. There is
an insistent identification underlying such projects, that of we the readers,
whose community may even be principally antagonistic, who may be uncomfortable
with even this identification; but who nevertheless have in common the fact of
having read thus far. It can be said that the use of we now, a marked use, as
an awkwardness of style has recovered the virtue of demonstrating an effort at
identification, and thus precisely offers a place where such identifications can
be challenged. To adopt we as a specific strategy by which terms of
identification are made transparent and tested was perhaps the effort made by
Burliuk, Kruchenyk, Mayakovsky and Khebnikov in their manifesto: "A Slap in the
Face of Public Taste":
We alone are the face of our time. Through us the horn of time blows in
the art of the world...
We order that poets' rights be revered...
To stand on the rock of the word "we" amidst the sea of boos and outrage.
*
The other side of the inclusion which the identification we assumes, is the
exclusion a reader feels when s/he cannot go along with what is expressed under
this aegis. In these circumstances s/he is alerted to a differend, to use
Lyotard's coinage, such as is suggested in the observation that "a universal
rule of judgement between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general" . Lyotard
defines the differend as "the unstable state and instant of language wherein
something which must be put into phrases cannot yet be". As such we may regard
it as what lies between the communities which are implied in a speech
intelligible to its participants. Lyotard claims that society is inhabited by
differends. He writes that:
there is a differend between two parties when the "settlement" of the
conflict that opposes them appears in the idiom of one of them while the tort
from which the other suffers cannot signify itself in the idiom.
That situation, I would argue, obtains wherever a law is the possession of
particular parties. Poetry, in such a circumstance, because it subjects its own
language to the exigencies of a position between languages, plays a role akin to
that of bearing witness to differends.
...just a thought we had when out tidying the kingdom
once upon each other
Christopher Kelen,
English Dept, University of Macau,
Taipa, Macao SAR, CHINA
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