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To AKMA's Seabury-Western Home Page Email me at Seabury AUTHENTICITY PREMISES Voice, Authenticity, Style, Politics Faculty and Administration of the University of Blogaria  Prof. of Hyperlinked Humanities, Primus Inter Pares David Weinberger Provost and Vice Chancellor of Imaginary Affairs Frank Paynter Wealth Bondage Registrar Halley Suitt Dean of Memetic Engineering and Reader of Thoughts Kevin Marks Research Professor of Markup Cryptology Phil Ringnalda Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon Foundation Professor of Early Japanese Literature Jonathan Delacour Abraham J. Simpson Chair of Desultory Conjecture Steve Himmer Clued Professor of Micro-journalism and Women's Studies Jeneane Sessum Prof. of Digital Psychometry Eric Norlin Christopher Locke Prof. of Comparative Kim Novak Ray Davis Ho Chi Minh Chair in Vietnamese Studies & American Poetry Joseph Duemer Section 508 Prof. of Web Accesibility and Useability Mark Pilgrim Professor of Haemophagy and Laputan Linguistics Naomi Chana Harley Davidson Saddle of Comparative Literature Tom Matrullo Prof. of Melanesian Hermeneutics Alex Golub Prof. of Linguistics Dorothea Salo Zimmerman Professor of Music and Poetics Mike Golby Senior Lecturer in Tlonian Area Studies and Chaplain A. K. M. Adam Szarkowski Chair of Photography Jeff Ward Prof. of Analytic Philosophy and Korean Area Studies Stavros Alfred E. Newman Foundation Chair in International Blogging Relations Shelley Powers Prof. of Gluation and Scissorology Mark Woods Professor of Folklore & Mythology Renee Perlmutter Crone-in-Residence, Purveyor of Eclectic Mysticism�??�?� and Professor of Rhetorical Ritual Elaine de Kalilily Prof. of Fractured Philosophy Tom Shugart Director of Music, Blogaria School of Divinity Tripp Hudgins House Band Shannon Campbell Audio-Visual Guy Josiah Adam Campus Cat Dizzy, at Allan Moult's place DAILY BLOGS The Usual Posse Doc Searls Dave Rogers Victor Echo Zulu Gary Turner Textism Jordon Cooper Elke (Sisco) Zimmermann sacra doctrina Mike Sanders ZINES The Ekklesia Project Fellowship 
Member of the JOHO Curling Team  
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Saturday, February 16, 2002 ( 12:25 PM ) Today's to-blog list: Steve Himmer's scintillating expansion of the literary-style and politics thread, and Rob Tow's (by way of Brenda Laurel, by way of Dave Rogers, by way of DW) claim that "narratives are the constitutions of new worlds," in a perpetuation of what Mike Golby eloquently called "the dull-as-ditchwater magnum opus that dissects the notion of voice and identity and authenticity and felicity and every other kind of crack-brained, in-the-world attribute we drag behind us like a bag of bones and bring to this space of infinite freedom." Steve Himmer takes up the lovely example of Jacques Lacan's notoriously, deliberately opaque prose, and wonders whether the impenetrability ("Impenetrability! That's what I say!") reflects Lacan's "authentic" voice of inexhaustible complexity, or whether the same feature marks Lacan's voice as "deliberately inauthentic." Lacan isn't the only difficult writer one could name; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has gotten some hostile press for her prose, and Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha have recently taken slings and arrows for their writing. Let me say this about that. (1) You can write badly from anywhere on the political spectrum. (2) Difficult writing is usually worse than clear writing, but not necessarily. (3) Sometimes difficult writing reflects the genuine torsion that accompanies unfamiliar theories' transition into discourse. (4) Jargon--one of the oft-cited vices of difficult prose--may represent a local dialect of like-minded thinkers who find communication easier when they allude to shared notions rather than spelling them out every time. Thus, when someone gets her or his knickers in a twist about Homi Bhabha's confusing or "meaningless" sentences, our complainer may have a plausible critique or may just be out of this particular loop. I don't understand 80% of what Unix geeks say even when they're ordering pizza, but that doesn't make their speech "meaningless." I don't understand a lot of what U.S. elected officials say, even in populist plain speech, because they're using familiar words to disguise the actual import of what they're saying. I don't understand what some of my students write, because they use imprecisely words that don't mean what they think they mean. Someone like Lacan constructs frustrating periods exactly because he's trying to put listeners and readers through a process of association, identification, confusion, interpretation, giving up, and understanding, and not-understanding, and changing one's way of thinking. Shall we call such a style "bad" or "unfair" or "illegitimate"? Why bother invoking a standard of goodness, decency, or legitimacy in order to decry bad style when one can lend focus to the matter by saying, "If there is anything to what he writes, I do not have the time to go through the process of understanding it" or "The only people I know who commend this work are faddish, self-important provocateurs who annoy me in every other way, so I'm not going to bother even giving it a chance"? (By the way, I'm only a lite reader of Lacan, not by any means a disciple, but a respectful observer.) But Steve isn't just asking whether Lacan's voice is authentic (in the way these terms have developed in our blogtied convesation, and I continue to use the term "authentic" only under protest); he wonders about the politics and ethics of writing that way at all. (i, in turn, wonder about the ethics of writing a blog filled with scripts that shoot the page up to the top on innocent mouseovers--I'm getting dizzy. Solution? Read the page in source code. Update: Steve graciously edited his page's javascripts, so that they no longer play havoc with mouseovers under Mac MSIE 5--on behalf of others so equipped, thank you Steve.) Steve quotes Andrew Ross, who said that the world is too interconnected today to allow people to create these arcane knowledge objects that must be rationalised and interpreted by an elite few thinkers, only to eventually trickle their influence out over the larger populace. That seems counterproductive to a fault. These days, building an academic reputation on smoke, mirrors, and pulling levers behind a curtain is much easier to see as what it really is--making a vocation out of crafting confusion. It might have been an adaptive trait at some point, but no longer. Too many people can and do pay attention. Too many people can spot a charlatan for a charlatan, and especially now, we can see that the Emperor is wearing no clothes because there are JPEGs of him all over the Internet. Well, yes and no. If I'm right about point 3 above, then Andrew's ethical imperative risks deamnding that no new idea be represented in the world until it's consumable by--whom?"a larger populace"? As I repetitively demand, who determines when an idea is digestible enough to be allowed? Populist rhetoric about "building an academic reputation on smoke, mirrors, and pulling levers behind a curtain" has often served as a ploy for anti-intellectuals to stave off intellectual interrogation of politics that can't withstand exposure to the light. Granted that Andrew would not enlist in such a cause, how are we readers to distinguish his impassioned plea for literary transparency from a manipulative demand that no one think harder than me ('cos I might feel less intelligent than someone else, and everyone knows that can't be the case)? Having said all that, I confess once again to an intensity of feeling about clear, precise writing that probably indicates some childhood trauma (and I was indeed brought up by a father who's an English Lit and Composition professor and a mother who, among other vocations, taught high school English). In the ideological battle over prose style between Orwell and Adorno, I sympathize with both parties, but try to write more like Orwell. Few writers have attained a control over their writing that will allow them thoughtfully to choose to compose dense, challenging sentences over against lucid, simple prose. Most students resist refining their compositional style with an energy they ordinarily reserve for more intensely pleasurable pursuits. They have, after all, been composing oral prose successfully all their lives, and see no urgency to breaking out of long-established habits. And my students have the misfortune of attending a seminary where their professor of New Testament and Early Church History harbors a restless yearning for students to extend their understanding of how composition works (and doesn't work), how readers and listeners perceive (and misperceive) prose, and what we all can do to compose more carefully (myself included, front of the line). Now, as to narrative. I am a vigorous advocate of thinking more richly in narrative categories. My grad schools were both associated with "narrative theology"; I practice a mode of biblical interpretation heavily influenced by my family background in critical study of the English novel. The sort of postmodern critical thinking and practice that I encourage draws some of its inspiration from what Jean-François Lyotard called "narrative knowledge." My copious work of literary composition derives such vigor as it attains by way of attention to narrative as one model for sustaining a reader's interest and sympathy. I sleep in pj's with a big "N" on them. "Go, narrative, go!" Rob Tow's pithy formula entices my assent, and (even more) DW's aphorism that "We are writing ourselves into existence on the Web. Together." (you may just have rendered yourself immortal with those words, David--seems like everyone's quoting them) delights me. Still, my interest in the difference of broadband hypermedia communications obliges me to apply the brakes gently when I approach encomia of narrative that appeal tremendously to my literary instincts. As I insisted a while ago, one of the giddying precipices that we're approaching involves not just the capacity for ordinary metics to "publish" their literary compositions for a mass audience--we the people are already streaming