As regards Mindy’s analysis, she has done a fine job. Not only does she nicely summarize the themes and ideas of the two books, but she also applies them well — knitting them together in her analysis of the second book and in her own personal observations.

However, as regards the books themselves and the ideas they contain, I have much less regard. Bakhtin’s notion of “unfinalizability” strikes me as utterly worthless. Don’t we all know already that time marches on…that change is both inevitable and unceasing? If someone coins a word to encapsulate this fact, exactly what has he added to the intellectual discourse? Are we supposed to be impressed because the word has so many syllables? I’m not. Mindy says that Bakhtin “tells us there is no sameness.” Did any of us not know this already? I have to wonder how dull Bakhtin’s life must have been in order for this to have been a eureka moment for him.

Likewise, his notion of the “superaddressee” — an imaginary audience beyond the actual person or group to whom we are speaking — strikes me as more gibberish. When we speak, are we not trying our best to communicate with our actual audience? To the extent that we fail to connect with our actual audience, we have not simply failed to communicate…period, end of story? If someone were to tell us, “Oh, I’m sorry, I failed to communicate with you because I was speaking to an imaginary audience that I invented in my head,” would we nod our heads knowingly or worry about that person’s mental stability? Count me among the latter. Perhaps my atheism is to blame for my rejection of an imaginary audience that some people apparently call, “god.”

Asante’s book offers us a bit more to digest, but is it really a surprise to learn that an African-American slave society in which literacy was banned by law relied on oratory to preserve its heritage and traditions? Haven’t *all* illiterate and pre-literate human societies done this exact same thing, including Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, the hill people of Appalachia, the tribes of Papua New Guinea, etc.?

As regards the injustice of slavery that Asante’s book conveys, Mindy speaks of feeling, “over and over,” a sense of shame. Why? Mindy did not own slaves nor, presumably, has she ever supported slavery. So, why should she feel shame for something she did not do? Is this why some people can relate to the biblical concept of original sin (the notion that each of us is automatically guilty for someone else’s fall from grace), whereas I feel no such shame? Yes, we might feel shame for our own ignorance, as Mindy also mentions, but not for the fact that some people, more than a century ago, traded in human cargo. That might have been their shame, but it is not ours.

In sum, though Mindy nicely summarizes Bakhtin’s and Asante’s ideas, I find them unworthy of her efforts.

offered background and summary information to help the audience follow the performance, commented on main themes, and showed how an ideal audience might react to the drama as it was presented. They also represent the general populace of any particular story. In many ancient Greek plays, the chorus expressed to the audience what the main characters could not say, such as their fears or secrets. The chorus usually communicated in song form, but sometimes the message was spoken. It was the playwright’s job to choreograph the chorus. Originally the chorus had twelve members. Sophocles added three more to make it fifteen. The Purpose of chorus was to act as a link between the actors and the audience. They moved in unison and spoke in unison.

I didn’t really have a name for it until I read your article, but the “superaddressee” has always been an important part of my writing experience. I tried to express this idea in an earlier post I titled “The Voices You Are.”

Perhaps the number one rule in writing (I’ve often been told) is to know one’s audience. Fair enough. Sometimes I can do that easily, for example, as when I write a letter to one person or a designated group of people. Many times, though, I’m writing to a larger audience of people that includes many people I’ve never met. I can’t really know all the people who make up that entire audience. When I write to such large audiences, I imagine writing to a “jury” representing that audience (it includes many more than the twelve people one would find in a courtroom jury).

Who comprises that jury? I can imagine seeing the specific people sitting toward the front. Those front-seaters include real people I highly respect. They include some of the authors of books I’ve enjoyed, including wonderful teachers under whom I’ve studied and some close friends. They also include many people who are dead, writers and thinkers such as Bertrand Russell and Hannah Arendt, Shakespeare and Martin Luther King. My jury is a motley group. Even my mom sits among them. And perhaps you are there too!

If I were to write schlock I would immediately disappoint these people, thereby disgracing myself. They generally know what I’m up to; whenever they spot cheap writing tricks they let out a chorus of moans and boos. No excessive sentimentality is tolerated. They really dislike it when I wrap an idea wrap an idea in obscure language instead of getting clear about it.

