Finding Voice without an Audience

(This is the first, unedited draft of my paper. The conclusion and citation is missing.)

The contested meanings of the term “voice” in composition theory are indicative of the ways in which the concept has been interpreted differently by scholars. While chronicling the different uses of the word Peter Vandenberg observes that “the term voice has been variously deployed as a rallying cry for expressivism, a symbol for the stage of maturity in a schema of women’s intellectual development (Belenkey et al), as a marker for resistance to political oppression (hooks), and as a metaphor or replacement term for style, naturalness, persona, authority, essence, and a variety of other abstractions (236).” Vandenberg also quotes I. Hashimoto as observing that despite the broad array of meanings ascribed to the word, “voice” became an “umbrella term throughout the seventies and eighties for the pedagogical objectives of authenticity, honesty, and “self discovery.”” Among those who equate voice with “authenticity of tone,” Hashimoto mentions scholars like Ken Macrorie, Donald Murray and Peter Elbow among others. In his book Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process (Chapter 26), Peter Elbow equates voice with “natural breath” (62) or “authenticity of tone” (63). Young children, the author argues, speak and write with real voices. The journey into adulthood and concomitant acculturation brings about a loss of real voice as people “often drift into fake voices because of the need of facing an audience.” As a way of overcoming the compulsion of addressing an audience and getting voice into words, Elbow urges writers to take frequent and regular freewriting exercises. Going further, Elbow classifies writing into two neat categories. The first of these two categories is what Elbow identifies as “pragmatic writing”—polished pieces that work for specific audiences and situations.” The other he calls “process writing” (38), represented by forms such as keeping a notebook or making journal entries (62), in which the writer completely removes himself “from the expectations of an audience, the demands of a particular task, the needs of a particular interaction” (63). While doing such a writing exercise, Elbow claims, a writer “writes honestly and accurately what’s going on in [his] mind” and through it discovers the resonance of his “real voice”. Pragmatic writing, on the other hand, acts as a conduit for the expression of the residual “other voices.” — Elbow admits the presence of “many voices” (66) — in a writer. Power in writing, for Elbow, comes through revivifying the child-like spontaneity of natural response that is increasingly lost to a person as he moves farther away from the pristine state of childhood existence and becomes cognizant of the social context/audience (65). Hence, Elbow postulates an inverse/cause-effect relationship between audience, and, voice and power.

According to Elbow’s triangulation of these three components, the presence/absence of audience has a direct impact on the power that accrues to a writer through writing. The higher is the awareness of audience, there is a greater tendency in the writer of drifting into fake voice thereby eliminating claim to power that comes from “real voice.” Going by this conceptualization of voice, writing for an audience is an expression of a writer’s other voices/inauthentic adult self. The writer instinctively adapts his/her speech to the expectations of the discourse community in which he/she aims to participate. While conforming to the expectations of the audience, the writer lapses into a mode of expression that may or may not be in consonance with his innermost convictions of his authentic/innocent child-like self (real voice). This results in a loss of power for the writer. Conversely, a scribble in a personal diary is conducive to sincere expression of thoughts since it offers the writer the choice of completely shutting out audience from his purview. The absence of audience allows the writer to express himself/herself in an untrammeled way without any fear of consequences in terms of reader reaction. The writer uninhibitedly puts down on paper whatever crosses his mind without pausing to contemplate its possible implications. In other words, there is no gap between the writer and his writing—his writing becomes an honest expression of his real voice. Also, for Elbow, this closing of gap between self and expression brings power to the writer. However, this notion of empowerment is problematic on two counts. Firstly, it rests on the assertion that it is possible to shut out “audience” in an act of solitary act of self-expression through writing. Secondly, it espouses the view that power emanates from writing that is not centered on audience. The purpose of this paper is to develop the claim that all forms of writing, including journalistic/free writing, are inherently audience centered. More specifically this paper seeks to controvert the antithetical relation that Elbow claims for power and audience in his writings.

