The Language of Inquiry

Who Is Speaking?

Who Is Speaking? The question “Who is speaking?” is uttered from within the social relationship 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, contentious —that was one of the public voices of poetry. To contribute to its formation , one had to be able to produce commentary with enormous rapidity . One had to know a lot and to know that one did so. One had to feel 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 unpredictable , 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 Who Is Speaking? / 31 The question “Who is speaking?” was intended as a challenge to a perceived 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 forever ” would be an unworldly world, and its poetry would be a transcendental enterprise. But the fact of the matter is that the world requires improving (reimproving ) 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 forever , so one cannot come to the end of the fight for social justice and ecological safety, for example, forever. Victories are particular, local, and almost always temporary. To improve the world, one must be situated in it, attentive 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. 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 question , 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 silence be construed as protest? As complicity? Who or what is the authority that “permits” one to speak, and on what grounds is that authority established 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...