Taking the plunge

I think I have undiagnosed social anxiety disorder--the very idea of blogging (a form of collaborative writing, it seems) scares the hell out of me. I've been reading the material and reading the posts and I keep thinking of things to say--and I even go so far as to make drafts--but when it comes to actually hitting "publish" I freeze up. Here goes:

In thinking what my own conceptual map for LeFevre, I came up with a few Arnoldian touchstones, two of which have already been mentioned by Mark--Saussure and Fish. As I was reading LeFevre, I thought about the idea of collaborative understanding and the invention involved with language, both in terms of making meaning--even at the phonemic level, but certainly at the lexical level of Saussure's signifier/signified--and "decoding" it, a la Fish's "interpretive communities" (I'm thinking of _Is There a Text in This Class?_ as opposed to _There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech...And it’s a Good Thing_, simply because I've read the former and not the latter), and then thinking of Fish's interpretive communities reminded me of Freire's critique of the teacher-student dichotomy (in terms of the discussion of collaborative writing, I would add the idea of critical pedagogy to what would possibly work to meet the goal--and I've been reading _This Book Is Not Required_, which raises some interesting issues, as well).

I'll be the official hack, too, and be the first to say that in terms of other posts, the discussion (by Faith and Aaron, I believe) of what constitutes authorship reminds me of Foucault's "What Is an Author?" and Barthes' "Death of the Author." Foucault interrogates the very notion of the author--how it's historically contingent and bound up with cultural practices--and he asks how an author's name "functions" in our society, how an author is associated not just with a single work but with entire discursive practices (authors can serve as "founders of discursivity." Barthes, meanwhile, asserts that the reader should be freed from the "constraints of fidelity to an origin, a unified meaning, an identity, or any other pregiven exterior or interior reality" (one of my favorite lines of all-time is "We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.")