A friend recently questioned the use of the personal pronoun “we” on aleph.dk. The question was posed on a rather bacchanalesque occasion, so the debate soon wandered off and finally had to sit down against a wall somewhere. In order to actually answer the very interesting question of personal pronouns, however, it would be pertinent to quote Beckett: “Qu’importe qui parle, quelqu’un a dit qu’importe qui parle” 1
There is a funny double entendre in the French original, which is sadly lost in translation. The sentence has three members. The first one is perceived as a question even though it has no question mark. The second member states that someone said something, this something being the third member. The ambiguity arises in this last member, which can be read as both a direct and an indirect quotation. Either someone repeated the question in the first member – “What matter who’s speaking” – or someone said that, in fact, it matters who is speaking.
The funny bit, of course, is the “someone” claiming the importance of identity. Who speaks at aleph.dk? Both an “I” and a “we.” Certainly, only one person writes all this garbage but there is a difference between the “someone” holding the pen and the “someone” who speaks through what is written. As Foucault once said: “Dans l’Ă©criture, il n’y a pas de la manifestation ou de l’exaltation du geste d’Ă©crire ; il ne s’agit pas de l’Ă©pinglage d’un sujet dans un langage ; il est question de l’ouverture d’un espace oĂą le sujet Ă©crivant ne cesse de disparaĂ®tre.” 2
There are a lot of theoretical subtleties in this argument and, unfortunately, it would derail our argument too much to pursue the disentanglement of their respective threads. Suffice it to say, that it is no longer theoretically viable to uphold the romantic notion of the text as direct imprint of the authoring soul.
The effacing of the authoring authority is, “I” feel, a healthy exercise, which is hopefully at the core of our present authoring function. The friendly questioning of “our” use of personal pronouns resulted, i.a., from our critique of Anne Knudsen’s usage of the term “the greater we” (“det store vi”)3. What is the difference between her “we” and our “we”?
Our “we” is completely empty. It is an empty megaphone, it is the “no hay banda” of Mulholland Drive. Every word needs an articulating mouth and our mouth opens wide for one single statement and is then closed forever. Anne Knudsen’s “greater we,” on the other hand, along with the usages of the “we” demonstrated in We the people, is a doxological “we.” It is the exclusive society of good Danish citizens. It is the obscurantist hailing of a never existing Danish spirit as the only true identity of the good Danish citizen and subsequent attempt at legally ostracizing anyone who dares not to comply.
The consistent question “What matter who’s speaking” and the anonymous “someone” of whoever claiming the importance of the speaker are part and parcel with another of Beckett’s characters. The first person narrator of The Unnamable tried in vain to take the motto “De nobis ipsis silemus.” 4. Maybe, in stead of the obscurantist declaration of who “we” are, “we” should accept ourselves as merely “someone” with an anonymous voice, not searching the fixating of identity through language but the opening of a space where “someone” is identity enough.
- Beckett’s own English translation goes as follows: “What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking.” ↩
- Michel Foucault: “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Dits et Écrits I, 1954-1975 p. 821. A possible translation would be: “In writing, there is no manifestation or exaltation of the act of writing. It is not a question of fixating a subject trough a language. It is the matter of opening a space where the writing subject never ceases to disappear.” ↩
- To the non-Danish reader it should be pointed out that Anne Knudsen is chief editor of Danish weekly newspaper Weekendavisen, and that she annoys us greatly. ↩
- “On ourselves we remain silent.” ↩
Tags: Anne Knudsen, Beckett, Foucault, personal pronouns, subject, Weekendavisen
