I.D.-ology

Now that I am respectably of age, I carry my license and its angstful photograph proudly. I no longer look demurely away from the beer list. I draw on woefully inadequate notions of winemaking to make remarks about growing conditions in various French provinces.

Yet I'm still amused by the authority of that scrappy headshot surrounded by a few lines of text--an authority that might seem misplaced were it not so ubiquitous. This combination of facts and picture have become a widely accepted way to maximize security and minimize trouble.

And a drivers' license is far from the only place this works. Consider this column, for instance. I can't promise facts; but you need only read a few lines of text before, gracing the page, is my grainy glamour shot. Beside it, my name and title proxy for zipcode (60093), hometown (Winnetka), birthdate (Sept. 3).

It's not unlike entering a bar: pleasantries exchanged at the door, identification checked, then the coast is clear and the real business (of providing your daily metaphor) can begin. The Crimson's decision to insert pictures of the editorial writers is, it seems, not simply of human or visual interest. It's a brilliant reminder of the fundamental social contract into which we have entered as writers of opinion, that is to say, facts skewed, perhaps beyond recognition--an anonymity checked by our (newly enlarged) photographs.

Perhaps it's about accountability. We, who have the freedom to skew our stories--needn't you see our faces? Needn't you look into our eyes as we tell you why Bush's tax plan isn't going to work or why we're ready to single-handedly reclaim the Alaskan refuge? Are you checking for falsehood, listening for trembling in our voice?

Or are you interested--curious in the personality behind the words? Perhaps the photographs are simply a sign of the cult of personality with which editorial remarks are typically infused. When we are writing as editorial individuals (for there is no photograph of the Ed Board writing the group's opinion) we are unique in a way that no individual reporter, striving for objectivity, can claim to be. So it seems fair enough to bring our bodies into it.

Though (I warn you) this narrative authority may be misplaced. I have no hope of objectivity and am no font of knowledge; my words are already typecast. My theory precedes my education (putting the Barthes before the course). I am continually dragged down by the undertone.

At the same time, I have found this accountability to be hardly a loss; it gives editorial words a force not always possible in objective writing. The individuated tone becomes confidential, confessional and biased by turns. And what credibility I have is not unconnected to my grainy face mediating the transference of these words, not immediately separable from the formalisms of identity and of recognition.

But the subtleties of that headshot explain a lot about the subtle difficulties of re-encountering one's own writing. Photographs, it's said, always seem off, because the image they present (horizontally) reverses the image one typically sees in the mirror. The inevitable dissymetries of the human face make this reversal slightly disconcerting. And perhaps this is the best way to explain the differences I find coming to my ink-smudged text on Monday mornings, coming as a reader, no longer approaching from the inside.

Coming as a reader means encountering the peculiarity of text: isolated, stripped of inflection and emphasis; vulnerable to selective reading, selective sight, decontextualization. Stranger than seeing yourself grinning exquisitely in vacation photographs is hearing your own words thrown back against you: "I was reading the other day," a friend begins, "though I forget where..."

Strange as it is, this brings the words full circle. Because the presence of a photograph demands of the text what headlines and ink cannot provide. Pictures give the words an immediacy and a historical presence; no longer disembodied facts, no longer abstract referents, these opinions inhabit particular conjunctions of time and knowledge. As such, they require a response which can only be timely.

Response: the only antidote to the textual impossibility of dialogue. Fame: from the Greek phonei, to speak; famous: to be spoken about. Fame, which takes the written word from its chaste page and breathes life into it. The dream of text: to become speech, imperfect and ink-stained images of itself.

In opinion, in speaking, in fame: so much rests on image, on tone, on touch. This is power beyond what the text can provide. (Bush has courts, Washington, time; I have sentences, capitals, period.) But somewhere in these hypotheticals, somewhere between the shorthand and the puns, between the writing and response, are the beginnings of authority. The space between comma and dash, introduction and headshot, margin and word is space full of promise.

Because, at the end of the day, these are structures on which we all depend - on which discourse itself depends. And mine is one column among many, supporting the edifice.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column usually appears on alternate Mondays.