Some time ago I was sent an email inviting me to write on the question ‘Why blog?’ The belated response below concerns, of course, only my own reasons.
For some time I’d kept a notebook with thoughts on things I’d been reading and so on. The blog was really a continuation of this. But what differentiates the blog from the private notebook is the fact of having a potential readership – this knowledge (irrespective of who or how many) is enough to enable and urge a legibility beyond the merely private. This, for me, touches also on one of the attractions of blogging. You don’t have to commodify your site to entice a certain ‘community’. You don’t have to worry about sales. You can pretty much write anything, no matter how idiosyncratic, esoteric, odd, and someone will gravitate toward it. The blog will, effectively, select its own audience. Needless to say, there are plenty of bloggers who worry terribly about 'hits', and modify their blog content accordingly (consciously or unconsciously). There are blogs that imitate magazines, or in other ways mime the forms and content of the printworld, some address their wares to an established category of reader, but none of these things are a necessity of blogging.
CS started somewhere in-between the private notebook and the academic text. The content and tone were to be experimental, draft-like. Thoughts and ideas, written in the pseudonymous voice of Kaplan could be cast into print and cast before the big virtual Nobody. They were to embody transient convictions and incomplete ideas. Out in the open, these would be tested, clarified, found wanting or whatever. The pseudonym was key, in escaping the censorship of the proper name. This brings me to a second more general point about blogging.
There is the line from Nietzsche, that a thought comes when it wants, it is not initiated by the ‘I’. Such self-manifesting thoughts have their own force and logic, which the I must listen to, pursue, develop. But ordinarily there comes a moment when the writer must make these thoughts accountable to (organise them around) his proper name. In short, the ‘I’ must ‘assume responsibility’ for its thoughts, make them consistent with one another and with the name of the I. Blogging escapes this necessity. Thoughts are collected under the pseudonym but not organised by it. The pseudonym need only differentiate you from other bloggers. It bears little responsibility. Any flack directed at posts is born by the pseudonym; the author escapes untouched.
Again, there are blogs which make the full facts of authorship available: name, picture, profession. The words on the page are given a reassuring Symbolic support. The blog is, as it were, registered. There are others who, for whatever reasons, have slipped the proper name and professional title that elsewhere slant or constrain their speech. Adopting something that’s obviously a mask, you can dispense with the necessary everyday mask that carries your name.
The pseudonym is not only a fiction that facilitates a truth. There is, I think, a further point.
The anonymity of blogging seems to irk some people. One does not know to whom (the category of person) one is speaking. Frequently, a convenient and stereotyped role has to be invented for the interlocutor – s/he must be a Revolutionary Student, a Hysterical Woman, a Middle Class Liberal etc. Once a place has been assigned his/her discourse no longer has to be taken as read but is coloured in advance by a Symbolic classification. Note also the glee/ relief when a bloggers identity is partially uncovered or disclosed– the routine appeal to Lenin’s student status , the change of tone when it was discovered, for example, that the author of Alphonse van Worden was a woman. One is no longer confined to addressing the posts themselves; one can now assign them their place, address some familiar Symbolic niche. The anonymity of blogging promises, perhaps, dialogue stripped of such Categorical supports.
The possibility of blogging here is related to a possibility inherent in writing. The written ‘I’ is stripped of its symbolic clothing – those signs in the voice or demeanour that lend it authority, register its ‘grade of culture’, assign it gender, class, age etc. The words must themselves speak, can circulate freely. It is for this reason I imagine a blogosphere of pseudonyms. There is nothing allowing us to ‘register’ the author, to assign him/ her Symbolic place. No pictures, no names, professions. No one declares their place of enunciation; nothing is delivered upfront to the Police*. There is only the romance of the Name: a disguise and revelation at once.
[* 'that regime which assigns things and people their place, which prescribes a certain order']
5 comments:
Well you mention a potential readership in your post, I would add that that readership is expected to give "its" comments, to give "its" viewpoints and contrast them with the author's ones, perhaps in this way we may follow the path of learning, find the ways to a better understanding of the matters and problems that beset us.
Well, I don't think I've ever read a better description of what makes blogging different - yet not entirely different.
"The possibility of blogging here is related to a possibility inherent in writing. The written ‘I’ is stripped of its symbolic clothing – those signs in the voice or demeanour that lend it authority, register its ‘grade of culture’, assign it gender, class, age etc. The words must themselves speak, can circulate freely."
This makes me think of Beckett's famous refusal to give interviews or lectures or speeches (or indeed even to appear in Stockholm when he won the Nobel Prize) - and of his aversion to being photographed, despite his strikingly good looks. Beckett's 'publicity-shyness' has usually been explained away as a symptom of his (allegedly) almost-pathological shyness; but surely his fierce avoidance of a public persona was above all a wise and conscious effort to defend his writing qua writing - to preserve his "written ‘I’ ... stripped of its symbolic clothing". And maybe this also ties in with his unhappiness in London, where barmen and taxi drivers would call him 'Paddy' or 'Shamus' whenever he opened his mouth.
It is always a peculiar moment when one sees or hears for the first time a living writer whose books one has admired. To me it nearly always seems to diminish the writer, even if he or she turns out be a brilliant talker and an admirable human being.
The reading experience must have been very different in the days before books were equipped with photos of the author and potted biographies. Imagine encountering, say, 'Molloy' or 'Der Prozess' and knowing nothing whatsoever about the author (and having no easy way of finding anything out). Not even knowing whether the names 'Samuel Beckett' and 'Franz Kafka' were pseudonyms.
Thanks W. When writing the post I was actually thinking of using the Beckett quote which graces the Qlipoth masthead (or whatever it's called) - absolutely that.
Of course, even an author who writes under their "proper" name writes pseudonymously -- or, equivalently, posthumously. The "I" who writes is always "not me". Using what library card catalogs officially recognize as a pseudonym just makes that fact of authorship more explicit. And when one's surrounded by (for example) a lynch mob, it's sensible to be as explicit as possible.
"The anonymity of blogging promises, perhaps, dialogue stripped of such Categorical supports."
It's only a promise though and one which will never be (completely) fulfilled.
For one thing, no one is able to hide completely behind a pseudonym, to succesfully mask their "real identity".
For another, before long the pseudonym itself will be catagorised based on their writing and demeanor, once again assignëd "their place, address and some familiar Symbolic niche".
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