Campbell & Ong: Illusion, Fiction, and Agency

I believe that Campbell’s assertion in Agency: Promiscuous and Protean that agency is limited to the surrounding culture of the time, and Ong’s thesis that The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction can be connected. In this post, I will attempt to write through these potential connections in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. 

Campbell writes that agency is limited to the surrounding culture, that of the audience (Campbell 5). I think that, if the author is somehow an agent of the surrounding culture, or even an alternative one, he must be aware of the reality of his audience. If that’s the case, doesn’t an author have a stronger connection to his actual audience than Ong believes, being also apart of the culture and time-period in which he writes? The competent author/rhetor understands his surroundings and somehow responds to them in his writing/speech, being aware that the very people that inhabit his surroundings will read/listen to it. 

Even so, Ong argues that the author creates in his imagination a “role” for his (clear or vague) audience that they must play; the role is necessary for them to successfully interact with the piece (Ong 12). He uses Hemingway as an example, pointing out that Hemingway wrote to an illusionary audience that mimicked a close friend. He argues that the very act of writing assumes the fictional creation of an audience that will best suit the subject matter. To Ong, the audience is a concept, one that directs the author, but also frees him. 

Campbell, though, sees this “illusion” of audience as a limitation instead of a natural act. To Campbell, authors/rhetors are “materially limited, linguistically constrained, historically situated subjects” that, at the same time, connect the past and present (Campbell 5). Their limitations drive them to Ong believes that the author connects the past and present in how they write for an audience. He says, 

“If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers,” (Ong 11). 

Here, he alludes to our issue of agen/cy. I’m beginning to believe that agency is also an illusion, one that we have constructed for ourselves as a structured society surrounding language. As Campbell argues agency to be “protean” or ever-changing and therefore somewhat illusory, Ong argues that an author’s intentions for writing, the agency from which he writes, if I may, are also illusory and fictional. They both have connected the topics of invention and imagination with the act of writing for an audience. For the rest of this unit, I will continue to attempt to find a deeper connection between these two (as they were my favorites). 

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Sources: 

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean.” Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 2.1 (2005): 1-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1479142042000332134

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/461344.