Shaping Subjectivity: Writing as Inquiry into the Self

“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”

-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Here in this introductory paragraph, I would like to begin in an unorthodox fashion. Academic writing is often stagnant in its tone and in its function. Usually, the tone is austere and unapologetically disembodied by its author; that is, the experience of the author is bracketed in order to create an illusion of objectivity and impartiality. The manner in which this is done even seems into the very language that the author uses. For example, in grade school we are all taught to never use the following words: I, me, or, my. We are told that this creates a formal tone that the reader can trust. In actuality, what happens is a kind of manipulation of the reader to buy into what the author is selling. Sadly, what often occurs because of this is a removal of the spirit of the author. Indeed, the very act of writing for the author becomes something that is unpleasant and phony when obeyed. Creativity is stifled as is the experience of the writing process for its author. Rather than obeying the orthodox law of academic writing, I aim to bring myself into this writing process and be shaped by it. As a means of introduction, my goal in this is to utilize my own creative writing along with the voices of other creative and helpful minds to discuss how writing itself can act as a means of inquiry into the shaping of our subjectivities. Moreover, I will note, while some parts of this undertaking will indeed by heterodox, some parts will be more familiar. As such, I hope to engage the whole person of the reader as they gain access to my mind and world and through providing some familiar structure in the analysis of my creative writing.

The Inquiry

Who am I? It appears that there is an I who asks this question. An utterance. An observing. An experiencer or one that is in some relation to experience. I have never not experienced, that I know. Whether this bodily extension that seems to be attached to this observer was prior to my awareness, I don’t have access to that information. Though, I am told so by others—some like me—some different. I am inclined to believe this to be the case as I write now—after assessing and absorbing narratives, examinations, and discussions of this world that I relate to—find myself in—experience. Many have spoken in great detail about this experience of embodiment—wondering where the line between me and you is drawn or if it is drawn at all. It is not my intention to reproduce such a phenomenological evaluation here. However, this does bring up the topic of subjectivity; that is, what defines me? What process creates me? Or am I already created? Or is it just a part of me? Through a reflection of my seemingly endless eruption of questions, it certainly appears to me that language has some great role to exercise here. Indeed, some sort of language, some symbolic exchange of ideas, representations, spiderwebs of connected signs pointing endlessly have always already been in my world as I know it—whether pointing, speaking, writing, reading, seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling—language has accompanied my experiencing.

Language also seems to be directed—not that there necessarily needs to be two subjects in relation via a linguistic exchange; rather, that, like intentionality, there seems to be some directed-ness to it—some sort of orientation or turning towards. Indeed, consciousness itself feels akin to this. However, it is not a neat and precise thing and 1:1 correspondence to something. Rather, this language of consciousness—this being in the world—is often disjunctive and multiplicitious. It’s a messy thing—very much like the spiderweb I mentioned earlier. Instead of a linear flow of words/ideas there is instead a divergence of multi-directional words/ideas. Perhaps something can be derived even from this brief reflection, that there is a kind of constant formation or eruption of ideas/words that arise in me—ebbing and flowing like the sea. Am I this ebbing and flowing and from whence does it come? Rather than arising in me, are they me? While there is this ebbing and flowing, there does appear to be some solidifications that take hold for different lengths of time—some for a very long time and others quite briefly.

Perhaps taking up this question of origination might be fruitful. Certainly, I am not an island. In the directedness of my consciousness, I find myself in a world of others and objects. The others do not appear to be the same quality as the objects—not only do they behave differently and have different capabilities—they feel differently. Computer, keys, light, desk. Objects with names and purposes and meanings all bound in a network of worldliness. Things to look at, things to touch, things to use. Goals and tasks to accomplish all bound in the world in time. While animals and other living things appear to break through this world of use and objects in a new and illuminated way, people do so almost to the point of being brilliant dancing starlight. These others pierce through consciousness in a way that reveals me so that I am seen and any shroud I clothe myself with is removed. Sometimes this being seen is pleasant and sometimes it is terrifying and tormenting. Nevertheless, during my experiences of others I am made more aware of the ebbing and flowing between myself and the world. There are emptyings and fillings back and forth—sometimes this feels like growing and other times like shrinking. I’ve been told in some books that I have read that it is in this in-between-ness that Being itself lives—the Being from which all arises—that which many refer to as God. Sometimes, especially during these experiences with others, language seems to fall away. Strange that something that appears so fundamental then gives way to something more fundamental that—in its most serene moments—occurs in silence. Perhaps not silence but something that language cannot capture—something that is beyond being named and dissected.

