My Imaginary Friend

I like to write alone. Even if the house is empty, I squish bits of orange foam into my ears to plug the tunnels that let others burrow in. The dogs and laundry and detritus on my desk can be so much louder than the faint melody of thought that drifts up from the catacombs.

The page is the closet where I hid as a child every time we had to move; it opens with the scent of winter coats. In its small dark space the self flickers like a firefly; I stare until it burns into my retina. Later, at my laptop, I close my eyes to trace its negative image, trying to map the blind spots where others might stand unseen.

Writing comes from that hush before the conductor drops her baton into the downbeat of the busy march of the day. A small split in time stretches into a soft elastic space where the hours run together. I am a wordbender, carving meaning from air grown thick with the particulate matter of discourse and pulling images through the gossamer walls of consciousness. It is my best magic trick, and thus not quite real.

I never write alone. “What is this?” I’ll ask, placing my partner’s hands on a text that I can feel but not see. I build these lines from the inside, circulating in rivers of metaphor and standing on muddy slopes of meaning, squinting for the horizon. I am Samuel de Champlain in a swamp with no astrolabe. “I don’t know,” my partner says, “but we’re not in Canada anymore.” ¹

Just as most of the DNA in my body belongs to tens of thousands of resident organisms, my writing is not mine. I am not alone; the voice of every atom vibrates like an orchestra of actors and forces co-constituting me. I naively try to find the tune, to press them into unison, to analyze and simplify, to make sense of their polyphony. In postmodern moments, I might settle for managed dissonance or harmony, but I am not weaned off the desire for discernable knowledge and boundaries.

Astrophysics has found that everything we know in existence only adds up to 4% of the mass of the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy, unreflective and undetectable except in its influence on the behavior of visible bodies. The culmination of centuries of collaborative cosmological inquiry is to admit that we cannot imagine how greatly the other exceeds us. Science thus renders 96% of my context invisible; culture, history, character, intention, and biology pick over the rest. The missing masses are with me, there in the closet—objects, machines, microbes, memories, feelings, fibers that once were forests—gathered at the edge of awareness, in and around my subjectivity. Claiming to write without others is, in this context, an egocentric fiction.

I rarely write for myself; generally, an imagined reader creates the conditions of possibility in which the act acquires enough purpose and meaning to bump more useful activities on my infinite to-do list. At the same time, I always write for myself; to get words past the cop-in-the-head, I pretend they will never be published or read. The fact that I then seek their public dissemination may indicate vanity but seems propelled by deeper currents. There is a kind of stifled, vague, ineffectual feeling that comes from not writing. It is as if, unwitnessed, I will dissipate into a fog. Bashing my head against the computer screen to make words fall out is like shaking myself awake. I recognize this as an act of will, a pushing that is sometimes hard but eventually gains traction and, more often than I deserve, carries me on its own momentum. There is a sense of release, like that elusive point in long-distance swimming when it feels like I could go on forever. There is, I dare say, happiness. I become less or differently self-aware; my actions don’t feel like something I am doing, so much so that it seems peculiar to take credit for them.

I have always been suspicious of artists who claim that inspiration comes through them; it seems pompous, improbable, a wizard of Oz ventriloquism that at best avoids accountability. However, neurology reframes this as quite reasonable. If you put the left side of the brain to sleep, a right-brain self emerges, with entirely different perceptions, capacities, and responses. The occasional recognition of this shadow self is interpreted by the sense-making machinations of the left brain as another presence—angels or muses, others inside us who exceed the selves that we know.

We practice our multiplicity on an everyday scale through critical reflection. In Thinking and Moral Considerations, Hannah Arendt (1971) positions the two-in-one soundless dialogue of thought as the way we achieve knowledge of right and wrong—not true and false—particularly once it extends into conversation within community. Coming to terms with the others inside is, she argues, the precondition for apprehending otherness out in the world. By that logic, I can most readily embrace in you those things that I have accepted in myself. The antidote to thoughtless trespass lies in reflexive self-scrutiny—which seems rather like the mandate of autoethnography. If I reach thought by using writing as a method of inquiry, Arendt’s insistence that moral reasoning requires community calls me to consider how my writing is and ought to be collaborative.

Which brings us to the crux of the biscuit.