our favorite recordings over the Web, are exposing our appearances to the Web, and may soon be streaming video of our choosing, for free, in a very different media world. Some of that stuff will narrate--but a lot won't, and you-all who are speaking so eloquently and convincingly in praise of narrative today ought not limit your imaginations to the medium of words or the mode of narrative. It's going to get exciting around here, and I'm hoping you can help me anticipate some of that excitement. Onto my to-blog list for the future: "content," and refining some of what we've been talking about regarding voice and authenticity on my summary page. Permalink -Main Page- ( 12:25 PM ) Hey, Si blogged from Sri Lanka! Messages will be short, in deference to access problems, but it's great to see that he remembered that his mom and dad will be peering through their electronic porthole to see how he's doing on the opposite side of the globe. Permalink -Main Page- Friday, February 15, 2002 ( 1:32 PM ) Dodged a bullet today; when I visited onepotmeal this afternoon I read of Steve Himmer's disappointment when people get his name wrong. Realizing that I had referred to him a day or two ago, I paged back to my reference and saw, aaaah, that I had spelt it "Himmer" and not any of the less-satisfactory variations on the theme. Even I wouldn't have thought ot call him Jamie Pickwick. On my street, growing up, most of the kids were from Eastern European Jewish or Roman Catholic families, or from Italian Roman Catholic families. The other kids didn't know what to make of a Scots-English casual Anglican--so they decided I must be an otherwise unknown species of Italian, and named me "Angelo," and my street nickname was "Anj." Jacob Shwirtz (spelled his name right, too--I'm on a roll) introduces "trust" into the discussion, and over at JOHO, David Weinberger entertains suggestions from Bill Seitz, Andrew Ross, Jonathan Peterson, and Jason Thompson. Look, it's a big back yard, and the more of us playing there the better, but it gets hard to keep track of all the fun. So by way of overview of the excitement: there seems to be something about history, the ways we represent ourselves, the things we actually say and do, and the settings in which we said, did, say, do, and represented and represent them, that a number of us want to highlight and applaud. The aggregate wisdom of our correspondents suggests that this quality involves a sort of congruence among the various elements, such that authentic identity reflects a discernable continuity of the [identity]'s history with its aspirations and self-representation, expressed across a variety of contexts in ways that complement one another and the historic self-presentation of the [identity]. Okay, but most of what that spotlights might more specifically be characterized in other, more precise ways. "I don't like David Weinberger's site; it conceals his unabashed hucksterism for his corporate fat-cat clients" tells me a lot more than "David Weinberger's site seems inauthentic." Are we not devoting vast amounts of intellectual energy (on your parts at least) to bolstering up a vague concept with rigor and nuance, when it might actually be more useful in its very vagueness, as an invitation or prelude to a different, more specific diagnosis? All of you sound pretty authentic to me, by the way. But in different ways. It's been a long week. I have to go grade some Greek exams. Let me know if you decide something. I told Mark Juchter I would blog that he, the Blood Man extraordinaire, once again escorted me, the Big Chicken, to Evanston-Northwestern Hospital to give blood. In a major breakthrough in donor-coddling technique, this makes the fourth time in a row I've given blood without fainting. Mark and the devoted blood siphoners at ENH smile bemusedly as I sweat, prattle, blanch, breathe deeply, look away from anything even vaguely associated with blood, and stagger away from the donor chair. They must really be desperate for blood if they put up with me, and I appreciate their willingness to endure my histrionics just to get my recycled body fluids. Mark's the real deal when it comes to giving blood; I think he's donated several tragic accidents' worth all by himself, and he conjures the rest of us into giving blood too, so if you need surgery in the upper midwest, you may well have Mark to thank for your transfusion. Go, and do likewise. (Give blood, I mean, not "need major surgery.") Permalink -Main Page- Thursday, February 14, 2002 ( 7:55 PM ) Si arrived, groggy and thunderstruck by the beauty of Sri Lanka and exhausted and thrilled to be with his godfather Jon. We can sleep tonight. Margaret's Valentine to me today: One need not blush or excuse oneself for being tender: it is an honor for which one must be proud, it is a grace that one must spread, for where there is no tenderness, neither is there joy given nor joy received. I know of course that one can misuse one's heart, one can wither one's body and soul in debilitating and sterile tenderness. It is the path that is opened wide to those entering into life. . .Hot'n'heavy theological mash