However, this is not to say that naming is a bad thing. It is a natural thing. Something that I found myself immersed in. In fact, since I found myself immersed in it—it does give reason to expect that it is that which I—in some sense—came out of or have arisen from. It is also something that I can manipulative and change—for it appears that I have some control over what enters my consciousness, my language, my lexicon of ideas. Though, I am not sure to what extent I have control. Illusion or not—my experience itself is real and undeniable. Aside from the exchanges with others, I have access to their experience—though indirectly—through books, film, song, photo, etc. Language provides me access to the world in a unique unifying and increasing way; that is, through the words of others I change, grow, move, extend. When I read a book I am connected to the world in new and exciting ways—the world unfolds before me and webs of meaning-making and connection snap together. In this process of reading the words on the page, I too am read by the book. There is an increase in the experience of ebbing and flowing that I have described previously. As I read a word, I am both consciously and unconsciously making associations and disassociations between it and my own schema and models that shape what the words mean and how I am within the world—it’s an organic and living process. In this process I can spend much time and solidify many understandings. I can match up information and experience. I can group them and strengthen their associations. I can also distance them and create dichotomies, binaries, and oppositions. I work out contradictions. I develop tools. I weigh thoughts. I examine them. I sit with them. And sometimes, sometimes I add and create my own.

There seems to me to be two different means by which I create: I speak, and I write. In the 21st century with advances in audio and video technologies, sometimes it is difficult to parse out the differences between speaking and writing; however, I would like to attempt to here. When I reflect on speech, it is difficult to generalize due to speech becoming a kind of medium via recording; however, I want to reflect on speech as it occurs otherwise. Speech appears to have just that, much reflection. Certainly, one can repeat what they want to say indefinitely in their minds before they say it; however, even still, in the speech act there is an immediacy to it. A directness. In some sense, it is always less mediated, less governed, and less restricted. Moreover, there is less opportunity for editing. Once the speech act has occurred and heard, one does not have access to the security of an eraser or the backspace key. Once uttered—the effects are immediate as our very voices change the world we are in. On the other hand, writing feels more permanent. Writing is a record—a recording of thought, of consciousness, of experience. It can easily be exchanged and spread. Writing takes on a life of its own as it moves through the world. In juxtaposition to this permanence, writing is also easily editable—unlike that of speech. Even as I type here now in a stream-of-consciousness manner as a creative act, I still have access to edit and change anything as I desire. Although I refuse to do so, I still have that choice. As such, writing presents to me as a more creative act—not that it is extemporaneous like speech can be or as free and unrestricted. However, it is exactly because it can be shaped that it becomes a creative act—an exploration. Like the potter who molds their clay, adding and removing material, creating and experimenting, putting themselves into their work, so to is the writer able to do so.

In my own writing, in the very writing that I am doing now, I feel this creativity and exploration. Things that I have read before, conversations that I have had, the words and thoughts arise with each key pressed on the keyboard—an amalgamation of influences and assemblages. Something else occurs to me, the words are more than this still. They are powerful and not simply abstractions in some platonic idealized heavens. Once they come into being they influence the world. Even here, the words I now type will influence my analysis of writing in this essay. That is what I am to explore in analysis—the question that now arises, how does writing shape subjectivity? How can writing itself act as a mode of inquiry into the self? What can be gleaned about ourselves and how the self arises via the process of writing? As I continue to write it does feel like a kind of me-ness forms and that processes of thought begin to seem more transparent and unveiled. Writing, especially writing like this, is a meditative act. As the stream-of-consciousness unfold, the monkey-mind erupts and then calms and things become clearer. But, what kind of inquiry is this? What is this writing that I am doing? Perhaps it is a sort of memoir? I am certainly reflecting on myself and working to tell the truth; however, I am here now in the present and not seeking to tell a story of my multifaceted histories. Perhaps this is a kind of phenomenological autoethnography? I need to investigate this more. For now, I would like to focus on the act of writing as an inquiry into the self. Moreover, it appears to me that no matter the genre of writing style, all writing is a kind of inquiry into the self. I wonder what would happen is writing were taught like this—reflective and inquisitive. Free and flowing. Currently, it seems that school gets in the way of education. I would like to teach this kind of writing. I would like to write with passion and zeal—with intention and openness. Perhaps we once knew how to write like this in an age ago. Perhaps I am only just now learning how to myself.