In traditional cultural theory, the highest form of aesthetic expression emerges from individual impractical creative imperatives. Bourdieu (1984) calls the artist “a producer who aims to be autonomous, that is, entirely the master of his product, who tends to reject . . . the ‘programmes’ imposed a priori by scholars and scribes” (p. xxvi). Adorno (1982) similarly argues that art works committed to political or strategic objectives “readily credit themselves with every noble value, and then manipulate them at their ease” and often end up “bleating what everyone is already saying or at least secretly wants to hear” (p. 317). Privilege accrues to the (male) solo artist, wrestling with his private demons and brilliantly skewering them on the tragic spikes of his melancholy genius. Writing appears as a gift that, like a shamanistic trance, indicates the specialness (or delusions) of the writer, and offers society a glimpse of the transcendent.

Like many other androcentric, classist Western norms, this model for the creative process has been contested. The individualism on which it rests is a foundational element within the structure of dichotomous oppositional difference that has rendered our species unjust and unsustainable. Cultural producers prompted by aesthetic and ethical qualms have developed a plethora of alternative practices, from the nonverbal layered conversations of jazz improvisation to devised theater groups in which uncertainty and failure are celebrated. These collaborative forms posit that unity of intention is not the necessary prerequisite of brilliance; even Michaelangelo had underpainters.

On Canadian public radio recently, a program on the advent of e-books announced the death (again) of the author and conventional publishing, arguing instead for a future in which books become dynamic online documents, endlessly altered and annotated by readers until their authorship is diffused across a profusion of intersecting tangents. Creative agency shifts from writer to audience, completing the drift that began when semiotics split signs from signifieds. There will be no need for world-weary authors laboring in garrets once the public can collaboratively craft and consume its own narratives. We see this already happening in game spaces like World of Warcraft and Halo—virtual locations which defy geographic and cultural distance to permit the non-linear real-time development of plots and characters.

This future was presented on the radio with utopian glee, and is taken seriously at my university, where the research facilities in the department of English include a state-of-the-art gaming studio. However, in my snooty opinion, the democratized texts produced in these spaces are like write-a-line, pass-it-on “poems” scrawled on accordian-folded pieces of paper. They may offer entertainment, diversion, or even insightful data, but they are unlikely to produce real art.

The sacred cow this viewpoint kicks has a powerful moo. Crowd-sourcing, wikis, social media, citizen journalism, opinion polls, and referenda have risen on the principle of power to the people. Even our consumer goods and entertainment are increasingly customized to our diverse whims, in this age of three-dimensional printers, just-in-time manufacturing, self-publishing, indie labels, itunes, and self-made celebrity Youtubers.

As Eli Wiesel (1990) notes, testimony has become the characteristic genre of our era. While our memoirs, documentaries, talk shows, TV specials, and tell-all interviews have often placed trauma as the pivots of meaning and identity (the rape/abduction/infidelity/bankruptcy/disease/death-defying accident that changed our whole lives), the rise of reality television and information technologies have coincided with the valorization of minutae. Perhaps driven by existential unease following the political death of God—the absence of the Just King, a trusted alpha dog to keep order in the pack—we now document everyday experience as if it were inherently fascinating and meaningful. On Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Second Life, blogs, and websites we declare the specificity of our existence and standpoint. We frame and reframe our own images, like teenagers taking selfies with their cell phone cameras to post online so others can see how they see themselves, not sure what they’re seeking but certain they need to keep looking.

Feminist researchers intent on turning the academic gaze to the private, everyday worlds beyond dominant histories of great men and wars may see this diffusion of access to public voice as a triumph for equality. If, as Orlie (1997) argues, “the universal is revealed in its eventful singularity” (165), access to a greater range of singularities must be a good thing, particularly if these data are produced without the troublesome colonial trespass of the experts. If two heads are better than one, ten thousand heads trending a twitter feed must be best of all. Has the dream of innocent knowledge finally come true?

Unlikely. While the individual’s power as a producer of knowledge and culture may be growing, our political and economic agency is simultaneously shrinking. The rise of neoliberal governments has brought cuts to social programs, increased extremes of wealth and poverty, consolidated power within executive branches of government, and reduced national sovereignty. Global corporations under the protection of world banking and trade systems have grown more powerful than democratically elected institutions. The broad distribution of voice within late capitalism is poor recompense for the loss of individual power, particularly when our media and education systems typically reinforce compliance rather than critical thinking. Our preoccupation with self-representation may, in fact, offer the pressure valve that maintains the stability of oppressive hegemonic structures.

As recently demonstrated by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, public voice can facilitate the mobilization of social protest. However, its effectiveness may be limited by an anti-intellectual bias that, ironically, can claim support from emancipatory ideals. Participatory action researchers, postcolonial scholars, transnational feminists, and activists of every stripe have spent decades challenging hierarchies of power and knowledge, privileging insider standpoints, and critiquing assumptions of expertise. The left-leaning intelligensia may have sown the seeds of its own undoing by pursuing the supposed ethical purity of leadership from below.