notes.... Me? I was going to send her an iCard, but the site was swamped today so I didn't get around to it. Permalink -Main Page- ( 11:44 AM ) Josiah changed planes successfully in Frankfurt (at about 6 in the morning CST) and Dubai (a little after noon CST), and is now in the air to Colombo--unless he got so severely lost that he hasn't dared call us. Due to land in Colombo at 6:10 CST. Just when I thought that David W., the Skip on the authenticity interblog curling team, had brought our bloggery to a graceful close after an exhilarating, memorable quartet (quintet, sextet, as various voices, authentic or in-, joined the chorus), all good things came not to an end, but to a new beginning. Well, one good thing, anyway. And maybe it came to two new beginnings. What it is: Tom "Vice Skip" Matrullo rekindles the embers with tinder concerning the matters of continuity, memory and forgetting, and accountability. Nothing for it but to stir the blaze back to full flame, I suppose. Oy, Tom! Memory, continuity, congruence, context: Another dimension of all this, towards which I didn't want to push while we were still blogging through discussions of "authenticity," is the basis for distinguishing a "self" from an "other." Consumer Service Warning: I am not saying that there is no such thing as "identity" or a "self" as distinct from anyone else, that we all are one big blob of consciousness or whatever (though I remember a particular afternoon on the Maine coastline, lying on my back, when it all seemed so clear to me...). Nonetheless, our "selves" do shade off and merge into others, into our context, into shared identities, so that if we attempt to construct an absolute borderline--this side "Me," that side "You"--we're guaranteed to impoverish and deceive ourselves. So Tom, if I understand him aright, locates "authenticity" not simply in a relation between facade and interior, or in a relations among an indefinite number of manifestations of a persona, but also in the relation of persona and context. Right indeed, and all the more challeninging to any who would venture to determine whether this or that persona, voice, website, whatever , is "authentic." On the other hand, Tom points us back to parrhesia in the context of accountability (and accountancy). Perhaps one way in which this very powerful point applies to our friend Dave "First Sweeper" Rogers's concerns might lie in the extent to which a web persona (whether personal or corporate) bespeaks a willingness to be held accountable for what it displays, says, offers. This sounds very Cluetrainical, and I expect you-all said it somewhere in there, implicitly if not explicitly (in the "inner" Cluetrain if not the "outer" Cluetrain). At least, in #22 on "straight talk" you might have said parrhesia if you had anticipated this discussion, and in #27, "By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay," you state the contrapositive. Candor (my preferred translation for parrhesia in most contexts) and accountability aren' t readily discernible from one's first glance at a Web page--but their opposites , dissimulation and evasiveness, are prominent enough and common enough that cautious visitors can often spot them at first glance. And candor and evasiveness figure also in David W.'s blog today. Phil Cubeta dresses David down for observing the ways language "cracks" under cultural stress, but doing so in the literary style of the Country Houses of Ben Jonson, or the coffee house of Dryden, or the drawing rooms of Edith Wharton, or the pages of the New Yorker, when E.B. White was a star contributor.(Sidenote to Phil Cubeta: don't forget to afflict me with a bodyslam like that. "Oooh, compare me to Jonson again! Harder!") David responds first, that his point wasn't that the language or the style was cracking, but that specific words were. (Side note to David: I liked the amplification of these cracks in JOHO The Zine; I almost missed them, since I've been reading along in the blog, but I want to get back to those amplifications sometime. Not now.) Then David, sounding a little ruffled, suggests that one can respond to stupidity and folly without necessarily starting (or escalating) a flame war. Some folks relish savage speech; David prefers to work with the materials at hand to build a productive staging area for mutual learning (if possible) and instruction. My chief dissent from David's position arises from the hint of defensiveness and regret that tinges his response, and if I were a different writer, I'd lambast Phil Cubeta from here to--well, in cyberspace I guess there isn't a handy "to" to lambast him to, but I would if there were. But there isn't and I'm not. David speaks the candid truth when he says that style and poltiics can be related, but that they don't stand in a simple one-to-one relation. The point David cites is convincing ("You'll find plenty of plain-spoken fascists, and there are Rush Limbaughs on the left as well as the right"), and Phil himself slips when he enlists Martin "I Dare You to Read This Prose" Heidegger as an exemplar of the kind of limpid lucidity with which he finds fault. What about George