Peter Fletcher

The issue of ethics in researching online diaries

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Serfaty outlines a number of ethical considerations encountered researching online diaries. I call these personal blogs. In many cases these writings contain subject matter of an intensely personal nature. But they are published on the Internet and easily located with the use of a search engine. In fact many personal bloggers make their writings even more accessible through RSS feeds and email subscriptions.

What then are the ethic considerations of collecting information from these sites?

In a lecture by Associate Professor Stephan Millet at Curtin today the importance of gaining ethical clearance before commencing research was made abundantly clear. In fact any data collected prior to ethics clearance cannot be used. Full stop, end of story.

Ethics clearance is required so that research complies with the NHMRC Act (1992).

The goal of ethics clearance is to ensure that the participants in any research are protected. It’s essential that the research disclose all relevant facts up front.

Research ethics rest on three broad areas of consideration:

  • Respect: of and for personal autonomy
  • Beneficence: doing good to the subject
  • Justice: is the overall benefit worth whatever the personal costs?

The researcher must ask the question: Does the subject know what they’re getting into?

It is essential that the researcher must, at all times, seek to avoid harm to the research subject. Harm may arise by removing markers of a person’s identity and (accidentally) breaching privacy. There is a positive burden on the researcher to proactively avoid harm and to look for doing good.

If in doubt apply a common-sense test. Would grandma participate?

Curtin have a two-tier approach to ethics clearance. One is for low risk research (Form C) where there is little risk in collecting information from research subjects. The other is More Than Low Risk (Form A), which requires a detailed ethics clearance process.

There are three broad areas of research risk assessment:

  • Ability and experience of researcher. As I’ve not conducted any research I would almost certainly be classed as a Level 3 (high) risk.
  • Vulnerability of the participants. The more vulnerable the participant, the greater the risk. I’ll be researching publicly published personal blogs written by adults and I therefore see little issues of vulnerability. I rate this area as Level 1 (low) risk.
  • Nature of the research. This is where the question of what I’ll be researching becomes crucial. If all I do is textual analysis of public documents then there will be no contact at all with the research subject. My research will create no more risks than if I read, and quoted, a published book from a public library. On the other hand, if I start interacting with blog authors, asking them questions and participating in their blog then the vulnerability of the subject increases. If I take the former path my assessment of risk is Level 1 (low), but if the latter the risk could be as high as Level 3 (high)

The risk score at this stage looks to be somewhere between 7 (very high, extra reporting may be required) and 5 (borderline, may only require a Form C).

I’ll need to talk this through with my supervisors as I progress towards Candidacy.

Notes on The Mirror and the Veil by Vivian Serfaty

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It is worth mentioning from the outset that Serfaty’s research dates back to 2001 not long after their first emergence as an object of research and analysis.

Serfaty’s work is heavily influenced by that of Gusdorf. She makes little attempt to explain the significance of Gusdorf’s work.

Serfaty commences the definitions section of her study with an observation about the “scope of the history of self-representational writing” (p. 1, italics mine). It’s a well-worn path to treat writing as representative of the self but it glides over the possibility of writing that creates the self.

“…[O]nline diaries…represent the latest avatar in the long history of self-inscription” and it’s therefore  important to understand why diaries are written and how diaries are defined (p. 4).

Serfaty proposes three major sources for the popularity of diary writing (p. 4). The Catholic tradition started with St. Augustine’s Confessions and was written to educate his peers and future students. These writings were written in the first person singular.

Seventeenth century England brought another form of self-representational writing that involved self-scrutiny, the interpretation of mundane events, and a recounting of a “spiritual journey towards personal salvation” (p. 5). Within these diaries was a continual recounting of the many tortures experienced in an attempt to maintain grace despite deep personal failings.

Rousseau’s Confessions is typical of the style associated with The Libertines of the seventeenth century. These accounts displayed a great freedom of thought and often caused outrage in a society where public behaviour was strictly regulated (p. 5).

The writings of Rousseau marked a significant break from religion’s influence. Whilst the Enlightenment created an interior space that was now controlled by reason and not religion (p. 6) it was in Rousseau that society saw the shift from reason to desire. The individual, established by religion, was now being secularised by desire.

