Hejinian - Who Is Speaking

Who Is Speaking?
The question “Who is speaking?” is uttered from within the social relation-
ship that binds together the problematics of power and ethicality. As the
question was first posed in the early 1980s as a topic for discussion by a
group of Bay Area women poets and intellectuals, it constituted a challenge
to certain styles of discourse, lest they begin to circumscribe possibilities
in the public life of the poetry community. Erudite, authoritative, conten-
tious—that was one of the public voices of poetry. To contribute to its for-
mation, one had to be able to produce commentary with enormous rapid-
ity. One had to know a lot and to know that one did so. One had to feel
Copyright © 2000. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
oneself to be on firm ground, ready to deliver and parry challenges. That

this generally came more easily to men than to women was not unpre-
dictable, though not all of the women in the scene felt ungrounded and not
all the men in the scene were speaking. The men and women who weren’t
speaking did not feel powerless, however. To invent other public formations
— even to enact an ungrounding—seemed desirable, even necessary, and
it certainly seemed possible.
30
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry, University of California Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brown/detail.action?docID=223206.
Created from brown on 2023-10-04 16:26:32.
Who Is Speaking? / 31
The question “Who is speaking?” was intended as a challenge to a per-

ceived style of asserting power and to the structures of power that were
being created by it. It was directed not at any specific group of persons but
at the problem of power itself, and— contrary, perhaps, to more typical
feminist challenges to power structures of the period—the discussion did
not constitute a rejection of power. Instead, it revolved around questions of
grounds and goals, of dialogue and efficacy, and to some extent it aspired
to an increased impersonal freedom for everyone. We were espousing an
admittedly utopian enterprise— one that was attached to a virtually explicit
agenda underlying every poetry discussion at the time; it was intrinsic to our
poetics, and its clear aim was to improve the world.
The grandiosity of that ambition may at first glance seem laughable. But
it is only so if one assumes that “to improve the world” requires that one
improve it forever. That ambition is indeed laughable— or it would be if it
weren’t horrifyingly dangerous and if the history of the twentieth century
didn’t include so many examples of atrocity perpetrated in the name of
improving the world forever. Such an aspiration underlies all totalitarianism
and all bigotry. It is inherently transcendental, since a world “improved for-
ever” would be an unworldly world, and its poetry would be a transcen-
dental enterprise.
But the fact of the matter is that the world requires improving (reim-
proving) every day. Just as one can’t prepare an all-purpose meal and dine
once and then be done with the preparation and consumption of food for-
ever, so one cannot come to the end of the fight for social justice and eco-
logical safety, for example, forever. Victories are particular, local, and almost
always temporary. To improve the world, one must be situated in it, at-
tentive and active; one must be worldly. Indeed, worldliness is an essential
feature of ethics. And, since the term poetics names not just a theory of
techniques but also attentiveness to the political and ethical dimensions of
language, worldliness is essential to a poetics.
32 / The Language of Inquiry
Poetics entails involvement in public life. And that involvement, in turn,

demands a negotiation with, and a willingness to take on, power.
In this context, the question “Who is speaking?” prompts a second ques-
tion, one that is addressed to oneself as the speaker of the first: “Am I
speaking?”
From this, numerous questions follow: If not, why not? Isn’t it incumbent
on me to break through others’ noise and my own silence so as to speak?
If so, how so? Having broken through into speech, what should I say and
what should it sound like when I’m saying it? Is it important to speak? Is it
necessary to do so? Can one be a participant without speaking? Should si-
lence be construed as protest? As complicity? Who or what is the authority
that “permits” one to speak, and on what grounds is that authority estab-
lished and/or asserted? What authority do I gain by speaking, first, in any
particular act (moment) of doing so and second, as one who is often one
of the speakers? What is the relationship between private creativity and par-
ticipation in public discourse? Is a public context a necessary component of
private work? What is the relationship of public speech to published writing
—are these similar public positions? Is writing formed in a social context, as
part of a dialogue, or is writing formed prior to the dialogue, then becoming
part of it? Who or what determines (and what are the criteria for deter-
mining) that what has been said was “good”? What does it mean when one
feels one “doesn’t have anything to say”? What is the nature of a community
of discourse? Is there a style of discourse that is effective and valuable with-
out being oppressive? Many such questions were formulated in private con-
versation before asking the original question, “Who Is Speaking?” in public.
If, as many of us have claimed, the practice of poetry, in being a study of
language, involves alertness to and critique of its misuse, and if its misuse in
the form of public hypocrisy is one of the outstanding problems of our time,
then it was incumbent on us to develop modes of invention which were not
hypocritical. This should not be interpreted as a demand for the invention
of honesty. The notion of honesty tends to be equated with truthtelling, and

