Robert's Response

[Robert Greco]

#475

Wysocki:
For Hall, that is, “We therefore occupy our identities very retrospectively: having produced them, we then know who we are” (qtd. in Drew 173). It is not that we find ourselves in our work because there was a unified self that preceded the work and that only needed being made present somehow in the work; it is rather that what the work is–its status as shaped object in front of us–makes visible to us “what we are.”
Hmm. My literacy narrative immediately comes to mind when I read this, probably because I still have a great deal of work to do on my digital presentation and very little time to do it. Nevertheless, this quotation hits home. My narrative, for those who didn’t get a chance to read it, focused primarily on the present. For me, the past history of just a day was more telling than looking back over my life–digital or otherwise. The digital literacy narrative pushed me to reflect on the ways that I engage with technology and reveled for me changes to my day-to-day life that were too small to be apparent until I took a big step back and looked at them with a fresh eye.
Before I look at this in the context of Wysocki, let me just unfold how I felt when I wrote this narrative. I was very much struck by the sensation that I had immediately and forcefully become aware of who I was–at least in the digital sense–when I wrote this narrative. Though I hadn’t reflected on the ways in which technology was filling, or perhaps infiltrating, my life, I had nevertheless reached a point where my interactions with digital tools or with other people through digital tools had come to fill a substantial part of my time. In fact, the digital literacy narrative pushed me to think about my experiences in productive ways.
In this way, I felt very much like Wysocki’s quotation of Hall that says, “No, I do not like that position . . . how can I rework it?” But where I get stuck is the point about what the act of writing the narrative did to me. If I was not a fixed point, revealed by the writing, then what was I? The “shaped object” that I produced did certainly “make visible to [me]” who I am in some very important ways, but I see Wysocki’s move as going beyond, possibly far beyond, mere revelation. What was created or changed when I became aware of my digital life? Certainly I was changed when I became aware of my circumstances, but that doesn’t sync with Wysocki’s denial–if I’m reading this right–of a preexisting unified self. The way I see it, and maybe I’m just misunderstanding the reading, I am always in flux with parts of my self changing and growing (or shrinking) all the time, but the power of the creative process, in my case the writing process, is that it offers moments of profound revelation, moments when the circumstances of oneself become substantial and visible. I don’t know if that’s is what Wysocki had in mind, but I think it’s an understanding of the relationship between identity and creation that I can connect with.

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