But what is diary writing, or as Serfaty continually labels it, “self-representational writing”? Serfaty uses a definition Rosenwald that she claims excludes “the ‘to do’ list…the aspiring author’s notebooks [and] the fictional autobiography” (p. 7). Using this definition of a diary is a convenient way for Serfaty to narrow the field of her own research, removing from its purview those blogs which ambiguously sit between the real and the fictional. Serfaty does not explain why an author’s notebooks are excluded as others posit that note taking is an important category of self-writing (Foucault, 1997).

In Serfaty’s description of the diary autobiographies are excluded. She recognises that autobiography takes place online but chooses to limit her research to “the diaristic aspects of self-representational writing with its patient, sometimes brilliant recording of the flotsam and jetsam of daily life…” (p. 8). Again, Serfaty doesn’t explain the reasons for dismissing a vast corpus of online writing that form many blogs and blog posts.

Research note: Serfaty chose – wisely I believe – to maintain distance between herself and the subjects of her research. Although this goes against some of the recommendations of the International Association of Internet Researchers it makes sense at a number of levels. The object of her research is publicly available personal diaries and, whilst they are personal in nature, their authors, either implicitly or explicitly, intended them to be public.

Furthermore, if permission were sought from the research subject, the relationship between diarist and researcher could become untenably intimate and this could affect the subject’s writing.

Serfaty’s project, at least in part, was to attempt to discover the motivations behind online diarists and her research methodology restricted her to make this discovery solely by reading the diaries themselves. This makes a great deal of sense to me at the level of research ethics.

Serfaty claims that the computer screen serves to protect the diary writer from the gaze of others allowing them to say and reveal things normally held to be a taboo in society (p. 13). Whilst most content on the Internet is public its sheer size provides the diarist with a further sense of protection from the gaze of others.

On an Internet diary both reader and diarist create an imagined space where offline taboos are transgressed at will and (seemingly) without consequence. Self-revelation on the Internet gains meaning and power through the offline prohibitions it transgresses. “The prohibition [of intimate disclosure] therefore is constitutive of the meaning of self-revelation on the Internet” (p. 14).

Serfaty ascribes to the screen a multiplicity of meanings. She describes the screen as a space that both connects and separates the writer and reader. It becomes a symbolic space onto (or into) which the writer projects fragments of an at times fantasy self. These personality fragments serve to highlight aspects of the ideal self while at the same time concealing less desired aspects of the self.

Serfaty then claims that “the screen is transformed into a mirror onto which diary-writers project signifiers of their identity in an ongoing process of self-creation and destruction” (p. 15). She does not, however, explain how this transformation takes place.

In Serfaty’s view, the screen, onto which selected elements of the self are projected, may be endowed with “a plurality of meanings” and, therefore, it plays the part of the ideal Other. But if only parts of the self are projected on the screen, and it appears this is what Serfaty argues, then the screen becomes only a fragment of the ideal Self.  Whilst Serfaty claims that the screen “functions as a mirror of the self” it appears that her intention is to claim the screen as a self-representation in the form of either a reflection or a projection.

Seen as self-representation, online diaries can be analysed as “literary, personal and social spaces”, each requiring their own methodological tools (p. 15).

Research note: Serfaty raises issues surrounding the scope of her research including the tools used for analysis – psycho-analysis for example – and the meta-information on a blog including About pages and blog title.

The question of what is included in the research must also address the use of multimedia, author- created links (both internal and external), and published linkbacks.

Images, videos, links, typography, colours and layout combine and overlay on one another in a way that creates “density and texture” and a plethora of meaning (p. 27).

Also important is the location of the blogger. Care needs to be taken with what might be inferred or generalised from research that doesn’t address issues of national culture. For example, the popularity of blogging in the US may well be driven and informed by a culture that values free speech as a fundamental right.

Serfaty believes that linearity distinguishes diaries from autobiography. Diaries are “rigorously chronological entries” (p. 29). Whereas diaries contain self-expression, autobiography tends toward painting a consistent version of the self.

…studies of self-representational writing have rested on the assumption that the selves which emerge in diaries come into being through the writing process itself and hence do not necessarily reflect the writer’s actual experience (p. 29).

Serfaty notes that, on the Internet, the distinction between diary writing and autobiography is “nebulous”. This arises from the continuing presence of online texts which gives rise to an open-endedness that is one of the hallmarks of Internet diaries (p. 30).

