Saturday, July 24, 2004

Communicative Action

People do not post blog entries or even live journal entries for themselves.  They do it in the hopes of communicating with others.  Diaries that are written are unique in that the writing takes place in secret, and for no one else.  If anything, the addressee is the future, perhaps the future writer him/herself. But the future is vague.

In order for us to talk to ourselves, our subjectivity must be split.  There must be an object, a "me" to talk to.  It is impossible to purely talk to oneself.  We invent an addressee, give her a history, imagine that she has solidity as we ourselves do.  Of course, this has been thought in poststructural thinking before, where linguists have discussed how alienation actually works linguistically.

But older than this, before we had selves, we sat around and talked to each other.  Like Bakhtin says, to another, whose body begins where mine ends. 

If we truly know ourselves, why do we produce so many narratives about "ourselves", this entity we invent? Who are we actually talking to?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So who are you talking to? Am I still the only person who knows your secret longings online?

You'll get bored if no one comments: you'll also get bored if only I do. And so: you're not doing it for just yourself. Who are you inventing?

Before we had selves we talked to each other? You mean grunted and pointed and cooed? I'm sure the sense of self was there when food was scarce. If you remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs - bellybutton pondering is a low priority but self is #1.

Anyway, so when I complain about my love life to my friends I'm just talking to my pseudoself? Seems I get something from feedback from others. Like "don't be an idiot" from my better friends. Maybe messages I was already telling myself but it is good to get it straight from a non-involved party.
On a recent art museum trip I was tempted to make many jokes and flippant comments to my companion - who had her own agenda and need to move around and was drawn to different things. The best thing we agreed on was the hotness of Ms. Mary Miller, Mayan expert. Those comments would have amused myself mostly - I don't know how my companion would have taken them. So I kept most bottled up since I wasn't sure my friend was enough like me?
Getting dizzy here. Who am I talking to?

July 29, 2004 at 3:00 PM  
Blogger Dr. Identity said...

Well, first of all, much of this is about who we actually write to when it isn't another person. With diaries, sometimes people even invent a person--Anne Frank invented Kitty, for instance, but really the person is themselves. But with a letter it's obvious it is to someone else.

With blogs, that kind of writing seems blurry to me. It often looks like diary writing, but there can be an audience too. But the writer doesn't usually act like there could be an audience, at least not in the ones I read.

The other thing that influenced this entry is poststructuralist philosophy--some of which I like very much. One of the tenets is that when we discuss ourselves, we are in fact alienated from them. We invent a kind of self in language. You can see the gap between "us" and that "self" we made up when someone says, "I don't feel like myself today" the question would be, why say it that way (rather than "I feel bad" or "I feel odd."). The answer would be that in order for us to experience self-consciousness, self-reflexivity or (less benignly) navel-gazing, we often split aspects of ourselves in order to examine ourselves as if we were another person. I think that diary writing allows this to happen, right at the beginning of the modern world.

The idea of self-reflexivity or even of a "self" at all, is a relatively new idea. People have always been someone of course, but they figured out who they were in relation to others. Before psychology (another modern invention), people knew who they were because of the group they belonged to, or the language they spoke, or who their relatives are. Some languages don't even have the pronoun "I" because you describe yourself as someone's sister or cousin or parent. So what Bakhtin meant was that before there was an idea of an interior identity that was never altered, there was an idea of being a person in what he called "the public square." His favourite example was ancient Greece. The Athenians gave funeral orations for people who died in public, because the life of that person meant nothing without the life of the community. Other people had a hand in commenting on the "self" that they heard. Bakhtin loved this idea of the self-in-relation, and it interests me too.

As for this blog, you may have noticed that I have tags for blogwise and blogsCanada on the site now. When I have a minute, I'll add a few more. That's a way for other people to find this blog and comment on it. I thought it would be interesting to see if anyone found it "in the wild" rather than having me tell them about it via some other medium. So, we will see!

But until then, I don't think I'm talking just to you. I sometimes develop my thoughts through writing, and so I am talking to a version of myself, to test things out that I think about but haven't crystallized, like why it is that so many people write narratives about themselves and publish them for other readers. So there ya go for now!

July 29, 2004 at 3:40 PM  

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