Imitation and Authenticity

I break now from my own reflexive stream-of-consciousness writing with the hope of returning to it with the words of some fellow writers and with some traditional analytic and synthetic structure. In my endeavor to understand the writing genre of memoir, I was pleased to read Karr’s The Art of Memoir which was itself a memoir about memoirs—the kind of creativity I am for myself. Therein, Karr states, “Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don’t sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer’s best voice will grow from embracing her own “you-ness”—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice” (Karr, 2016, 67). I too have found this to be a hurtle to get over in my own writing. Indeed, even in the creative writing I have done here, looking back on it I wonder, “Do I sound like Joyce? Is this just an imitation of Woolf?” Undoubtedly, as I point out in my inquiry, the answer to this question is both yes and no because I am an amalgamation of different voices. However, even still, Karr is right here when they state the importance of embracing one’s own “you-ness.” Indeed, in academia, as a society, we have spent far too much time running from our own voices and imitating those of others. Mewshaw, in their memoir entitled The Lost Prince: A Search for Pat Conroy, recalls a list of rules that his friend and prolific author Pat Conroy kept: “Write from the heart, not the gut, not the head. . .Deepen everything, concentrate. Keep this journal. Learn to relax. To appreciate silence and solitude. Try to use my disadvantages as a writer—make them strengths. Do not be afraid to write everything down. Believe in myself as a writer. Believe deeply. I am young no longer. I am now writing the books I was meant to write. I’m not preparing for any future books. These are the ones I was born to write. Make them wonderful.” (Mewshaw, 2019, 85-86) So many things stand out for me here in this short bit of prose addressed to an author’s future self. This idea of authenticity comes to mind. Even as I write here in this essay, the flow is right. My words are congruent and match to me. I believe that this is what Mewshaw is capturing from Conroy’s words of advice. As he states, when we write, we need to write from the heart and the gut and not from the head. Academia is stifled with those writing only from their head and as is education more generally in America. So, I make the pledge to write what I was born to write and to make them wonderful.

Change and Fluctuation

One of, if not the major theme of my inquiry, is this idea of the shaping of subjectivity through the writing process itself. I state the following, “As I read a word, I am both consciously and unconsciously making associations and disassociations between it and my own schema and models that shape what the words mean and how I am within the world.” In writing there is this ongoing dialectical hermeneutic process. I shape the writing and then the writing shapes me—a kind of constant change and fluctuation. In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Atwood also gleans something similar in her own writing: “A book may outlive its author, and it moves too, and it too can be said to change - but not in the manner of the telling. It changes in the manner of the reading. As many commentators have remarked, works of literature are recreated by each generation of readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them” (Atwood, 2003, 65). Here Atwood writes of the reader’s experience of what an author has written and how this changes the text; however, I think Atwood would also agree that this same kind of phenomenon happens as well with the author as they are writing—especially if they are open to the experience of writing as a kind of inquiry into the self rather than attempting to always bracket the self from entering the writing. In a certain sense, the author is already long dead before the book is even published if they are writing in this bracketed way. Additionally, the philosopher Walter Benjamin touches on this notion and experience of perceptual and existential change in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (Benjamin, 1986, 222). Benjamin speaks of a radical kind of change here and one that we often simply do not notice without hindsight. In fact, Benjamin points out that these changes do not happen instantaneously, but rather over long periods of history. When I find even more interesting is that when we write with reflexivity and with openness, we can see how these long periods of change are actually composed of small oscillations in ourselves in each moment. For example, in my own inquiry I write: “there is a kind of constant formation or eruption of ideas/words that arise in me—ebbing and flowing like the sea.” It is my suspension that in our lifeworld meetings with others, some of these tides within us unite with the tides of others and over time create these changes in sense perception and in our mode of existence.