This open-endedness is produced in no small part by the interplay between “dialectics of stability and motion” (p. 30) that are present on personal blogs. On the one hand the chronological ordering of events provide a comforting linearity for the writer that plays conveniently to a belief in the progression of time. On the other linking back to archived posts bring these to life in the present and distorts a sense of the progressively unfolded self. “The writing process itself creates this space of redefinition: “the intention of self-representational writing […] is a dynamic factor in the evolution of the minds reality. Scrutinizing identity contributes to constituting identity”” (Gusdorf, 1991 as cited in Serfaty, 2004, p. 30).

“The individual’s constant interpretative process is what gives consistency and symbolic weight to the past, because there is no such thing as an over-and-done-with incident for human memory” (p. 30).

Most online diarists commence their journals with an explanation of why they’ve commenced the project. Serfaty believes this self-reflexivity is needed to transcend any feeling of vacuity produced through writing about the self. It is this writing that becomes a “way of taming the formlessness of experience, a formlessness that prefigures that of death” (p. 37).

These notes will be continued in an upcoming post.

References

Foucault, M. (1997). Self Writing (R. Hurley, Trans.). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics : subjectivity and truth. New York: New Press.

Serfaty, V. (2004). The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Amsterdam – New York: Rodopi.

Notes about Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg

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Blogs are (usually) ordered in reverse chronological order. It’s something that’s ingrained in the architecture of the Internet. It parallels the human as/with a history with a linear progression from the past to the present. This way of ordering emphasises the present, then the most recent.

Older pages that produce ongoing link backs and comments and that perform well in search rank gives significance to the past and creation of meaning.

According to Rosenberg blogging is “…the first form of social media to be widely adopted beyond the world of technology enthusiasts” (p. 13).

He refers to Justin Halls Dark Knight video as confessional in style, soul baring and a form of self-exposure. It is here that Rosenberg, possibly intentionally, hints at Rousseau’s Confessions where, in the introduction, he set out on a project like no other, to document his life and leave nothing out. Everything was to be revealed.

Note to self: Writing about the self is one thing, but it’s writing about others that create tensions. Perhaps part of online self-creation is as much what others say about us as what we say about ourselves.

Rosenberg claims that confessional autobiography is recent trend. In fact it’s been around for hundreds of years. Maybe it’s just more popular today.

One of the early confessional autobiographers on the web was Justin Hall. Rosenberg believes he changed the defaults of the Internet (p. 44).

Note to self: How is online self-creation shaped by the CMS of blogging software?

Rosenberg states that Dave Winer believes that it’s essential that a person’s authentic voice come through on a blog. Without this it’s not a blog (p. 63). It’s a rather narrow, purist definition but it could prove a fruitful starting point for the purpose of narrowing down the scope of my research, for keeping it focussed.

Rosenberg discusses the central place of truth within Dave Winer’s blog, especially “speak[ing] truth to power” (p. 69). Was he referring here to the Greek concept of parrhesia? In discussing Winer’s role in the emergence of blogging Rosenberg alludes to, but doesn’t address specifically, the Western democratic values that inform his telling of the story. He tells of Winer’s role in the development of the blogging community and his refusal to be told that he couldn’t talk about Jason Calacanis on his blog. It’s a story that is supported by the Western narrative that the lone conquering hero can achieve anything through their own efforts.

Question: Are status updates and tweets personal blogs? The answer to this question is going to come out of the scope of my research. Are they to be excluded from the research just because they don’t give the experience of bloginess? If we are to use Winer’s idea of what constitutes a blog then surely they must be included.

It was Berger who first coined the term weblog in 1997 (p. 79).

Rebecca Blood points to blogging as a way to discover her real interests (p. 89) indicating a revealing of something previously hidden. She also referred to blogging as a way to be reminded of something that she found interesting as a child. The latter is much more of self-writing as a comptroller or stock taker, with no value or meaning overlay.

Question: What has the ubiquity of blogs and blogging done for the experience of blogging?

Rosenberg holds 9/11 out as a significant moment in the history of blogging. The breaking of the attacks on a Blogger blog gave blogs credibility as places to find and publish relevant, timely information.

Question: What influence has ‘background’ functionality, such as RSS and Google search, had on the appeal of personal blogging? Would people blog if there were no chance of their blog being found and read? Or would they use it simply as a convenient way to write a diary or share stories with close family and friends?