Orwell, patron of a prose all the more harrowing for its clarity? Presumably he, too, falls under Phil's scourge. And while Foucault was not an Orwell, a Jonson, or Dryden, yet his prose and speech (in works like Discipline and Punish, in his copious interviews, and awkwardly enough, in his defense of parrhesia) line up closer to David W.'s readable periods than Yippie free-speech yowls. (By the way, did Phil mistransliterate the Greek word, or is he exemplifying subversive discourse by creating the illusion of mistransliteration?) And Peter Sloterdijk, sponsor of modern neo-cynicism (and allegedly a crypto-fascist, in one of those instances where you end up at one extreme by pushing far enough in the opposite direction), wrote an academic defense of the fart as social critique. (I find myself in the odd position today of defending David against the charge of speaking too gently when a few days ago I was chiding him for speaking too snarkily.) So I second David. The (literary) style does not determine the politics, nor does the end determine the (literary) means. If one has to apply crass measures, it would be tough for a leader to benefit more lives more dramatically than did Mohandas Gandhi--but he used the literary style that Phil decries against the forces that oppressed India. And in-your-face prose sells everything from reactionary politics to sneakers to syrup-flavored fizzy water. So there--nyaah, nyahh, nyahh. Si's plane landed in Colombo, presumably with him aboard. Still waiting for a phone call to say he cleared customs, has his health and suitcase, and rendez-vous-ed with his godfather Jon. Permalink -Main Page- Wednesday, February 13, 2002 ( 10:23 PM ) Drive-by blog tonight, just to explain that "random thoughts" began to sound very unoriginal and uninteresting as soon as I typed it into Blogger. So I switched the title to something more specifically congruent to me, a Greek teacher, theologian, web big-mouth, and second broom on the JOHO curling team. "Doxa" would be either "opinion," "received opinion," so that "para doxa" would mean "contrary to received opinion" (hence "paradox"); the preposition "peri" can mean "around" (as in "periscope," for looking around) or "concerning." "Peri doxas" then might be "concerning received opinion" or "concerning glory," depending on what I'm talking about. Our son Josiah is on his way to Sri Lanka--we won't have a report from him till about twenty hours from now. He promised to blog as often as he could. Is this the twenty-first century or what? Permalink -Main Page- Tuesday, February 12, 2002 ( 3:33 PM ) Lest anyone doubt that one of the dimensions of my identity, one of the circles in my Venn diagram (I owe that metaphor to an essay Margaret Adam wrote, due recognition here offered), includes the work of a parish priest, another blogger caught me in the act. Jim McGee, of Christ Church Winnetka and of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, has now heard me pontificate both in person, on the gospel, and in virtuum, on stuff related to truth, identity, and corporate website design. His comment on my sermon--"Good stuff"--may seem concise to the point of dismissiveness, but if you knew Jim McGee as well as I do (that is, I received his email and glanced at his website) you'd be able to tell at a glance that that's just his way of saying, "Savonarola, move over! That sermon was spectacular!" Anyway, I'm going to be looking out for him two weeks from now, when I go back to Winnetka. I want to repeat what I blogged yesterday in my almost-asleep haze, drawing the nearly-exhausted thread on identity to what is probably the "Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead" Phase of the conversation. I don't care; I liked it, and I want to bring it around again. This is me. This is what I'm like when you can't see my face, or hear my voice, but can make out the words I'm scrawling on your computer screen and can tell from the color scheme and logo that I teach at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Whether I seem authentic or not, whether you want to buy anything I might sell you or not, when you look at me through this address, this is who I am. Kinda pale, with black spots, and a purple tattoo. Hmmm. Permalink -Main Page- Monday, February 11, 2002 ( 8:59 AM ) Before I generate any official, this-is-today's-blog blog, it occurred to me during the afternoon Hymn Festival yesterday that the problem with "authenticity" may lie in part with how we're trying to get at it, rather than with the concept itself. That is, "inauthenticity" tends toward homogeneity and imitation; the kind of "authenticity" for which people generally aim, derives from (a) not worrying about whether one is sounding authentic and (b) not trying to sound like something else, whether an ideal of one's own or a model provided by someone else. So while "authenticity" may be necessarily elusive as a positive quality, "inauthenticity" may be easier to get hold of. Or as Tolstoy might have said if he had been a Web visionary, "All inauthentic web voices are alike, but an authentic web voice is authentic after its own fashion."