The Multiplicity of Self

Directly connected to the discussion of change and fluctuation that arises in the author through the act of writing is the question of what the self is—and it is a very old question. Is the self static? Does it change? Is it the soul? Is it the mind? What is it made of? Whence does it come? I will table many of these questions for my purpose here. For my purpose, I wish to speak of the self as a multiplicity. Many philosophers have in fact already done this long before me; however, I find that it is a notion that I have experienced and one of the themes that arose out of my own inquiry here. Before turning to my own experience, Malabou, in their philosophical memoir entitled Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (Cultural Memory in the Present), provides an additional lived literary account of this notion of the divided self. Malabou states, “Very early on, Derrida had the feeling that his identity was divided: "at once a Maghrebian (which is not a citizenship) and a French citizen. One and the other at the same time. And better yet, at once one and the other by birth." French, Maghrebian, and Jewish. The triple dissociation that dislocated the situation of his birth was itself subdivided in turn” (Malabou, 2004, 78). Derrida provides a very clear illustration of just how complicated the composure of the self really is and can be. French but not French. Jewish but not Jewish. Maghrebian but not Maghrebian. All of these contested identities forming in their disjunction who he was. In Ferrante’s In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Ferrante takes up this lived experience and centers it in their own discussion of the writing experience: “I believe that the sense I have of writing—and all the struggles it involves—has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success” (Ferrante, 2022, 10). Ferrante seems to be working out the same question that I too am concerned with in my inquiry; that is, where am I in the writing? Am I in the cracks and liminal spaces therein? Am I in the margins? If so, am I stuck there? I think that perhaps it is more like Malabou suggests about Derrida’s identity and what I write about here: “this language of consciousness—this being in the world—is often disjunctive and multiplicitious. It’s a messy thing—very much like the spiderweb I mentioned earlier. Instead of a linear flow of words/ideas there is instead a divergence of multi-directional words/ideas.” Perhaps further into this essay I can then link this discussion to what I also experience in the indefinite solidification of some of these things as well—as a means of illustrating even the flux of flux in our selves.

Writing with Others

Sometimes phenomenology can get too locked into the individual. In an effort to avoid navel gazing—even if my primary material here is my own writing—it is important to point out how writing as an inquiry into the self actually does entail both writing with and for Others. One way I am trying to do that is the inclusion of all of these other voices and my sifting through them. Singh in their essay The Breaks writes to their daughter about this task that we must all at some point and to some degree take up: “These choices will require acts of indebted critique – of sifting through our individual and collective pasts not to burn down your ancestors for what they failed to accomplish, but to learn from what they neglected and to cull the latent seeds planted by our awe-inspiring foremothers” (Singh, 2021, 98). Indeed, it seems that even further still, when one engages in an act of writing as inquiry into the self, one constantly is presented with the choice to burn one’s ancestors or reify them. This is something that we are constantly both consciously and unconsciously engaged with via the world we surround ourselves with, who we are writing for, who we speak with, what books we read. What writing does do however is slow down this process and allow for mindfulness and intentionality.