Question: Why does a person maintain a personal blog if they never/rarely experience the presence of an Other from which they can experience the self more fully. Commercial motivation? Perhaps. Is this why Facebook is so popular, that there is so much more interaction and a sense of the Other and of connection?

Note to self: There’s a line of thinking that could be developed here about the nature of links, what they mean, what they do and how they create the self. Both links in and out can be controlled on a blog. Links become a reputational device. What a blogger links to says something about the blogger. They have a form of representational value. You are what you link to (p. 97)

Being real and being truthful is the mantra of successful blogging, but they can get a person in hot water. In blogging you aim to be real but you can also “fool around with being fake” (p. 236)

“In the history of online communication, this aspiration to personal truth has always served as a powerful magnetic pole” (p. 345)

Rosenberg considers how anonymity is used to create fictional characters and hide identity particularly amongst war bloggers and whistle blower blogs. Anonymity reduces the quality of online discourse (249). This is the case both with authors and blog commenters.

“By letting us expose our inner selves or masquerade as somebody else, blogs have confronted us with a set of unfamiliar challenges, and most of us are not well prepared to handle them” (p. 257).

There are tensions between the personal blogger’s ethic to ‘keep it real’ and the negative consequences of over-sharing. So to tensions between ideals of anonymity and free speech when confronted with hate speech and anti-social behaviour.

Rosenberg compares and contrasts the notions of sincerity with authenticity. Whereas sincerity means to “eschew the expedient lies that grease our social machine” (p. 258) – to live a life of sincerity involves an intransigent truthfulness – authenticity emerged in the Romantic era. It was a theme picked up by Nietzsche and Freud who espoused the revelation of inner secrets and internal discord. Sincerity involves living a consistent public and private life, authenticity means “excavating private torments and confronting the world with their naked reality” (p. 258).

Rosenberg claims that it is the difference between the two – sincerity and authenticity – that is at the heart of the problems experienced by bloggers. Whereas the sincere blogger attempts to maintain a consistency between the online and offline self, the authentic blogger attempts to excavate and reveal the repressed and hidden. The authentic blogger attempts to (finally?) create their real self through their blog.

The self is experienced through the relationship to others and it is that causes some bloggers to write in a way that stirs a reaction through inflammatory speech. When a post attracts no comments the writer can only speculate about what’s happening ‘out there’ but by writing something provocative a reaction is provoked and the relationship between the writer and the commenter helps create the writer’s self.

Alluding to the nature of blogs Rosenberg compares them to other media forms such as TV, radio, email and the telephone. Blogs are a category that bridges these forms and there is something uniquely bloggy about the way blogs contain elements of traditional public broadcast and conversations among friends depending on the motivation of their author (p. 324).

Blogging is an essentially social activity, says Rosenberg (p. 325). Without at least some audience (evidenced by visitors reports and comments) blogging is unrewarding. He implicitly says there is little reward in the writing itself.

Comparing blogs with what’s said on social networking sites Rosenberg suggests that blogs may become more deliberate as people post short form updates to Facebook and Twitter. But blogs are more substantial, free-standing and powerful and they allow the writer to define themselves, whereas on social networks it’s more likely that the self is defined by others. Whilst he states that blogs and social networks are different (p. 336) he provides no tangible evidence for the existence of this difference. Declaring it different makes it so only for the person making the declaration, in this case Rosenberg.

In some ways Rosenberg’s assertion that social networks and blogging is different flies in the face of his earlier claim that blogging is an essentially social activity. What’s missing in ‘social networking as blogging’ is any experience of bloginess: but that experience only comes with being a blogger. For many it’s an experience that never eventuates despite writing a blog.

Blogging is “…a species of writing…a fundamentally literary [activity]” (p. 345) which leaves photo and video blogs stranded, without definition. Are video blogs not also blogs simply because they contain little or no writing? Rosenberg’s definition poses a question of scope for my own research, that is, will it include video and photo blogs? My response is that they could be included if they were primarily a first person account of lived experience. It’s hard to imagine how a photo blog could thus be included without resorting to semiotics something I have no intention to attempt.

Video blogs are a little different. They are very often first person accounts and often focus on lived experience.

Reference

Rosenberg, S. (2009). Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What it’s Becoming, and Why it Matters. New York: Crown Publishers.

Why I’m interested in self-writing and the hupomnemata

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Why self-writing and the hupomnemata?

