(dave e)

This whole discussion is fascinating, and I feel smarter just knowing all of you (well, I don't know Elouise and Chuck - hi, Elouise. hi, Chuck). But I feel that it is my duty to add a bit of pop culture fluff to this heady discussion.

MSNBC's Scoop column reports that Michael Jackson recently rented out a grocery store and asked his friends and relatives to "pretend" to shop so he could feel like a "real person." Performance, performativity, freak of nature?

damn. that's like elvis renting out movie theatres and libertyland. but stranger. crazy.

In theatre and performance studies, we talk about a density of signification that makes theatre different from traditional texts: that is, the semiotic systems of theatre (lighting, body, language, costume, set design, theatrical space) are more numerous and therefore more dense than in a written text, which itself carries a number of semiotic systems.

Real life gets even tougher, because as actors, we have far less control over the semiotic systems that provide us context, and even less control over the positioning of audiences within those systems.

That is, while a theatrical performer knows which way the audience is looking from, has had time to memorize lines and plan gestures, Dave-the-avocado-consumer is not sure who's looking (maybe big brother), hasn't gotten his lines from a gifted playwright weeks beforehand, and doesn't know whether he's going to try another avocado or put this one in his basket.

In blogspace, the semiotic systems are thinner than real life, and therefore our control over them is a bit tighter, which ultimately makes them seem less real.

Does this, then, suggest that what defines the real is a helplessness about controling it?

Is the most authentic experience that in which we are most disempowered?

Is this perhaps an illusion reinforced by power structures to crave the exercises of power over our lives?

We may be onto something here.

much to reflect on.

this may be complicated by the work of confession. i think the speech-act of confessing mitigates against what you call helplessness (native to the "real") and disempowerment (native to "authenticity"). confession is where we can say, "look, i know there are holes in my self, that my identities sometimes come into conflict," and, doing so, begin to decode (i'm tempted to say deconstruct, but i'm not so sure that's right) all the density of signification that populates every moment of human interaction.

and confession can be a site of agency. but, you're right, there are all sorts of "illusions" and "power structures" between confessor and audience.

ok. off to your current entry, which has my mind spinning (in a good way).

Your choice of the word "confession" is a telling one, even though you're not Catholic. Look, though, at what Foucault says about confession in History of Sexuality, Part I. Here he essentially makes an argument that confession (in the sacramental sense) of desire was initially configured as a way to control transgression by turning it into discourse. Even as we become speaking subjects in the moment of confession (we become citizens of heaven instead of sinners, personae non grata), we similarly become subject to the power of the church who oversees that confession.

As the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made the operations of power even less visible than the priest in the confessional box (again see Foucault on the panopticon), confession in any public forum is a double-edged operation. Even as we claim to speak as empowered subjects, we submit ourselves to the State as subjects of its greater power. Therefore, the discourses of confession that allow us agency to self-construct do so only in a way that privileges self-construction while wrong-footed: when we don't know we're being watched, when we can't prepare a speech, when the theatricality of the event is sapped.

Hence, prepared confessions that seem canned are suspect, because they seem less "real" and because they suggest a control over the confession that is undesireable to a power matrix that seeks to keep its subjects under its own control. Theatricality is suspect because it is potentially transgressive, and Puritan notions of authenticity are privileged because they can only occur when the subject is at the greatest disadvantage.

OK. That's about as theoretical as I'll ever get.

goodness. i don't think i take such a foucauldian stance on the way wordherding and selves are co-constructive.

"Even as we claim to speak as empowered subjects..."

that's the thing, though. i'm not saying that confessions of imperfection, absence, and contradiction empower the author. i'm talking about a discourse that allows its participating subjects to reflect on and emphasize its own limits. for the realized panopticon to work, its subjects don't enjoy the privelege of finding it. the metaphorical panopticon, in this model, has a spotlight put on it, reflected in prison-tower mirrors, by all of us inmates below. then, we climb up, take it down, use it to look at each other, point it back up at the tower and at the guards. then, we say, "hey, this thing is for keeping people in check." kind of a naive simplification of the concept (i realize i just turned the panopticon's immateriality into an artifact), and i imagine that this risks sounding like a fantastic sort of knowing, in which a navel-gazing grad student such as myself can say, "aha! my blog is really real, man, because i understand that it's like, an imperfect representation."

however, my confession does not include a promise to be a better subject, but instead signals the fact that unified subjectivity and all its dubious signfication is simply not available at (dave e). that i'd like (dave e) to revel in its confessed imperfection.

it is entirely possible that my resistance to blog-as-discipline is just denial. that, while discourses of power make me a more plugged-in dave, i'm sinking into some bourgeois captivity... but i'd like to think of messy online selves as something like confession and theatricality smashed into each other.

whew.