Additionally, even looking outside of phenomenology and mytho-poetic literary framings of self and other, there is much to glean from other theoretical traditions. For example, critical theory can be a helpful tool in organizing our inquiry on the relationship between self and other. In their text regarding the history of the Frankfurt School of thought, The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay writes: “Critical Theory, as its name implies, was expressed through a series of critiques of other thinkers and philosophical traditions. Its development was thus through dialogue, its genesis as dialectical as the method it purported to apply to social phenomena” (Jay, 1996, 84). Critical theory thus finds its origins through a fundamental understanding of the importance of the relationship between self and other. It then works to establish a methodology for analyzing the relationship. In my own inquiry I write, “While animals and other living things appear to break through this world of use and objects in a new and illuminated way, people do so almost to the point of being brilliant dancing starlight.” Taking up the relationship of inquiry into the self via this kind of intentional writing can help us to breathe vitality and life into theory and academic writing which—as mentioned before—can sometimes become dry and stale. What I hope to convey here is that more traditional methods of inquiry need not be juxtaposed to writing genres such as memoir, autoethnography, fiction, etc. They, in fact, need one another to provide a more wholistic picture of the object of study and discussion.

The Social Function of the Writer

Perhaps then it is important to turn now to an often forgotten or simply unthought of question not only regarding all authors, but specifically those of creative writing; that is, what exactly is this kind of a writer? While Gramsci takes up this question with specific reference to distinguishing intellectuals vs. nonintellectuals, I think that the analysis still works regarding writers generally. He writes in his Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci: “When one distinguishes between intellectuals and nonintellectuals, one is referring in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional category of the intellectuals, that is, one has in mind the direction in which their specific professional activity is weighted, whether towards intellectual elaboration or towards muscular-nervous effort” (Gramsci, 1971, 9). Gramsci gives a rather unsurprising Marxist suggestion here when considering intellectuals and nonintellectuals—one regarding material conditions. That is to say, we can know what something is by the function it plays in society (functionalism) and its effect on material conditions. So, what kind of social function does this kind of writing provide? What makes these kinds of creative writing works and efforts important? I believe I answer this in my creative inquiry when I write describe what the process does for me: “I can match up information and experience. I can group them and strengthen their associations. I can also distance them and create dichotomies, binaries, and oppositions. I work out contradictions. I develop tools. I weigh thoughts. I examine them. I sit with them. And sometimes, sometimes I add and create my own.” In short, creative writing provides the social function of teaching others how to benefit from the many tools it provides which in turn they can use for any number of undertakings in the world.

Teaching Writing as Inquiry

Before moving to lastly reflect on the ultimate telos of writing, a last consideration for this praxis of writing as inquiry into the self has to do with its relationship to education; that is, addressing the question of how this can be taught to each new generation. The process of education has largely given way to the process of schooling. In schooling, the student becomes that of the consumer which is the object of capitalism. The student is seen for what use they can be to their institution and how they can reify the institutions of schooling, the market, corporations, and industry. Horkheimer and Adorno comment on this process in the following: “The consumer becomes the ideology of the pleasure industry, whose institutions he cannot escape. One simply “has to” have seen Mrs. Miniver, just as one “has to” subscribe to Life and Time. Everything is looked at from only one aspect: that it can be used for something else, however vague the notion of this use may be” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, 158). When the subject is made the consumer, they become trapped by the institution and the limits of their perception become narrowed and confined to one thing: its use value to the institution. This is very clear when one looks at the current state of education in America. There is an actual emphasis in place that seeks to dampen creative writing and creative exploration of ideas. Rather, the goal is one of creating machines that only think in one way and have one concern: reproduction of institutional interests. Sadly, this has been put forth under the guise of providing a neutral and objective education. Giroux addresses this in their article “The Scourge of Illiteracy in Authoritarian Times.” They write: “The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Education and pedagogy do not exist outside of relations of power, values, and politics” (Giroux, 2017, 22). The problem is that so many of us have lost sight of these underpinnings to education and pedagogy. For, if we are not being taught to think reflexively and critically, we simply assume that the guise is true—that what schooling teaches us is neutral and objective. This is the kind of problem that writing as an inquiry into the self is faced against—that creative writing and reflection is faced with.

