Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often character­ized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma that language creates and then cannot resolve. The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to sat­isfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curi­ously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to bounded­ness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a dis­tinction be made between inside and outside, between the rele­vant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writer’s subject position.

Autore: Lyn Hejinian