In the paragraphs ahead I explain how writing is central to the question of personal blogging. I briefly summarise Michel Foucault’s theories of self-writing and propose how they might be used to develop an understanding of self-creation through personal blogging.

The central question of my thesis is “What is a blog?” It’s a question that asks ‘by what means did the term blog come into existence?’ It also begs a further question: what is a blog, to whom?

The definition of a blog is contingent on the relationship of the to the blog.

A person who has never blogged will define a blog quite differently to someone who is an experienced blogger. Indeed, within the population of bloggers a blog means something different to each actor. For example, someone maintaining a corporate blog might see a blog as a branding tool whereas to a struggling mum there blog might be a creative outlet.

My response to this range of potential definitions is to limit my field of inquiry to ask: what is a blog to those who maintain a personal blog? There is any amount of commentary about business blogging and I have no inclination to add further to the swill of opinion on the matter.

By focussing on the experience of personal blogging – writing, linking, commenting, maintaining – I can potentially unfurl what blogging is as a project of self-creation.

So when I talk about blogging I talk about personal blogging; and by personal blogging I mean a blog that’s written in the first person, that records the everyday and the mundane, that reveals the personal and reflects on the past so as to create meaning in the present.

The subject of a personal blog, then, is the self.

Personal blogs contrast to other forms of blogging where the subject is an Other. The other may be a person or it may be an inanimate object, such as blogs about cars and pets and search engine optimisation.

I recognise, though, the potential for a blog to contain elements of the personal in the guise of – to coin a phrase – an object blog. For example, a blog about a pet may in fact be a blog about the relationship between the pet and the self. And with the contemplation of the self-pet relationship the blog begins to include the primary markers of a personal blog:  the existence of a first person narrative and a significant degree of self-revelation that include descriptions of thoughts, perceptions, emotions and bodily sensations.

It is this self-revelation I want to analyse. To do so I intend using Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self as a toolkit for understanding what is taking place on a personal blog.

Foucault, in Technologies of the Self (1988) and Ethics: subjectivity and truth (1997), outlined a range of means by which individuals took care of the self (epimelésthai sautou) (1988, 19). This care for the self involved various practices (askésis) that “involve the progressive consideration of self, or mastery over oneself…through the acquisition and assimilation of truth…It is a set of practices by which once can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth into a permanent principle of action” (1988, 35).

For Foucault, epimelésthai involved taking definite and purposeful steps; activities directed toward taking care of ones health and well-being (25). The principle activity for the care of the self is for the “soul to know itself”. It is, in Foucault’s view, activity that is important and leads to care of the self, not the more benign attitude of “know thyself” (gnothi sauton) (19).

To take care of oneself, then, involved various ascetic practices. It is here that Foucault found, in Hellenistic culture, the importance of writing as an important technology (tecchné) for living a good life.

Foucault detailed two primary forms of self-writing: the hupomnemata and letters or correspondence.

The hupomnemata were records made primarily as a memory aid. “They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation” (??, 1997). And while the hupomnemata served as a memory aid its more important role is to serve as a “framework” (??) of ascetic practices. Whilst personal in nature, Foucault maintained they do not “constitute a “narrative of oneself”…[their] intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self (??).

And it is this capturing and recording of the said, read and heard that is at the heart of what takes place on a personal blog. But this is no ordinary recording of life. Rather, it is a “subjectivation of discourse” (??), a means by which a blogger draws together disparate life experiences and establishes an identity and a relationship with themselves.

Blogging, however, can be distinguished somewhat from the hupomnemata. Most notably, a blog usually has an audience; and the awareness of an (often unknown) audience makes for a particular style of writing. Foucault noted that both the hupomnemata and correspondence work similarly on the writer. Both are productive of the self.

Whereas the hupomnemata was often a document that served the writer alone, correspondence acted as a “way of manifesting oneself to oneself and to others…[making] the writer “present” to whom he addresses it” (??). Being present to another, then, becomes a way for a writer to place himself or herself in view of the other’s subjectivizing gaze. Correspondence, then, becomes a means by which “one opens oneself to the gaze of others and puts the correspondent in the place of the inner god” (??).  But, in the case of correspondence, the gaze is two-way; the writer and the reader exchange positions as part of the communication process.