Shaping Subjectivity with Education

Moreover, if we are not teaching each new generation the value of such pursuits then we should not be surprised when our subjectivities are shaped in such a way that makes it difficult for writing and inquiry to be cherished and appreciated. McLaren makes this abundantly clear when he writes the following in his article entitled “Neoliberalism, Critical Pedagogy, and Forging the Next Revolution”: “…schools serve not only to target student subjectivities, dispositions, and capacities in order to shape ideas but to manipulate the nimble realms of affect that reinforce those ideas. Schools then come to serve as strategies of behavioral containment, ideological implantation, and dissemination of ruling-class ideas” (McLaren, 2017, 270). Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is simply just an accidental byproduct of education as an institution. McLaren intentionally chooses the word target here to illustrate the fact that there is intentionality at hand. For, if we as a society shape the subjectivities of our students in such a way that does not teach creativity and exploration and reflection then it naturally follows that they merely become receptacles for regurgitating the ideas that are fed to them. Clayton Pierce offers another piece of insight into this troubling problem in their book entitled Education in the Age of Biocapitalism: Optimizing Educational Life for a Flat World. Pierce states the following: “One of the most troubling aspects emerging from the neoliberal restructuring of education over the past 30 years in the United States is the way in which reform movements based on educational measurement techniques such as the value-added framework claim to have isolated the true measure of learning into what teachers can either add or subtract from their pupils” (Pierce, 2012, 43). Again, here we see that the very structuring of the educational institution is one where the very measurements of learning are controlled in such a way that precludes any philosophical and creative endeavors. This concern emerges for me even in my own brief writing before engaging in this analysis: “Currently, it seems that school gets in the way of education. I would like to teach this kind of writing. I would like to write with passion and zeal—with intention and openness.” I hope to instill a call in my readers that if we are not careful—if we do not care—any hopes of retaining this means of inquiry could be lost to us.

The Telos of Writing

As a final topic of discussion and analysis, I would like to lastly turn to what might the telos of writing be. Thus far we have investigated many things. We have looked into how writing shapes our subjectivity, what might be gleaned about subjectivity, how writing connects us to others in our lifeworld, how we constitute one another, what the role of the writer is in our world, and the challenges of teaching this kind of writing in our schools. It might now be helpful to discuss the successes and struggles in engaging in this kind of praxis. Ultimately, it appears to matter how the act of writing is taken up and this has resulted in a mix of opinions in the literature. Pulling once more from Singh, this time from No Archive Will Restore You, they write: “The archive was an elusive hope of our individual salvation. If we could find the right archive, the right stash of materials that was sexy enough to sell ourselves, we could be spared the depression, the anxiety attacks, the pre-mid-life crises that would come when, one by one, we realized we were not going to be chosen.” (Singh, 2018, 22). As readers, especially if you are an academic, we can feel what Singh is saying here. Singh speaks about their work in writing in academia was a hope of salvation; however, this writing is described in a way that is not authentic or at least there was a concern for how one looked in their writing and how they were to be received. This is the tragic writing we find in academia which has also fallen prey to schooling. Thankfully, Singh was ultimately able to break free from this and write about the experience. In juxtaposition to hoping for writing as salvation, in Augustine’s memoir, The Confessions, we see an image of someone who writes freely and does not care for convention, praise, or critique. He writes, “…to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (Augustine, 1998, 34). Interestingly enough, in Augustine’s indifference for the praise or encouragement, writing becomes a reflection of his salvation as he rejects the need to be supported by the world.

Struggles

Rather than ending on a low note, I would like to begin this examination of the struggles and successes of writing as inquiry with the struggles before moving onto what we can hope to gain from it. One aspect of the creative writing process that we have focused on is the complexity of how the self ebbs and flows and how language can only strive to capture this experience but never really can. Margaret Atwood reflects on this experience in her own writing: “It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many” (Atwood, 1998, 126). It is true. No matter how hard we try to capture an experience and try to describe it to another, it never really can be the experience. Language fails us in this task—this fundamental task and desire of wanting to be completely seen and wanting to share oneself completely with another. Language has limitations. In my own exercise here in speaking about God I concur with Atwood: “Strange that something that appears so fundamental then gives way to something more fundamental that—in its most serene moments—occurs in silence. Perhaps not silence but something that language cannot capture—something that is beyond being named and dissected.” However, does this mean that the endeavor should then be rejected? I say no. No. The process remains worthwhile even if it cannot do all the things we want of it.