we felt a genuine distaste for both inherited and discovered notions of Truth.
But it did, over time, develop into a demand for honesty of invention. The
question “Who is speaking?” asked who was inventing and what was being
invented.
A panel discussion on the question took place in San Francisco at Inter-
section for the Arts on March 26, 1983. The panelists were Gloria Frym,
Robert Glück, Johanna Drucker, and myself.1 This event was the culmina-
tion in public of private conversations, but in many ways I see it now as an
initial, rather than as a final, step.
It was an early intervention into the process of inventing.
What follows is a slightly revised version of my contribution to that panel.
In my manuscript copy of it, it begins with an epigraph in the form of a quo-
tation, unattributed but probably from a news article: “75% of all Americans
interviewed prefer death to public speaking.”
Invention is central to the private as to the public life of a writer,

but it is of the latter that I want to speak on this occasion. At stake
in the public life of a writer are the invention of a writing com-
munity; the invention of the writer (as writer and as person) in
that community; and the invention of the meanings and mean-

ingfulness of his or her writing.
Almost every writer is faced with the relentless necessity of in-
venting him- or herself anew as a writer every day, and the task
of considering the terms in which this can be accomplished is an
ongoing one.
But the invention of oneself as a writer in a community is only
part of a larger question; it should be accompanied by the neces-
sity for inventing that community, and thereby participating in
the making of the terms that, in turn, themselves play a crucial

role in making invention possible (or, in bad scenarios, impos-
sible). One must think about the invention of the community in
and as consideration of the politics, ethics, and psychology of
speaking in it. And one must do all this even while addressing the
question of how the community and one’s way of being in it in-
fluences one’s writing.
The question of community and creativity is not one issue
but a whole complex of interrelated public and private issues, and
as one brings the pressure of one’s attention to bear on one of
them, another of them rises up, requiring that one adjust one’s
emphasis. But this adjusting of emphasis is essential to keeping
the relationship between oneself and the community viable and
productive.
Doing so is not easy. There is an inevitable conflict between
community and creativity, and writers very often feel torn be-
tween the possibilities of solitude and the requirements of the so-
cial. Caught in such conflicts, one might ask why one would want
to invent a community in the first place. Do we need commu-
nity? Do we want one?
One quick way to answer this is to say that, want it or not, we
have it. And this is the case not just because the world is with us.
To the extent that humans know about humans, community oc-
curs. A community consists of any or all of those persons who
have the capacity to acknowledge what others among them are
doing. In this sense, even solo sailors and hermits living in total
isolation in desert or mountain caves belong to communities—
communities, in the broadest sense, consisting of the persons for
whom solo sailing or hermitism is meaningful.
These communities do not, as such, preexist the solo sailing or
the hermit’s retreat. In a profound sense, the person setting forth

alone to sail or entering his or her hermit’s cave, in doing so
summons into existence the community in which to do so makes
sense— even if, as will sometimes be the case, it is not a present
but a past (though not, strictly speaking, preexisting) or future
community, consisting of those whose past or future capacity to
understand, that is being invoked.
Any characteristic act—whether it is a sailor’s sailing or a her-
mit’s withdrawal or a writer’s writing—is an act of reciprocal
invocation. It activates a world in which the act makes sense. It
invents.
Invention, in the literary as in many other contexts, is a term
nuanced toward reciprocity—between the creative imagination
and utility, between originality and the world. As an act brings a
community into being, the community must be there to provide
advocacy (or publication, in the broad as well as literal or literary
sense—bringing the act into a public space), social and profes-
sional support, intellectual challenge, aesthetic stimulus, etc.
The community creates the context in which the work’s happen-
ing happens. It does so by generating ideas and work that might
not have come into being otherwise, and, in the best sense, by
challenging everyone involved. In this last respect, a community

presents a more difficult milieu than that of the support group.
To be simultaneously permissive and rigorous is the challenging
task that a highly functional community must attempt. A com-
munity that can manage it will be an improvement to the world
that is always with us.
A community of discourse develops and is maintained through
speaking—by which I mean articulate participation of various
kinds. In the course of this constitutive speaking, terms come
into use that define the community to a certain extent and, more
importantly, charge it. These may be literal terms—key words or
phrases that designate particular or general ideas of mutual con-
cern and around which there is some shared excitement (though
not necessarily always agreement): ostranenie, parataxis, and the
new sentence are possible examples. Or, in a community of writ-
ers, the terms might include the titles of literary works or names
of publishers or publications or even literary events—particulars
that have extension, structural or thematic; particulars in and
from which things are happening.
There is, of course, the danger that such terms can become
tyrannical—that they will circumscribe the community or that
the power embedded in them is of the kind that some persons can
wield over others. Also, and perhaps to some extent this is un-
avoidable, the terms may appear to be, and so become, exclusion-
ary—marking the difference between the inside and the outside
of the community and effectively discouraging participation. Or
the terms may serve to edit the speaking of the community rather
than encourage it, with the result that speech turns into dialect
and the terms become a form of closure, the means to a commu-
nity’s self-destruction.
Silencing in a community, of course, does not always come