"something like confession and theatricality smashed into each other."

I agree, but I still think that the theatricality of the confession makes it appear less authentic than, say, avocado shopping.

And really, when are you more yourself than snuggled up to the velvety flesh of an avocado?

Don't you *hate* avocados Ryan?

Avocadoes actually give me hives (no, really), but Dave snuggling up to an avocado is another thing altogether. Plus I like the word.

At the risk of asking you to tear yourselves away from the avocado sex imagery at which this discussion seems to have stalled, I am confused, a little. Not about the theoretical ideas being floated around so much (having read "Playing at Lives" for one thing), but at the attitude that the discussion participants seem to be taking toward the concept of the blog. I can see the argument for it as a sort of "controlled confession," certainly, and therefore as a form of self-presentation that offers the author more agency than he/she might feel in possession of than in the grocery store scenario being used here as the other possibility. But how then do you account for the hypothetical/real reluctance that some of us feel at the very thought of writing a blog and posting it?

You might suggest that the concern would be stemming from a fear of being misunderstood or losing control over one's own narrative once it's out there (here?), but I don't think that's it. I would argue instead that my concern stems from the potential for exposure of a self that I firmly believe would be authentic, not least because I place such a high value on my own ability to construct myself in words--as I am guessing many of the people posting here do as well.

I realize I am talking a lot more personally/emotionally here than you were earlier, but it still seems relevant. For one thing, any non-Catholic who is tossing around the concept of confession is not thinking of that concept in the same way that a Catholic, recovering or otherwise, is. Consider it controlled or controlling as you will, the heart of the act itself is exposure of the self and the impulse is a self-loathing one (shame/guilt).

What's more . . . and please notice that it is 4 a.m. so I am not necessarily coherent right now . . . is there room in the discussion of the continuum of the authentic self for the idea of a private versus public self? What if part of the impulse towards agency over one's own self-presentation is the simple desire to avoid the public presentation altogether?

Of course, I did choose to comment here, so I can't claim total reclusivity . . .

thanks for putting an end to the avocado intrigue.

i would never insist that public writing (at least by way of a weblog) is some means to agency that everyone who wants to control her self needs to practice.

because of that, i'm not capable of accounting for the desire to resist blog-based exposure. maybe one extension of ryan's entry about control and performance of self ( http://dogma.wordherders.net/archives/000622.html ) is that not-blogging is a willful choice through which agency is expressed. the sounds of silence?

i'm guilty (i confess) of "tossing around" terms that i don't control as well as i should. but i hope that my version of confession is not self-hatred. i'm not confessing the sin of my private incompleteness but instead the sin of my blog's public incompleteness. again, i don't think it's a bad thing that this blog isn't mimetic. i'm not ashamed of the fragmentary nature of a blog self. i hope that the opposite --some sort of naive pride, in which i think i've figured it all out-- isn't taking hold, either. wouldn't want to speak for anyone else, but the brain typing this right now likes the resulting messiness, the conflicting ideas, the (hopefully) transgressive resistance to coherence. at the same time, i'm not looking to avoid self-consciousness either (plenty clear, i imagine). in fact, i want the consciousness of what it means to think of a self as such to be as important as that self.

maybe "admission" is a better word than confession. it's just that, if confession means there's something wrong, well, yeah, i think there's something wrong, and i think that this wrongness is not something i'm interested in correcting. is it possible to coopt the dominant sign, "confession"? to wrest its control out of history? i guess not.

i'm not at all sure about much of this. i keep re-writing it. i can't possibly say, "well, currer, in my theory, the reason you are reluctant to expose your authentic self by way of a blog is..." just typing that makes me seriously uncomfortable.