Another struggle that we have mentioned is the struggle of social influence and manipulation. Klincheloe writes, “The new era of childhood, the postmodern childhood, cannot escape the influence of the postmodern condition with its electronic media saturation. Such a media omnipresence produces a hyperreality that repositions the real as something no longer simply given but artificially reproduced as real” (Klincheloe, 2011, 281). If we find ourselves in this state of hyperreality when all originals are lost and we are left with copies of copies of copies, the question that rises is whether anything real occurs in our writing; that is, anything that is actually ours. Can we escape the influence? Here, I say no as well. No, we cannot escape the influence; however, we can become more aware of it. Indeed, one of the positives of writing as an inquiry into the self is a sense of mindfulness to where it becomes easier to see where are influences stem from and how they interact within us. Steinberg makes a similar critique when discussing the role of Barbies in our society. They state, “When Barbie is treated as a fashion idol, a heroine, she becomes reality, as flesh and blood beings retreat into becoming simulacra . . . Is this marketing at its best? Lines blurred between toy and reality have created an industry that marketing has turned into art, culture, memory, and history” (Steinberg, 2011, 263). Again, yes, we know that these things are happening; however, we are writing about their happenings and that is worth something. To be fair, whether something can be done to alter this is a different question altogether. Regardless, it is imperative that we continue to take up critical and creative writing so that what is unconscious might become conscious.

Successes

As a last reference to my own exploration into writing as an inquiry into the self, I would like to mention what I believe this kind of writing can do for us: “Like the potter who molds their clay, adding and removing material, creating and experimenting, putting themselves into their work, so to is the writer able to do so.” In our writing we can create. Even if the materials are from elsewhere, what we do with them matters. The fact that we can take from one another and make something new is evidence that learning and writing matter. Not only this but even the act itself is joyful. Oliver Sacks wonderfully describes this in his memoir On the Move: A Life. He writes, “The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place—irrespective of my subject—where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time” (Sacks, 2015, 291). Indeed, writing is something that is akin to reading in that it can transport us to another place and create in us different modes of being and ways that we can interact with out lifeworld. It is a joyous and kind of meditative state. This is something that I pointed out in my own exploratory writing. Additionally, and in a somewhat partial juxtaposition to the quote from Atwood earlier, Ferrante in her novel entitled My Brilliant Friend suggests that writing actually can create the means for one to be truly seen. Speaking as the main character from the novel about their relationship with their best friend after reading a letter from her, she states: “Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but–further–she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her.” (Ferrante, 2018, 218) In Lila’s writing, it comes without effort; that is, it follows naturally for her. She is in a state of flow—a different kind of subjectivity. It is not constrained nor controlled. In her free act of writing, she is able to create in her reader the effect of being seen and heard. This shows just how important and how powerful it is for us to not forget how to write from the heart and from the gut—to do so risks losing our ability to be seen and heard.

Conclusion

In the introduction I began by taking up the task of trying to break free of some of the orthodox conventions of academic writing. I think that it is only right that I should conclude in a similar way. Throughout this essay I have tried to not only speak about writing as an inquiry into the self, but I have tried to do so myself and provide an example of what doing so looks like—at least to the best of my ability. I am no expert and do not claim to be; however, what I am is someone who knows the value of writing and how it works to shape my own subjectivity. It is my hope that the example of my own inquiry inspires any that might read this essay. I have worked to analyze to components of writing as an inquiry into the self in order to show that writing shapes us, how it shapes us, and how it effects our relationships with others in our world from the smallest relationship to the global community. Furthermore, It is also my hope that the analysis of my experience and the accompanying quotes from many who are more well versed in these ideas that I am help you to understand why this process—this praxis—matters and what dangers it faces in the American educational system. In formal academic writing that is taught to us through years of schooling and influence, it is generally ill advised to end with a quote; therefore, that is what I will do: “some sort of language, some symbolic exchange of ideas, representations, spiderwebs of connected signs pointing endlessly have always already been in my world as I know it—whether pointing, speaking, writing, reading, seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling—language has accompanied my experiencing.”

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