from the community’s terms. Silencings occur that are manifes-
tations of a drama whose history is longer than that of any com-
munity. One participates in it fearfully, hesitating or even failing
to speak lest doing so will reveal one’s presence, or the presence
of one’s ideas, to a predator or enemy, one who may figuratively
if not literally gobble one up. One may refrain from speaking be-
cause one is afraid of being wrong, or irrelevant, or intrusive (an
idle chatterbox), or inarticulate and intellectually clumsy, or ig-
norant. One may remain silent, in other words, because one is

afraid of being exposed (stripped bare by the bachelors). One
may sit in silence feeling intimidated, or confused; one may be
bored but ashamed to be bored.
Or one may sit in silence feeling self-righteous. There is a cu-
rious virtuousness ascribed to silence. We see it inscribed in such
aphorisms as “Silence is golden,” “Still waters run deep,” or “The
wise man speaks little and listens well.” Behind such prescriptive
dicta are a disdain for explanation and a privileging of action.
They can serve as injunctions, and their effect, if not necessarily
their intention, is to encourage one to keep one’s opinions in-
violate and apolitical. Silence in this context renders one apo-
litical precisely because it removes one from the public sphere—
the sphere in which ideas are aired and experiences (stories)
exchanged.
But a distinction must be made; the silences that occur in a
community are not necessarily silencings. Silence is inherent to
speech itself—for speech to be meaningful, there must be not
only the speaking of the speaker but the silence of the listener.
Can we call this a communicative silence? a communicat-
ing one?
Certainly it can be. Borrowing a phrase from Heidegger’s “Lo-

gos” essay, one might say that such a silence “gathers everything
present into presence, and lets it present itself.”
Heidegger, however, was talking not about silence but about
logos, and, since logos is usually translated as word, or speech, or
reason, logos would seem to be the opposite of silence.
But this need not be the case. Logos is the opposite of silencing.
The logos of the listener exists in and as his or her readiness and
availability, his or her willingness and capacity to be the one who
waits to tell, the one who will make an experience of what the
speaker says; it can be a ready silence, a contextualization.
The alternative, the refusal of listening resulting in the expe-
rience of not-being-listened-to, is a problem which has always
vexed women and other “others.” Our speech is regarded as triv-
ial, second-class, since it is held to originate not in the public
world (of free men) but in the private and domestic sphere (main-
tained by women and servants). Because of this, it is also regarded
as disgusting, since the domestic sphere is the realm of the
body—the domus being where the body is kept fed, clothed, and
clean, where it procreates, defecates, and regularly retreats into
the world of greatest privacy and secrecy, the world of sleep and
dreams. And finally, because women have knowledge of things of
this sphere, our speech is regarded as frightening.
The question “Who is speaking?” implies, then, yet another
question: “Who is listening?” Consideration of how speaking is
being heard and what is being heard in and of it involves another
address to power. Listening accords power to speech. It grants it
its logic by discovering logic in it. In listening as in speaking,
both meaningfulness and meaning are at stake. To trace the lines
of reciprocity through which they are established is to map a so-
cial space, a community.

But this metaphor should be used with caution. A community
is not a geography, not a fixed and stable terrain, and any map of
it is temporary. Communities are mobile and mutable, and they
are not always easily habitable. A demanding community can be
exhausting, to speakers and listeners alike, and its participants
must be allowed private experiences as well as public ones. If, as
a member of a community, one is flourishing, one may not be in-
clined to ask questions of it. But if one is not, it is crucial to do

so, in order to discover and accomplish what is to be done.
Note
1. Robert Glück’s panel paper, “Who Speaks for Us: Being an Ex-
pert,” appears in Writing/ Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale: South-
ern Illinois University Press, 1985).

Hejinian - Who Is Speaking

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hejinian - Who Is Speaking

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Who Is Speaking?

oneself to be on ﬁrm ground, ready to deliver and parry challenges. That

The question “Who is speaking?” was intended as a challenge to a per-

Poetics entails involvement in public life. And that involvement, in turn,

of honesty. The notion of honesty tends to be equated with truthtelling, and

Invention is central to the private as to the public life of a writer,

that community; and the invention of the meanings and mean-

the making of the terms that, in turn, themselves play a crucial

the hermit’s retreat. In a profound sense, the person setting forth

challenging everyone involved. In this last respect, a community

Silencing in a community, of course, does not always come

norant. One may remain silent, in other words, because one is

Certainly it can be. Borrowing a phrase from Heidegger’s “Lo-

cial space, a community.

clined to ask questions of it. But if one is not, it is crucial to do

You might also like