Our attraction to diamonds in the rough has spawned a whole genre of entertainment in which ordinary people watch apparently ordinary others reveal themselves on television as surprisingly extraordinary (albeit less special than a dancing dog). This preference for the unlikely hero suggests an investment in the meritocratic ideal that all anybody really lacks is determination and opportunity. This, in turn, may rest on the pious hope that competency is evenly distributed. The associated disinterest in born winners arises from the conflation of power with oppression; to be likeable, pretty rich White girls tearfully confide their painful secrets, and American Presidents pose as half-wit good ole’ boys or remind us they were raised by a single mum.

These shows further reveal our fascination with largeness; in their world, more is more. The number of viewers and size of the electorate voting for your nation’s favorite whatever becomes invested with both authority and collective identity. This last factor is particularly compelling in societies plagued by isolation. Although feminist relational theorists may welcome the growth of digital communities and the blogosphere as evidence of our growing investment in connection, the urgency and spread of self-representation might actually indicate how poorly our need for connection is being met. We are, perhaps, relationally over-fed and under-nourished. A recent survey by the Vancouver Foundation (2011) found that the most pressing local social problem was loneliness—even though their city includes the poorest neighborhood in Canada.

The hunger to belong and be recognized as exceptional helps me understand the rise of the book written by everyone. It may offer a good read, but like the working-class middle-aged housewife soprano discovered on TV, I suspect that its social impact will be short-lived. While our voices have proliferated and diversified, many of our approaches to making sense and locating value have been delegitimized, including our systems for arbitrating between conflicting analytic frameworks. When human rights principles can be contested as arising from specific Judeo-Christian political traditions and might can no longer credibly make right, it becomes hard to know how to know anything.

So here we sit like an over-zealous researcher lost in hundreds of hours of interview tapes, wishing we’d chosen a single case study. We have never lacked for content. Now, more than ever, what we’re missing is reliable filters and means of analysis. In a world of four-year election cycles, thirty second sound bites, new managerialist outcome measurements, and horrifying injustices, we need a space in between under-theorized populism and rigorous uncertainty in which we can make robust policy decisions.

Even within the eggshell dome of one skull, there is too much going on to actually see anything clearly; that is why writers and mystics withdraw. In the cacophony of collaboration, writing skims back and forth like a water bug, lacking the weight to break the surface tension. If writing alone is like holding a hand mirror, in collaborative writing the other(s) stand in their own skins some distance apart. But do they have larger mirrors—that is, greater reflective capacity? If their silver faces are turned toward me, I may see myself differently, but not necessarily more deeply. I am unlikely to lean in, hunting for pimples and whiskers; you are too present, watching me, and I am too busy watching you. Writing paradoxically reduces my self-consciousness, but I can’t forget myself with you staring at me.

This may be why some collaborative writing seems to dwell almost exclusively on itself. The relationship between authors displaces anything else they may have meant to address, without telling me why I should care about it. The need to negotiate and remain on good terms with co-authors plays a silent editorial role, blunting the bite of conflict and introducing a carefulness that can leave the text muddy as an over-worked painting. Instead of the author’s raw insights and ideas, the reader’s meal comes pre-cooked by the heat of whatever friction and compromise was involved in its crafting. It takes exceptional talent to engage my interest in your conversation. An exchange of letters hacked into a semi-coherent text resembles nonfiction prose as much as an interview transcript resembles theatrical dialogue.

I am thus concerned that the rising interest in collaborative writing as a means of academic inquiry rests on the idealization of breadth, multiplicity, complexity, and relational connection, along with an associated suspicion of individual expertise. While there is a common-sense ethical appeal to hearing from more perspectives, it will not automatically have a practical pay-off. Well before collaborative writing—or inquiry—is embraced as our new hope and valorized (not least by virtue of its marginality), I would like to see its links to prevailing social and cultural tendencies well interrogated and historicized. If feminist social change activists have been taking up the master’s tools, we can be sure that the master has also been learning a few tricks.