To please me, really please myself, my writing must be respected by the people I respect. At least that is how I seem to operate. I believe that my writing is better to the extent that it is constantly tested by those superaddressees. I’m less sloppy when “they” are watching my every move.

Sitting further back in my jury one can find hundreds of “superaddressees” from all walks of life, many of them faceless. Some of them are naturally disposed to my ways of thinking and writing. Others are often pissed off some by my writing. I can’t please them all, but I try to keep them all involved. I’m not doing anything interesting if I’m merely preaching to the front rows of my choir.

I’ve generally imagined my superaddressees as a diverse bunch of real people. They certainly aren’t a jury of twelve copies of me. Twelve copies of me might give easy approval—after all, they are me. But not always, because I am often self-critical (or I’d like to believe this).

Maybe it’s most accurate to think of my superaddressee as a large diverse group of people that includes at least some copies of me sprinkled in. There’s enough variety in there, I would hope, that I am at least occasionally spurred on by the alternative voices among them. They will (I hope) let me know their disapproval when I stray too far from my own realm of experience. At least some of them will chime in: “You don’t really know much about the sorts of people you are writing about.” or “Who do you think you’re fooling?” When it works best, this “feedback” is enough to keep me honest, but not so harsh that my superaddressees run me away from the keyboard by convincing me that I have nothing to offer (except on those days when I truly don’t have anything to offer). That sort of destructive, taunting hyper-critical voice was captured by Nietzsche in the following aphorism:

The evil hour.—Every philosopher has probably had an evil hour when he thought: What do I matter if one does not accept my bad arguments, too? –And then some mischievous little bird flew past him and twittered: “What do you matter? What do you matter?

[The Gay Science, Section 332.] When they are not too harsh, my superaddressees help me to write with more authenticity by reminding me that I shouldn’t write at all unless I have been able to engage meaningfully with the subjects of my writing. It’s not that I speak knowledgably about everyone everywhere. I certainly don’t. But I need to remind myself where I have become unanchored. Where that happens, all is not necessarily lost. After all, the imagination is incredibly powerful. Also, we do share more with most human animals that we might even want to believe. Further, one can sometimes become authentic by doing homework. For example, consider Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Here’s a description of her adventure:

Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

Until now, I didn’t before have a name for my collection of superaddressees, but I did have a sense that people could rig their sense of what is interesting, proper or even moral by stacking their imaginary juries with particular sorts of people. Those who are born wealthy might stack their juries with friends who think similarly. Criminals might seek the approval of imaginary criminals. In the end, the way our superaddressees collectively think is generally coextensive with our sense of conscience. Not that we didn’t rig the entire system. But not that we don’t sometimes disappoint even our own stacked jury . . .

I suspect also that to the extent people write creatively or as freethinkers they are more likely to have intentionally filled their juries of superaddressees with imaginary people with a wider variety of perspectives. It’s harder work to write for a more diverse audience, but I think this accomplishes two things: A) Such writers are more able to generate effective ideas due to the bad ideas being shouted down—vetoed—by at least some of those diverse people; and B) they are more able to productively work alone, because they carry around a more realistic cross-section of the world in their heads.

My superaddressees and I thank you for this fine post!

Remember the saying that wisdom lies in knowing that you know nothing? I think empathy follows a similar principle. If you attempt to understand everyone’s perspective, and you instead assume you know their position, you’ve eliminated the very empathy you sought to create. I think we all do it- we look at someone’s appearance or demographics and assume the way they see the world follows the typical formula. But maybe true empathy lies in knowing and recognizing that you will never know another person’s full range of experience, cognition, and emotion.

Back to the first book, it is mind-boggling what we “decide” to take for granted. The superaddresse concept is good to know about, especially if it turns out that we are indeed talking to ourselves. I hate to keep stealing from PZ, but he linked to an article about Joshua Bell the violin “genius” which you may enjoy. As a prank, he (Bell) pretended to be a street performer…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Also here is the audio of his first and only “ignored” performance…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2007/04/09/VI2007040900536.html