Hasty reader that I am, I missed David Weinberger's "If your outer self doesn't pretend to represent your inner self, you're now in a politics of theatre or authorship, not one of personal identity" until Tom Matrullo pointed it out. But this is just the kind of distinction I'm wondering if we might want to question; after all, isn't "the politics of theatre or authorship" a constituent of "the politics of personal identity"? It might not make sense to ask if RageBoy is "authentic" (and here I'm presupposing, contra my intuition, that it's worth deploying that concept), but since Chris Locke has made his sharing RageBoy's voice a transparent gesture, it seems to make sense to ask whether Locke/RageBoy's voice is authentic. Moreover, don't we expect theatrical or literary characters to have distinctive, convincing, expressive voices? One of Gosford Park's strengths lies in the richness of the characters; they strike us as authentic characters. So I'd hesitate before I affirmed David's proposal from yesterday.
Well, in response to David and Tom and Steve Himmer and Dave R., I will push us another step beyond. The various contributions from these wise gentlefolk have tended to operate within the set of assumptions that treats our Web personae as somehow extrinsic to the real "us" (observations on corporate websites anon); but what if our Web personae are, quite simply, yet another part of us? I am a different guy at home with my family from when I'm teaching, and different yet again when I'm leading worship or preaching, and different again when I'm discussing my fantasy baseball league team, and so on. (How different are these personae? That's part of the meta-question.) Culture has variously urged us to be natural & strip off our masks; or to keep our affections in the closet; or to compartmentalize; or a thousand other bits of identity-shaping instruction. Perhaps it's a mistake to parse this advice as involving different "inner" and "outer" selves (as one might say, "my 'inner' self is a gay Mets fan, whereas my 'outer' self is a straight Red Sox fan"). Perhaps the question ought not concern "inner" and "outer," but ought to involve the extent to which our ways in the world are coherent with one another, the extent to which they complement one another in constituting an engaging whole. Now, that's of little immediate help in evaluating Web personae; I know none of my present interlocutors as anything other than a stream of electrons (though sometimes I hear David Weinberger's stream of electrons on NPR). But that doesn't mean that my acquaintance with them is less real; it simply means that I know less of them. I know relatively little of the Academic Affairs Assistant at my office apart from her work on campus; I know more of the administrator of the Seabury Instute, because she worships in my parish; I know even more of the professor of Church History, because she and I belong to the same parish and we work side-by-side; I know yet more of the professor of Systematic Theology, because we became close friends way back in graduate school (walking around following Aristotle). The issue at hand in both Web personae and workplace/family/gang/etc. personae isn't reducible to "inner" and "outer." There are whole vast Venn diagrams of persona whose complexities it would take a lifetime to map. Here Steve Himmer's blog seems quite to the point, and I'd quote him except I can't copy-and-paste from his page. Any one of the facets of our identity may represent an unexpected, radically incongruous aspect of the whole, or it may draw on a broader pool of characteristics that our various personae share. The matter of a corporate persona gets complicated in large part because we construe a site as a single voice (unless different voices re marked out for us), yet that single voice has been proiduced by a committee, or "to suit a committee," or "so as not to offend a number of people important to the well-being of this institution." This usually doesn't yield a convincingly human-sounding voice--the overlap among the various constituent personae get awfully thin, and some of the personae who might contribute to making the web voice get flattened out or ignored. This is me. This is what I'm like when you can't see my face, or hear my voice, but can make out the words I'm scrawling on your computer screen and can tell from the color scheme and logo that I teach at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. At this point, I'm going to sleep. I'll blog more tomorrow. By the way, David W., Margaret loved the curling metaphor; she said, "Oh, AKMA, you finally made a team!" I want to know when I get my uniform. Permalink -Main Page- Sunday, February 10, 2002 ( 2:06 PM ) Well, Tom Matrullo has advanced the conversation about voice, etc., with a generous examination of the touchstone concepts "voice," "presence," and "authenticity." My first response involves pushing a little bit on a point he makes toward the end of his post: Not to get too Zenny about it, but the bit of us that comes in after something has struck a portion of the receiving public as authentic - the part that attempts to parse, seize, analyze, appreciate and "understand" the felicitous authenticity of this or that piece of expression, (for there is a link, I think, between what we like to call authentic and felicity) - is itself inauthentic. The very gesture betrays our wish to possess that which can be replicated, re-produced, by technique. Desire for the authentic, for replication - regardless of why one wishes the happy outcome of reproduction - has the misfortune of always being fresh out of luck.Here my postmodern union card obliges me to wonder whether even Tom's specification of the "inauthentic" arrives on the scene belatedly. That is, once it occurs to a public to perceive something, as "authentic," they/we've already produced the effect of an inauthenticity even without someone rushing to capture that-which-made-it-authentic. The category itself is the problem; one can't have authentic without inauthentic, and even the "authentic" itself hs a hard time staying "authentic" once it has "authenticity" to live up to; it becomes a parody of itself (perhaps a case in point might be "Saturday Night Live"). Likewise in the next paragraph, That which attempts to possess, copy, multiply, limn or mime it is stillborn. The authentic arrives unbidden, without fair warning, unconceived. Once it is in the world, the world might bestow an abundance of attention, or none. But does it have an interest in what the world says?There's the rub! Once "authenticity" becomes a positive characterization toward which one might aspire, it perpetually recedes from the grasp of the seeker-after-authenticity. One can't attain authenticity by trying to get there. Indeed, the desire may itself be the insuperable obstacle. (Not just Zen, but many ways touch on this; I think I remember being impressed with Gurdjieff's insistence on this point.) Perhaps corporate clients' desire to cultivate an "authentic" web voice constitutes an element in the problem they're trying to correct (working out the problem outside themselves, on the web site, as surrogate for their impoverished selves). Or maybe not. Remember Louis Armstrong's correct analysis of this phenomenon, when he was asked to define jazz: "if you've got to ask, you're never going to know." But he might alternatively simply have raised cornet to lips and played the "St. Louis Blues." Now, David W. directs our attention a different direction, complicating life by pointing out the problem of assuming a bifurcated anthropology of "inner" and "outer" selves. Such an assumption dominates colloquial talk and thought about people, but as he points out, it's got to be more complicated than that. What if, instead of letting our idioms about "inner" and "outer" dictate what we think about people, we trained ourselves to talk about "obvious" and "obscure," or "manifest" and latent" characteristics of a person? Would that make a difference, or would the powerful custom of assuming a binary personality of outer and inner personae simply adopt new terminology to suit long-established habits? Then David also connects this with "why I'm so interested in the ways in which our Web selves are literary." Now, when David talks that way, or when he says Even the immediate conversations - chat, IM - occur through keyboards, allowing us to compose ourselves as we compose our words.I get all weak-kneed and ardently enthusiastic, 'cause I'm a literary guy. (I'm going to use David's point here the next time I cajole a bunch of students into writing more carefully; if "we're writing ourselves into existence," who wants to have a sloppy existence just 'cause you can't be bothered to write carefully?) But doesn't our self-composition include visual presentation elements such as page design (and video and eventually perhaps auditory elements)? Isn't Jenny Whoever "composing" herself into existence with her webcam, too? I don't want to knock words or literariness--if they turn out to be the keys to the future, I'm better off than if I'm relying on looks. But I don't want us to lock on to literary composition to the exclusion of the various other ways we consitute our prosthetic Web selves. That's enough, now. Has anyone else thought it very odd that with all the perturbation about the "Today's New International Version" (with more precise treatment of gender issues, as brought to my attention by Telford Work and the NY Times), that I haven;t seen any mention of the New Revised Standard Version, which came out more than ten years ago and did a more far-reaching job of tackling translation and gender. Now, it may be that the TNIV translators did a better job, and it may be that part of the fuss about the TNIV arises because the NIV has been the standard translation for English-speaking conservatives who wanted a contemporary translation from reliable manuscripts, but without the perceived leftward tilt of the RSV and NRSV. Still, if the press coverage concerns gender-sensitive translations, you might think that someone would at least allude to an existing exemplar that has become part of daily (or just weekly) life for hundred of thousands of US Christians. Permalink -Main Page- All times are local. Local times may vary. Minutes do not expire. A. K. M. Adam That which we have not yet bothered to imagine is not therefore impossible. |
He seems like a nice guy. Has he written any books? Would he come speak to us?
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