Ownership

I was thinking tonight about one of the most difficult concepts in writing—ownership. I think part of the problem in dealing with ownership is the conflation of ownership with power. Ownership isn’t power, it is potential. To say that you want students to “own” their writing isn’t to say that you mean to empower them. Writing isn’t a “currency” which has any intrinsic value. It’s primary value, like most things, comes only through use. As more and more people start writing, sharing their thoughts on the internet, writing does seem electric.

But electricity is the result of a flow of potential—a movement from positive to negative. Such flows are not possible without potential; and I think potential in this case is commensurate with ownership. Writers who “own” (in the sense of owning-up, perhaps,—taking responsibility) store potentialities that are transferable to readers. Writers who think of themselves as primarily empty conduits for other people’s words don’t have that capacity. A typical student falls in that category: “what do you want me to write?”

The dangerous thing about the overemphasis of the collaborative aspects of writing is that it tends to place the entire potential for generation on exchange. However, such exchanges can only take place where a difference of potential occurs—the difference between specialists who have made it their business to own some sort of specialized knowledge which can be expended to do work. Owning knowledge isn’t intrinsically evil—knowledge is our most valuable possession because it cannot be diminished through exchange. Taking responsibility for one’s words does not mean attaching your name in John Hancock size letters to it, hoarding them through stiff copyrights. It merely means that behind your words, there is a person—a unique person who has collected certain potentialities that they own the same way that a person might own a book. To own our words means that we possess them. They also, in turn, possess us.

I was thinking, as I was packing, of all the leaves of old journals I kept when I was a teenager. There is nothing of value, really, in those dried leaves. But between each page, it seems like they might be cells in the storage battery I later became. I never expended that energy to any sort of public; no one has read them but me. But they became a part of me, with their pasted in picture-collages from magazines, with their ink-spatters and tea spills. Writing in public is different; but not necessarily so, I think. It depends on how much you focus on the collection of potential versus the power of exchange.

Suggesting that a student take ownership of their own words is not a matter of empowerment; it is a suggestion that they pay close attention to their potentialities. Power is always exercised socially; but potential is always collected individually.