According to Lyn Hejinian, “Writing develops subjects that mean the words we have for them,” Heidegger claims that “language speaks,” and work in comparative rhetoric and discourse studies has persuasively established that the available means of persuasion in any given situation are culturally and socially delineated. Nevertheless, it is common to imagine an individual as the origin of a speech act, to suggest, as does the call for papers for this colloquium, that “the unrivaled power of language to shape thought remains inseparably linked to those individuals who exercise it” without explicitly acknowledging the power of language to shape the individuals who use it. In this paper, I will explore the relationships between discursively performed authenticity and the bestowal of authority to argue that within the constraining forces of discourse there is not only room, but also reason, for agency. Individuals are able to write themselves into authority by performing socially defined authenticity, but without these social structures, which not only constrain but also enable, the variation that we need the notion of agency to account for would be meaningless. Though not the agency of an autonomous individual, I follow Barry Barnes and Mikhail Bakhtin to develop a notion of social agency that finds its resources in the clash of incompatible discourses through which competing ideologies are enacted.