When I write, I have a temptation to destroy myself. What do I mean? When I initially sought to write the former sentence, my inclination was to write as follows: “When one writes for others, they can too easily develop a temptation to destroy themselves.” Doesn’t the use of the first person do something to that sentence? I believe it does. What is it? Only what the French philosopher Louis Althusser called “interpellation,” or drawing-you-in [1]. And when I refer to myself expressly through my own pronouns (I, me, my, mine), don’t I draw you in more than I do when I write using abstract banalities like “one” and “they”?
I can’t say how exactly I developed this tendency to self-immolation. I believe it has to do with the quantity of writing I produced over the past few years in undergrad and in my master’s degree, but I can’t be certain. What we we’re long ago taught in high-school – avoid the first person at all costs! – here returns in a most hateful garb. Here, I was only able to speak of myself as a methodologic (think: “critic” as “one who critiques”, but instead “methodologic” as “one who practices a methodology”). (Here again was the temptation! I thought first to say: “Here, one was…”). Such nebulousness comes from this! Instead of I myself speaking from the first person, instead everything comes to me in this rarefied garb between a pretentious objectivity and an obvious subjectivity. If I say “one says,” surely I mean that I say it, but I am hesitant to lay claim to it for fear of the obvious problem – who am I that you should care?
But this is strange. The audience for whom I have been writing for the past 5 years was almost entirely an academic audience. With Weber in “Science as a Vocation,” [2] the academic wants everywhere to destroy himself. Cutting away slivers of truth, he wants everywhere that his cuts be everyone’s – thus every academic is at infinite pains to “justify” their work and, above all, its “generalizability.” There is something life-denying about this in Nietzsche’s sense. Indeed, Nietzsche long ago saw this and called it what it was – the so-called “objective man” who squabbles over petty truth-claims while he himself languages in personal obscurity [3, Ch. 6].
The impulse to destroy oneself (God! there it is again!) in – no, my impulse to destroy myself – in my writing is a crystallization of this horrid trait. It is depersonalization in the most concrete sense. But this is only because of the audience for whom I was in the past writing. That audience demanded of me my self-destruction. I habituated this not only as a theoretical attitude but as a practical habit. And in this habit I practiced a normative injunction – “Do not write of yourself! Write of the objective tendency only!” How horrible this is to me! How life-denying, how spasmodically putrid! Ideas, instead of being unified in my concrete apperception, are instead organized in some sham pretention to the absolute which never finally coheres [4]. Yuck!
I call this phenomenon audientiality. It is the internalization of the audience for whom one is writing as both a practical habit and a normative injunction. When I address myself to you, dear reader, as a being free and equal to myself, I don’t require flat academic language. I can speak freely of my experiences, since we are together here in the instance of your reading my writing. I could never say this of my academic audience, since the we-relation [5] present here is a subjective fact, and not an objective one. Namely, I can speak “subjectively” with my pronouns and yet write something factual for you because we experience that relevance together. The academics will have nothing of this!
I call this a difficulty because of its unconsciousness. Writing for an audience whose members you respect not as academics but as free and equal beings implies, for me, a kind of regression. I already wrote this way as a highschooler. Only having come out of the meat-grinder of academia, has my mind been processed otherwise. I must forget this! I must remember to write for an audience of equals, not academic scrutinizers!
I call this practice of writing vococity. This is the self-consciousness of one’s writing-for-an-audience. Audientiality is the unconscious precondition for vococity. Where the former is an always-already in-motion practice of writing-for-an-audience, the latter is the realization that one was in fact doing so. Of course, one is always only writing for the audience they imagine. So, to write for one audience and not another is only to write for one phantasm whose impressions on the mind are more vivid than another. All of this is, in a way, nothing but a dream made concrete. But then this, I hypothesize, is why mental illness and writing are so often concomitant – Nietzsche, Plath, Woolf, Hemingway, etc. There is so much phantasmagoric about it, so much imagined. What one calls their own self-consciousness is only another phantasm. One cannot be too heavy-handed with the declaration.
References
[1] L. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” p. 38.
[2] M. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, Nachdr. d. Ausg. 1958. New York: Oxford Univ. Pr, 1981.
[3] F. W. Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale, and M. Tanner, Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future. 2014.
[4] I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, [Private library ed. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1955.
[5] R. R. Cox, “Schutz’s Theory of Relevance and the We-relation,” 2023.
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