And correspondence or letters work at the level of the banal. The writer is “constituting oneself as an “inspector of oneself,” and hence of gauging the common faults, and of reactivating the rules of behavior that one must always bear in mind” (??).

The interplay between the gaze of the other and the gaze of the self as created through the process of correspondence becomes an important development in the art of living (tekhê tou biou).

It is here that I see most value in Foucault’s concept of self-writing. Although the hupomnemata helps us to understand the self-productive nature of some blog post, it is when these are turned over to the gaze of the audience that they become correspondence or letters.  Not only is the writing productive of the self but it also allows the presence of the reader and the writer to be experienced by one another; and that is made particularly so through comments whereby the writer becomes the reader and vice versa.

References

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Press.

Foucault, M. (1997). Self Writing (R. Hurley, Trans.). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics : subjectivity and truth. New York: New Press.

Reflections on Subjectivity

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In my last meeting with my PhD supervisors I was asked “are you arguing that a personal blog is the self or a production of the self?” It was evident I was not being clear.

My initial reaction was that I was arguing that a personal blog is a production of the self. It is an object separate from the subject in the same way as the paper on which I write this (yes, I wrote this long-hand first) is something separate from me.

Such a line of reasoning works well if we start from the position of a pre-existent subject. In other words, if thinking creates the subject as in “I think, therefore I am”, then mental activity produces an I ­– an individual – that is separate from a world of objects.

Such a notion works to support the idea that we area all born with a ‘personality’ and that our subjectivity takes shape through the Freudian Oedipal phase in early childhood. We are already and always an individual and our selfhood is shaped by our relationship to the penis or an object that stands in place of the penis.

In Lacanian terms we are trapped in our subjectivity that was formed in the Oedipal phase in a denseness of language that allows no release. In other words, we are made of language.

More importantly, to both Freud and Lacan, our subjectivity is already and always interior and hidden, an essence to be discovered and revealed. It is, as it were, a kind of tiniest building block of our universe that will always be ‘yet to be discovered’. This hidden self is produced through a never-ending always-present sense of lack.

If I accept this Freudian-Lacanian view of the pre-existent subject then I must also accept that a blog is an object that can be studied, analysed and written about. In doing so I would then look at the blog as a tool of signification, a series of sign posts that point back inwards to a fixed human essence. In other words, what does this blog reveal about its author? What does the blog mean to the blogger? What lack is being redressed through the act of blogging?

I am inclined to join with Deleuze and Guattari, and to a lesser extent Foucault, and subscribe to the radical effacement of the subject. In their view the subject never existed and until the project of psychoanalysis; and this produced an object of study and never-ending analysis. Of course, this view was shared by their contemporary Foucault who believed that the creation of the individual was the preeminent move of power. Through fields of study, such as psychiatry, the individual came to exist and could thus be categorised and normalised.

What does this mean for the personal blog? If I start from the Deleuzian position of the non-existent subject I immediately obliterate the object called the personal blog for it is only through the creation of the subject that the object of the blog can come into existence.

For Deleuze and Guattari it is from this non-position of existence that a purely creative humanity can emerge. Unencumbered by the morbidity of Freud and Lacan humans are free simply to become.

Where does this leave my research? As I see it Freud and Lacan weigh heavily on the modern understanding of the subject. Any analysis of the ways in which personal blogging is productive of the self would be deficient if it ignored (especially) Lacan’s notion of lack whereby all actions taken by the subject compensate for a always-present sense of lack. An analysis of personal blogging in this way would posit the pre-existent subject interacting with the external object of the blog generating the self always clambering for a return to the imaginary of the pre-Oedipal phase.

Equally, there is merit in analysing personal blogging through the lens of Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Using the cyborg as a metaphor the personal blog becomes, not an external object or tool, but an integral part of the subject. The machine of the blog contains no ghost, no inherent pre-existent nature, but, rather, constitutes an integral, indivisible part of the subject.

In Haraway I find a particularly useful and promising line of thinking where she connects the narratives about technology and racism. In Haraway’s view, fear of societal decline through advancement of technology and the mixing of races are one and the same action of thought. . It is through the use of technology (and here I refer to personal blogging) she believes that racism can be problematised.

Haraway, along with Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault share a postmodern conception of the subject. Each offers a fresh way to understand personal blogging. In the case of Foucault, as a technology of the self, a practice of living as a work of art. And through Deleuze we can understand it as a moment akin to the chaos inherent when the artist’s brush meets the canvas.