On the other hand, my dismissal of collaborative writing and implicit coronation of creative autonomy relies on tired modernist notions of insight and depth, order and clarity, separation and mastery. It is not fair to tar the range of collaborative writing practices with the same brush, nor to position it as the outcome of our misguided interest in the distribution of voice. Whether or not my concerns are well founded, I am confabulating reasons to dislike collaborative writing, trying to justify the visceral affective reaction those two words evoke—like “heart-warming” or “wholesome” or “live, laugh, love,” they make me cringe. They feel insincere and prescriptive, a sticky platitudinous gloss for the competition, jealousy, anger, desire, betrayal, and compromise that must come from letting others meddle in the extreme intimacy of an unconscious creative process.

When I was a child, I told my mother that my imaginary friend Cinderella lived in a castle by herself with no friends and no parents and she was never lonely and she was never sad. Later, in school, I hated group work; it meant tiptoeing around others’ lame efforts and hissy fits, letting them coast on my labor and settling for mediocrity. I was always the weird new kid in the ruthless caste system of small-town schools. “So sorry Sophie,” the miniature mean girls chanted from the top of the monkey bars, “but there’s just no room.” My recent three years on the doormat of the academy waiting for a hiring committee to let me in has done nothing to soften this sense of being an outsider.

I was devastated, at 18, when an older poet said that my work was sentimental, but now I sit in my carapace eyeing the soft-focus confessions of collaborative writing panels and mutter the same critique. I protect myself from my fear of rejection with impossible standards; anyone brilliant enough for me to admire would not want to write with me and anyone who would want to write with me is not brilliant enough to admire (or perhaps, is simply admiring what remains of my corporeal assets). I manage the ecstatic semi-erotic co-mingling described by writing teams like Mazzei and Jackson with a wallflower’s pre-emptive spite: I don’t want to dance with you anyhow. A co-writer is like a personal trainer; I can work out on my own.

I explain the success of my few sorties into the field by maintaining that I was not deeply invested, the other was gracious enough to let me have my way, or each of us ruled our own kingdoms. They have felt a bit like a game. No matter how carefully our voices were stitched together, they remain, as I read them, so separate that they seem written in different fonts. When a co-authored text does not tell me who has written what, my ability to input its meaning is overtaken by the hunt for clues. I feel irritated when my need to locate the author is thwarted. I may need more Sesame Street sermons on sharing and cooperation, but the claim that two or more people have equally written a text seems as likely as several mums giving birth to one child.

Writing is a kind of fierce fugue state. I am the mantle of a gas lamp; when words are flowing I burn hot and bright but once they stop I am brittle and small. I do not know how I would collaborate with others in these initial stages of composition; what they could bring that I need.

I do not want to need you, in this far, as close to me as words, so I am careful. It is hard to help me. The person who writes is someone that I barely know. I have put her away for years so she would not sour my days with her impatient sulking and make me unlovable. Now, she disappears when I am called on to care for others, and moves back in slowly. Like a big butchy Tinkerbell, she is temperamental, magical, and only exists when I believe in her.

I have so many reasons to mistrust collaborative writing, but something in Jane Speedy (2012) gives me pause. “Collaborative writing,” she says, “is about engaging with the highly subversive activity, much neglected amongst scholars, of building loving communities” (p. 355, emphasis in original). I cannot oppose a praxis that seeks the recognition and cultivation of love, if only because I could not write without it.

As I said in the beginning, I do not and cannot write alone. My children bring me cups of tea and accept that I occasionally become an obsessively writing madwoman prone to mood swings and irritability. They are proud of me, even after they have read my work. My partner, Shawn, plugs my drafts into his brain as if he is an ICU, leaving them there on life support while I summon the nerve to operate or pull the plug. Sometimes it is just an embryonic mass, waiting for its genetic codes to unfurl; he patiently helps me find the places to splice chromosomes, tracing back malformations with his blue ballpoint pen, undistracted by pretty turns of phrase. While he conducts his careful examinations, I stare at him the way the dogs watch me cooking, ready to catch any scrap of feedback before it hits the floor. I have a colleague, a publisher, and an editor who similarly read my work willingly, respond to it promptly, and help me locate the hairline fractures and imbalances that impair the functioning of the text. I cannot claim to do this work alone without dishonoring the impact of the gifts they have given with consistent magnanimity. It is as if they have seen my imaginary friend, and know that she is real. This is important because I still forget.

There are, of course, substantial differences between supporting, editing, revising, and collaborating. I cannot separate thinking from feeling enough to know what I can and should say about writing, or guess what you can and should hear. Writing may be the only thing that I really believe in. It is communal and private, simple and complex, shaping and shifting our selves and others. It is the sound of the squeak in the hinges between us. Inscribing the world is an act of power, so is and must be a site of incessant political reflection and responsibility.