Ethos, Ethics, and Performative Writing (cont.)

In my students, this assignment produces texts I would call "performative," borrowing my terminology from performance-art theories developed by Della Pollock.[1] Like the "coming out" stories my students wrote, performative writing "evokes worlds that are other-wise intangible, unlocatable" (80). For Pollock, these worlds exist in "memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect, and insight," whereas for my students, these worlds bridge the fictional and nonfictional in disruptive ways: the self in the text is one that isn't a self as much as it is their "selves." Performative writing, Pollock argues, is both "subjective" (86) and "nervous" (90). Rather than "subject-centered" texts which "circl[e] back on the writer/subject" in ways that establish a clear self, performative writing is subjective in that it represents the "the performed relation between or among subjects, the dynamic engagement of a contingent and contiguous (rather than continuous) relation between the writer and his/her subject(s), subject-selves, and or reader(s)" (86). Such writing, she claims, "tends to subject the reader to the writer's reflexivity," and for Pollock this move is highly (aesthetically) artful. However, for my students (and me as a teacher-reader), a similar move occurs in "newness" and the lack of "art" that creates unstable texts, texts where selves exists for all sorts of purposes, some under the rhetor's control, perhaps, but mostly not, mostly under the control of how the reader and writer are creating meaning together in such "tentative" texts.[2] "Subjective" performative writing creates a self that "emerges from these shifting perspectives" in order to become a "possibility rather than a fact, a figure of relation emerging from between lines of difference" (Pollock 87).

[1] Of course, Pollock notes in her work her own indebtedness to the performativity theories of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault.

[2] My use of "tentative" reflects the sort of use that Jane Hindeman has demonstrated in her work on "embodied rhetorics" and "embodied writing," writing which she claims is "tentative" in the ways that the body itself is tentative, moving in fits and starts, and enacting its own rebellions on process and (ethical) performance ("Writing"; "Making Writing").

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