Vygotsky’s theory of language acquisition and development, which assumes a social genesis for language, provides a vantage point from which to begin exploring the sense in which all writing is compulsively addressed to an audience. In the chapter entitled “Language Development,” which appears in the book Writing Groups: History, Theory and Implications, Anne Ruggles Gere points out that for Vygotsky the source of language lies outside the individual, and instead of being a transition to from asocial to social language, egocentric or inner speech is a continuation of socially and environmentally oriented language development (81). Reflecting on Vygotsky’s delineation of meaning in words,” Gere observes that Vygotsky’s sense of word as something “complex and mobile” derives from his conviction in an ongoing dialectic between individual and society. She quotes the following lines from Vygotsky’s book Thought and Language (146) in support of this assertion.

The sense of a word…is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word…Meaning is only one of the zones of sense, the most stable and precise zone. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense. Meaning remains stable throughout the changes of sense. The dictionary meaning of a word is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, no more than a potentiality that finds diversified realization in speech.

For Vygotsky, Gere adds, the dictionary meaning an individual carries around interacts then, with its social context to create the sense of the word. According to Gere, in Vygotsky’s view inner speech may compress social interchanges into individualistic verbal thought, but this language still maintains the relationship of the individual to the social environment. Hence, in Vygotskyan world, language is inevitably social in origin or individual language is actually internalized social language.

Vygotsky’s perspective on the dialectic between individual and society is echoed in the works of his contemporary M.M. Bakhtin. Central to Bakhtin’s view of speech/written communication is the active role of the “other” embedded in what he calls “the communication chain.” In his book Speech Genres Bakhtin writes “ "Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere . . . Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication"(91). While enunciating Bakhtin’s idea of “communication chain,” in the essay “Bakhtin, Collaborative Partners, and Published Discourse,” Charlotte Thralls observes that Bakhtin holds that an author’s written communication cannot be viewed separately from a larger discourse chain. Every written discourse is a dialogic response to other utterances, making up a collaborative partnership. In the concluding chapter of his book The Dialogic Imagination (the title itself is suggestive) Bakhtin writes:

[…] there are no “neutral” words and forms—words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the taste of a profession, genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word.

Also, in Bakhtin’s view a text is both a response to certain others who have who have preceded a writer and a response to subsequent utterances that a writer anticipates as possible responsive reactions. According to Bakhtin, Thralls further observes, authors generally adopt from others various forms of expression “that are kindred to ours in genre, that is, in theme, composition and style” (Speech Genres 87). To put this in a more simple way, genres are actually language forms employed by different discourse communities/spheres who adopt forms of expression that define meaningful communication within that group. Because forms of expression are already defined when an author composes, these forms “restrict possible expression, so an author communicating within a specific communication sphere naturally incorporates expressions typical of that sphere” (Thralls 67).

Vygotsky and Bakhtin’s theory of language is important to understanding the first claim of this paper in several ways. First, if one accepts the idea that language is a social construction, it follows that no real division exists between inner and external speech—society/audience is embedded in language. This is in direct contradiction with Elbow’s assertion that a writer can, during moments of private writing, rediscover real voice by divorcing language from the larger social context/audience. The disjunction between self and language is at best illusory in the Vygotskyan world because “source of language lies outside the individual.” Language can never be the purview of an individual. The social context is so deeply enmeshed in human acquisition of language that writing (in all its forms) is quintessentially a communal act, either in an explicit or implicit way. In other words, there can exist no real separation between pragmatic writing and process writing. Even during moment of making a private entry in a journal, a writer will be expressing himself/herself language that he has acquired communally. In other words, there is a direct relationship between composing and the social world in which it takes place. Audience is embedded in the very language that shapes the utterance/voice of a writer.

The communal view of language or the notion that “the word in language is half someone else’s” (Dialogic Imagination, 293) has been echoed by many critics and theorists since the time of Vygotsky and Bakhtin. In his article “Collaborative Writing and the “Conversation of Mankind,”” Kenneth A. Bruffee explains the dialectic between audience and writing in the following words:

If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized. Like thought, writing is related to conversation in both time and function. Writing is a technologically displaced form of conversation. When we write, having already internalized the "skill and partnership" of conversation, we displace it once more onto the written page. But because thought is already one step away from conversation, the position of writing relative to conversation is more complex than the position of thought relative to conversation. Writing is at once two steps away from conversation and a return to conversation. We converse; we internalize conversation as thought; and then by writing, we re-immerse conversation in its external, social medium. (641)

