On Proust and Talking to Yourself

Goffman, Bakhtin, and Sapir on Who Is Talking

Where do the things we say come from, and who actually says them? In his endlessly fascinating 1979 essay, "Footing," Erving Goffman suggested that we might do well to break down the commonplace notion of a "speaker" into a number of partials. He labels them "animator,""author," and "principal." An animator is a "sounding box in use," a "talking machine, a body engaged in acoustic activity, or, if you will, an individual active in the role of utterance production." An author is something different, "someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded." Finally, a principal is the person "whose beliefs have been told … who is committed to what the words say"—someone who is willing, in today's parlance, to own the words. If you find yourself possessed and uttering words coming from elsewhere, then you are an animator without being a principal or an author. If you tell someone what you more or less want to say, and they then write the speech that you later deliver, then they are the author, but you will be the animator and principal (at least partly). If you write and deliver a speech or a one-act play meant to represent some moment in the life of some historical figure, then you are the author and the animator, but perhaps not fully the principal. And so on.¹

Just referring to a speaker, Goffman underlines, risks failing to grasp the complexity of what is occurring when words are uttered. "When one uses the term 'speaker,'" Goffman writes, "one often implies that the individual who animates is formulating his own text and staking out his own position through it: animator, author, and principal are one. What could be more natural? So natural indeed that I cannot avoid continuing to use the term 'speaker' in this sense, let alone the masculine pronoun as the unmarked singular form."² Part of the delight of this passage is its voicing, and the work its voicing does to illustrate and add complexity to Goffman's point. What does he mean that he "cannot avoid" using the masculine pronoun to refer to the antecedent speaker? He cleverly marks the unmarked form and suggests that what was unavoidable for him to say is perhaps not something that he is fully the author of, and not something that he fully backs as principal. He has been a voice box for something "natural," something that seems to have piggybacked on his own speech, something that, we might assume, some part of him means to suggest is not natural; it is, rather, social. He has been a voice box for the social order or for socially sedimented habits of speech and thought relating to how "we" think of "speakers" and how "we" use pronouns, and then some other part of him has questioned his own role as speaker, his allegiance to what his language has communicated. Or, we could say, this was all a performance: Goffman has performed a piece of theater in those three sentences, shifting his footing slightly in each sentence, so as to illustrate how slippery the roles of author and principal are even in what would seem to be the simplest moments of formulating and producing utterances. "Often," Goffman notes, "when we do engage in 'fresh talk,' that is, the extemporaneous, ongoing formulation of a text under the exigency of immediate response to our current situation, it is not true to say that we always speak our own words and ourself take the position to which these words attest."³

I think that what Goffman has suggested, although he doesn't take up the suggestion, is that even in situations that seem to be made up of "fresh talk," the analytic roles of animator, author, and principal themselves will not be fine-grained enough to capture what happens through language use. The reasons for this have to do with how language, a social institution, inhabits individual speakers and how we conceive of what individual users...