Authoring life writing as a technology of the self: A communicological perspective on the concept of voice

This paper problematizes a number of theoretical issues surrounding the popular performance of feminist life writing, in particular investigating how it relates to the feminist concept of "voice." To begin, I argue that current theorizing on life writing is too narrowly focused on its linguistic nature. Drawing from the works of Michel Foucault, I develop a more nuanced epistemology of life writing employing a Communicological lens, paying tribute to the insights of Richard L. Lanigan. I argue that such an epistemological stance expands our current understanding of life writing because it allows us to view it as a dialectical practice of discourse thereby fully appreciating it as a communication phenomenon (not merely a linguistic enactment). I describe how life writing is best understood as proceeding from a combinatory discursive logic, one that accentuates it as a semiotic process and phenomenological event, i.e., embodied communicative experience. Doing so begins to expose life writing's inherent dialectical movement in practice between life writing and what I call writing life. I use Foucault's dialectic of the "voiceless name" and the "nameless voice" (and Lanigan's interpretation of Foucault on this phenomenon), to provide a more insightful analysis of the life writing process as an issue of voice. We discover that when viewed as a discursive practice (and not merely a practice of discourse), voice enacts its true authorship. I argue that it is only through this new theoretical lens that we can understand life writing as a powerful technology of the self that feminists claim it to be.