Bibliography

Mansfield, N. (2000). Subjectivity: theories of the self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.

Foucault on Confession

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Commenting on the significance of Rousseau’s Confessions, Gutman (1988, p. 102) states: “…there has indeed been an immense labor to turn man into a subject (an individuated self and a defined personage in the social order) in order to subject him more completely and inescapably to the traversals and furrowings of power.” For Gutman the confession sits at the heart of this labour, the very techne for its elaboration.

The confession is central to Foucault’s understanding of the workings of power. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Foucault describes how  “Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth”.  He outlined how a “…continuous incitement to discourse and to truth” (Foucault, 1978, p. 56) emerged concurrently with an ever-expanding array of confessional techniques beyond those codified by the Christian church; and these “helped to give the confession a central role in the order of civil and religious powers.” (Foucault, 1978, p. 58)

…the confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have singularly become a confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relationships, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses ones crimes, one’s sins one’s thoughts and desires, ones illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat…Western man has become a confessing animal. (Foucault, 1978, p. 59)

Our society has become obsessed with “the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (Foucault, 1978, p. 59).

In the West “ the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points…that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us” (Foucault, 1978, p. 60). We have become accustomed to believing that power constrains us, holds us back and pins us down and that it is only through confession, through the revelation of all of that is inside of us that we can finally become free.

Sex has become a “privileged theme of confession” (Foucault, 1978, p. 61), a form of confession that compels individuals to confess any and every sexual peculiarity. Its effect is to reinforce heterogeneous array of sexualities. Foucault (1988, p. 16) believed that “sexual interdictions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about oneself”. Through the confession of inner secrets truth becomes the means by which sex is manifested.

“The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement” (p. 61); and it this ritual which takes place within relations of power where much is at stake. Confession within a relationship of power gives to the authority demanding the confession a resource or tool by which the individual can be assessed and dealt with in accord with the wishes of those in authority.

The confession of truth requires effort, for the revelation of truth must overcome resistance

The confession of truth has the effect of modifying the person making the confession. Whether by way of experiencing a sense of liberation, of being unburdened or being forgiven for ones sins the confession works directly on the confessor.

The confession does not work as a top down power structure, as in a dictate from above. Rather it works by presupposing the existence of a secret that must be revealed in order to liberate and to finally reveal the hidden essence of the confessor.

Whereas the confession was once something that was performed in ritual in modern society it has now become widely dispersed (Foucault, 1978, p. 63), embedded within the very fibre of day-to-day life. From the church, to family life, to pedagogy, to policing, psychiatry, medicine and labour relationships, each employ the confession as a central strategy to the outworking of power.

The confession involves not merely confessing an act but to all of those thoughts, sensations motivations and desires that accompanied the act.

This great incitement to confess is accompanied by an equally great labour to record that which is confessed. This body of work is, through medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy, studied, categorised and analysed. The confession, and therefore the confessor, has thus become an object of study within fields of scientific research that themselves have only emerged from the discourse surrounding the confession. Foucault (1988, p. 18) understood these “sciences as very specific “truth games” that human beings use to understand themselves”.

Much of Foucault’s commentary on confession is situated within his an analysis of the ways in which sexuality has become an object of science; scientia sexualis.

The confession, he argues, has been impressed into the service of a scientific discourse. By declaring sex a causal instinct, by combining the medical examination with the act of confession, by declaring sex as something that hides the truth within and privileging the confessional listener with powers of decipherment and truth validation, confession has become central to the workings of our society. Sex is everywhere; therefore the confession is everywhere, for by confessing ones sexual minutiae one discovers the hidden secret of oneself.

At least, this is the promise of the confession. But this will to knowledge is used as a tactic of power within the discourse of sex. It is a tactic that began in the early Christian church, one that resulted in an “institutional incitement to speak” (Foucault, 1978, p. 18) that urged each to tell, in infinite detail, the most intimate details of the act and of every thought, idea, image and emotion. If we are repressed then it is only through a detailed expurgation of all of our aberrations and deviations through confession can we discover who we really are. The more detailed and thorough the confession, the more likely we are to discover our essential nature.

It is here that Foucault’s work on confession and sexuality is usefully applied within a broader context. As already noted, Foucault (1978, p. 58) understood confession as having “a central role in the order of civil and religious powers…The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power [and has become] one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth”.