Although here, Bruffee goes a step further by blurring the boundary between external and internal world, the basic premise does not alter. Like Bakhtin and Vygotsky before him, Bruffee is also emphasizing the dialogic aspect of language as represented in the view of language as shared product of the community, the notion that human mind is always in dialogue with the world around, and that language, for individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other.” This is reflected in a comment that Bruffee makes further on in this same article. He notes “Writing may seem to be displaced in time and space from the rest of a writer's community of readers and other writers, but in every instance writing is an act, however much displaced, of conversational exchange” (642). If writing is viewed as “internalized social talk” then voice expressed through language can never be a neutral media of communication which a writer can reclaim at will during freewriting exercises. To put this in Bakhtin’s words, the writers “authentic voice” will actually be “heteroglot opinion” and not a neutral media that passes freely and easily into the property of the speaker’s intentions; it [will be ] populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (Dialogic Imagination 294). David Bleich, in his review of Peter Elbow’s book Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching, echoes Bruffee in his observation that “Language has never been a purely individual matter. It means interacting with others. Even though writing may be provisionally prepared privately, the choice of words, the contexts of presentation, and the ranges of response all depend on the collective values and common circumstances of communities and societies.” Bleich also adds “…writing is the political act of identifying oneself both as private, subjective person and as a bearer of commonly held values. This manifestly places language beyond the control of an individual human mind.

Bakhtin’s notion of speech genre also has important implications for understanding the inherently “heteroglot” character of voice. According to Bakhtin a form of writing is intertwined with former utterances in that form which compels the author to naturally incorporate expressions typical of that sphere. Thralls explains this “speech genre” in the following way.

In terms of its links to utterances that have preceded it, every utterance takes from other utterances the worldviews and meanings of other speakers who have already “articulated, disputed, elucidated and evaluated” (Speech Genres 93) an authors topic. An authors text, thus, is addressed not only “to its own object, but also to others speech about it” (Speech Genres 94), for an author presupposes not only the existence of a language system he is using but also the existence of other utterances—his own and others’— with which his utterance enters into one kind of relation or another.” …An author, for example may directly mention and build upon utterances of another. Or an author may employ only a single word that directly evokes the voice of a preceding partner… (67)

For example, a novelist has in mind a distinct form for novel as typified in earlier representations of the form. While writing a novel, the novelist enters into a dialog with all those former utterances. In other words, this author’s writing partakes in the conversation initiated in the novels preceding his own. The same can be said of journal entry. A journal is a genre/distinct form of writing. While writing an entry in a journal, the writer is bound to respond inwardly to the form of a journal entry or language usage within the form, such as writing in first person, which he/she derived from reading other journals. This invalidates Elbow’s view of journal keeping as a private exercise in which the writer can wholly shut out his audience. As argued above, audience is implicit not only in the language through which the writer communicates his thoughts but also in the form which his writing takes. To sum it up in Thrall’s words, “a writer’s written text may be viewed as a textualized representation of the entire collaborative chain” (68).

Furthermore, Elbow himself expresses occasional doubts about the possibility of completely doing away with audience. In the very same essay, he considers the need of finding a “certain kind of audience” for one’s writing although “it was probably the pressures of audience that led” [the writer] to unreal voices in the first place” (63). He talks about practicing freewriting in the “shared presence” of a real audience who would help the writer to construe “real voice.” This is, of course, has strong echoes of the reader-response criticism theory which holds that the reader is a necessary third party in the author-text-reader relationship that constitutes a literary work. The work, in other words, is not fully crated until readers make a transaction with it by assimilating and actualizing it in the light of their own knowledge and experience. In other words, here Elbow here indirectly acknowledges that “voice” is something constructed not by the writer but by the reader. This directly negates Elbow’s claim that audience can be ignored in certain forms of writing. Audience, real or virtual, pervades human communication in all its forms. It is an ineluctable reality that all writers have to negotiate with.

As part of the second claim of this paper that power and audience are interdependent, David Bartholomae’s article “Inventing the University” provides a good starting point for the discussion. In this influential piece that argues for a pedagogy based on discourse conventions, Bartholomae poses a direct challenge to Elbow’s disassociation of power from audience by describing “the problem of audience awareness” as a “problem of power and finesse”. He notes “Writers who can successfully manipulate an audience (or, to use a less pointed language, writers who can accommodate their motives to their readers’ expectations) are writers who can both imagine and write from a position of privilege. They must, that is, see themselves within a privileged discourse that already includes or excludes groups of readers. They must be either equal to or more powerful than those they would address.” The pedagogy advocated by Bartholomae focuses on the idea of community and denies the existence of an absolute transcendent truth or reality. Like Bakhtin and Vygotsky, Bartholomae situates language within the “community” as opposed to Elbow who locates it in the individual. He also envisages a direct correspondence between power and audience.

To speak with authority student writers have not only to speak in another’s voice but also through another’s “code;” and they not only have to do this, they have to speak in the voice and through the codes of those of us with power and wisdom…Our students may be able to enter into a conventional discourse and speak, not as themselves, but through the voice of the community”

This concept of “community” that emerges from Bartholomae’s exposition recalls the principle tenet of the social constructionist approach that knowledge/language is not “individual, internal, and mental” (Bruffee 775) but is instead social in nature. For Bruffee, and other constructionists knowledge/language emerges from a social matrix. This matrix is defined by the concept of discourse community. In their perception, community is both a normative force, the origin of shared values and beliefs that shape and even regulate communication, and subject to being shaped by the communicative process and discourse the community generates (Thralls & Byler 128). And, writing is learning to participate in conversations by fitting one’s talk to the demands of knowledgeable peers, those “who accept, and whose work is guided by the same paradigms and same code of values and assumptions” (Bruffee, 1984, 642). Accordingly, for social constructionists power in writing emerges not from excluding audience but from merging one’s voice with that of the community’s.

However, some critics like Joseph Harris and Lester Faigley have critiqued this concept of community pointing out that the term implies the exclusion of minority or dissenting voices. This problem is succinctly captured by Thralls and Byler in their article “The Social Perspectives and Professional Communication” (133).

At issue is Bruffee’s willingness to concede almost complete authority to the accepted knowledge of community members while minimizing the discourses that are silenced or excluded in the consensus making process. For Bruffee, conflicting views and individual differences can be either explained as views that must be eliminated or views that can be reconciled through rational negotiation and thus absorbed into a prevailing consensus.

It is clear that Elbow and Bartholomae see themselves at the two extreme points of the debate surrounding voice and power. If for Elbow power in writing comes through dissention, from breaking away from the community, for Bartholomae power derives from placing oneself within the dominant discourse of one’s community. While responding to Elbow and Bartholomae, in his chapter Voice, Joseph Harris situates himself midway on line of the debate. He is against either conceiving voice as a “personal attribute of the writer” as in Elbow or as a “kind of totalizing discourse” as in Bartholomae to which the writer must submit. Harris argues that the aim of composition pedagogy should be to help students develop an ironic or reflexive awareness of how they are situated and framed as users of language, how paradoxically, a writer must always draw on the words and methods of others to create their own sense of a text or an issue or even themselves (35). He also points out the importance of imagining self “not as an essence but as a set of perspectives, as something that can be seen only in relation to something else” (36). This is, of course, in conflict with Elbow who conceptualizes real voice as an expression of the individualistic essence. Harris concedes that all writing will in some way show “the pressure and presence of the institution/community in the work of an individual” (Facts 39). However, unlike Bartholomae, Harris does not advocate a position of total submission. For Harris, power in writing comes through a process of negotiation between individual and community or from “addressing the tension between freedom and constraint” (44). This stance is reflected in the following observation that he makes in the same article.

We need to think, that is, of voice as a way of speaking that lies outside a writer, and which she must struggle to appropriate or control. Her voice as a writer will thus come out of the stance she takes toward these other social codes and voices, in the ways she makes use of the languages and methods of her field or culture. (34)

Hence, Harris makes the following four claims for voice. First, he locates voice outside a writer. Secondly, he undercuts the conceptualization of voice as objective individualistic essence. He reinvisions it instead as set of conflicting perspectives. Thirdly, he disagrees with the notion that voice (real/otherwise) is something that a writer can effortlessly summon at will. For him, voice can be acquired only through struggle. Finally, he posits that power in writing comes neither through resistance nor enculturation. It lies in a writer’s ability to engage in meditative interaction with community. Voice is an agreement reached with other communicants though the process of interaction.