Communication and Choices

I have found that the degree to which I routinely see myself as a writer (distinct from by not ‘versus’ a reader, which I do at the same time) determines how effectively I communicate. When I’ve been writing here, with agency over the content and direction I write, I feel more invested and competent in other forms of communication as well. It has something to do with habits, I’m sure. I need to keep writing here to feel invested elsewhere.

Debate has a complex relationship to the activities of reading and writing. In many ways, the structure of the activity is designed to analyze debaters as accountable writers. Speaker points are assigned to each speaker/writer/agent, and every speech must contain particular arguments or argument structures to be ‘persuasive’ (in quotes, because persuasion in debate has as much to do with getting a judge to think they should be persuaded as it does with just persuasion). At the same time, the process of preparation and argument construction, which for a debater, makes up the bulk of the time invested in debate, almost exclusively concerns reading texts with very little agency. Arguments can be made based on their relationship to published texts, which the debater finds and assembles into an argument. At the same time, this process dismisses a large portion of what goes on during reading elsewhere – the reader/debater ignores, intentionally, arguments which fit poorly into the form of debate, or contradict the argument desired from a text. So, part of debate concerns being a proficient writer, but that writing exists symbolically subordinated to the debater’s status as a reader.

I think the relationship between reading, writing and agency concerns the material and perceptible impact of choice on politics/self concept. Subjects able to invoke a sense of agency over speech, politics, etc. in their self-concept have a different relationship to themselves and the world, even if they do not act on that agency. Choices can be understood, felt and incorporated into political thought, even when people don’t take the choices available to them. The presenece and experience of choice matters.

The experience of agency over language sustains the contradictions and ‘double binds’ of gender roles for women. The experience of being the whore/prude, pollution/purity have less to do with the specific manifestations of those gender roles as they do with the means by which they are labeled, through a system of language controlled and established by men. The history of language and labels, created by a particular group which comes to benefit from the use of that language, sustains the contradictions by means of necessity. The use of the labels emerges in particular situations where their uses benefit those who define. The nature of language use and application intersects this power to sustain contradictions in gender relationships.

Duncan