Foucault (1982) contends that individualising power finds its modern day expression in pastoral power. Whereas pastoral power was once found only within the Christian church it is now commonly found in more secular forms. In the church it offered salvation of the soul in the next life, but in Western society it promises secular salvation through taking care of a person’s health and well-being.

In each case the promise of power is that the soul will be taken care of for life.

Significantly the price of the care of the soul comes at the cost of intimate confession for pastoral power “cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it (Foucault, 1982, p. 783).

It is here the line of Foucault’s thoughts on confession take a recursive loop back to the panopticon. In Discipline and Punish Foucault outlined a diagram of surveillance that described how individuals within a surveillance society internalise the rules and regulations of their own subjection. And it is here that the outworking of the confession is at its most effective.

Through confession individuals take an active role in their own surveillance acting at once as the governor and the governed, the prison and the warder, the watcher and the watched. By confessing all that is within, all that is hidden and all that can be known individuals deliver to power the means by which a person can be forgiven, counselled, punished, dealt with, judged and corrected. The promise of lifetime care of the soul through better health, elevated social status or greater riches is the irresistible mirage that compels one to confess. But the even more compelling mirage is the promise that confession will finally deliver to the individual the truth of who they are or who they ought to be, the secret of the heretofore hidden self.

There is another form of confession that is contemplated by Foucault: the writing of and about the self. This was, in Hellenistic culture, a theme of writing, especially in correspondence with another. This writing often addressed the nuances of “life, mood…the experience of oneself was intensified and widened by virtue of this act of writing” (Foucault, 1988, p. 28). The focus of the writing was often that of bodily sensations but there was often an examination of conscience, something that could later be found within the Christian confession. “This examination of conscience begins with this letter writing. Diary writing comes later. It dates from the Christian Era and focuses on the notion of the struggle of the soul.” (Foucault, 1988, p. 30)

This writing was a part of adhering to the Greek practice of taking care of oneself (epimelésthai sautou) (this practice differed from the Delphic principle gnothi sauton, to know yourself). Even more, these writings became a kind of daily stock take of what was to be done and what was actually done. Unlike the Christian tradition of finding fault this writing was simply an accounting without attempt to add guilt or meaning. Whatever errors were made were errors of strategy rather than of virtue.

Further, this form of writing was aimed at remembering truth not uncovering truth as in the Christian tradition. If anything is forgotten it’s that which should or ought to have been done, not the writer’s true nature. There is nothing to decipher, as in Christianity, simply rules of conduct to remember (Foucault, 1988, p. 34). In Stoic tradition truth could be found in the logoi, the teaching of the teachers, and it is these truths that must be memorised and turned into rules of action. On the other hand, in Christianity the obligation is to know who one is and what is going on within oneself. From this knowledge comes the obligation “to acknowledge faults, to recognise temptations, to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others…The truth obligations of faith and self are linked together. This link permits a purification of the soul impossible without self-knowledge”(Foucault, 1988, p. 40).

There is in Technologies a small, but important consideration of correlation between self-disclosure and self-renunciation. At this stage I intend to leave this alone as I’m not clear on its relevance to my project.

Confessions and blogging

I will briefly look at how Foucault’s observations of the confession might be applied to the question “What is a blog?”

Personal blogs are often intense confessionals in the Christian sense. They often address what was done and then seek underlying, hidden reasons that motivated the action. This is particularly evident in dooce where themes from her early childhood continue to surface, even to this day.

How could I think of the video posted by the young Scandinavian man who killed all those people recently? Is that a form of confession? Is that an attempt to uncover the secret of his existence? Was it a form of confession as resistance?

Personal blogs can also take the form of the confessions found in correspondence and in writing that is a form of daily stock-take.

Those that take the form of correspondence are often written with both a known and unknown audience in mind. They address the mundane with little or no attempt at introspection. “I went to Leederville. I had an ice cream. I went home.”

Those that take the form of a stock-take are more in the form of this is what I did and this is what I could do better/differently next time. For example, a person blogging as a training journal would look at how they performed and how they might improve their times.

References

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777-795.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Press.

Gutman, H. (1988). Rousseau’s confessions: A technology of the self. In L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self (pp. 99-120). London: Tavistock Publications.

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