• • • low end theory

Q. asks whether I am not afraid that my personal style is “too much” for an academic audience; he says that it is inevitable that my words will be read as “all about me” and speculates that the writing necessarily involves the reader’s passing judgment on me. Rather than risking another memo written in the first person, I take Q. to lunch and we talk.

I say: Writing for me is an act of sacrifice, not denial. (I think: I’m so glad I didn’t try to write this down.) I deliberately sacrifice myself in my writing. I leave no part of myself out, for that is how much I want readers to connect with me. I want them to wonder about the things i wonder about, and to think about some of the things that trouble me.

What is “impersonal” writing but denial of self? If withholding is an ideology worth teaching, we should be clearer about that as the bottom line of the enterprise. We should also acknowledge the extent to which denial of one’s authority in authorship is not the same as elimination of oneself; it is ruse, not reality. and the object of such ruse is to empower still further; to empower beyond the self, by appealing to neutral, shared, even universal understanding. In a vacuum, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that attempt to empower: it generates respect and distance and a certain obeisance to the sleekness of a product that has been skinned of its personalized complication. But in a world of real others, the cost of such exclusive forms of discourse is empowerment at the expense of one’s relation to those others; empowerment without communion. And as the comfort of such false power becomes habitual, it is easy to forget that the source of one’s power is quite limited, not the fiat of a heavenly mandate. It is easy to forget how much that grandiosity of power depends on the courtesy and restrain of a society of other no less equally endowed than you.

The other thing contained in assumption of neutral, impersonal writing styles is the lack of risk. it is not only a ruse, but a warm protective hole to crawl in, as if you were to throw your shoe out the front door while insisting that no one’s home. I also believe that the personal is not the same as “private”: the personal is often merely the highly particular. I think the personal has fallen into disrepute as sloppy because we have lost the courage and the vocabulary to describe it in the face of the enormous social pressure to “keep it to ourselves”—but this is where our most idealistic and our deadliest politics are lodged, and are revealed.

- Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights