Author Archives: steviecohen

Authority, Authorship, and Audience. Steve Cohen.

Others have written about the blog as affording a writer the opportunity to construct a “self” discursively. A central thread of our discussion about blogs (and about the epistolary novel) has been the idea of response. Bloggers write into a community, who is then invited to respond; similarly, the authors of letters enter a dialogue. Both kinds of writers, then, seek not only to construct a self, but also to position it in relation to others.

In “Self-Making,” Jerome Bruner (1991) recalled Roman Jakobson’s assertion that “Language is a system not only for communicating, but also for organizing attention” (p. 73). Bruner (1991) went on to detail how the organizing function of language is essential in the construction of a coherent narrative of self—events happen; it’s how we “pattern” them that gives us a story of the self (p. 74). In reading blogs, and in reading Clarissa over the course of the semester, the importance of how that narrated self is interpreted by others has emerged as a key concern.

In the case of Clarissa, much of what’s at stake early in the novel is her ability to convince her parents that they should still view her as the dutiful daughter she attempts to construct in her letters. Her parents refuse to read those letters, preferring their own construction of her as willful and selfish. It’s paradoxical that Clarissa’s parents should have so much authority to create the Clarissa they believe they know (the Clarissa who is “perversely” willing to run off with Lovelace) in the face of their acknowledgement that Clarissa is so powerfully able to shape her own identity. Clarissa attempts to narrate an identity in her letters to them; she writes and she writes and she writes, but ultimately she’s unsuccessful. This is indicative to me that there is more involved in the construction of an identity than self-narrative. To some extent, there also has to be external assent to the version of “self” one creates. As Bruner (1991) put it “self-making is powerfully affected not only by your own interpretations of yourself, but by the interpretations others offer your version” (p. 76). No one, including Clarissa, is completely free to author a “self,” as such a thing is always defined with and against others and their perspectives.

The blog, as a communicative technology, highlights this interdependence. It calls attention to the “distributed” nature of the self (Bruner, 1991, p. 76). There has been much work on the “online diary” quality of many blogs, but virtually all of that work has acknowledged that the public nature of the blog, at the very least, fundamentally alters how we can think about their “diary-ness.” A different kind of blog, like Radical Faggot for instance, offers an identity, but it offers an identity explicitly for the purpose of public participation with its meanings. This is what I see as the most important connection between blogs and the epistolary novel; identity as and in dialogue. The creation of an “I” is impossible in a vacuum. It requires the presence (if not attention) of an “other.”

Lovelace as Rhetor. Steve Cohen.

In Letter 191, Lovelace writes to Belford that his “principal design is but to bring virtue to a trial, that, if virtue, it need not be afraid of,” indicating that he will again test Clarissa’s virtue—ostensibly for the sake of testing her virtue (Richardson, 1748/1985, p. 608). This little snippet stuck with me because I can’t decide whether or not Lovelace believes it himself.

Certainly, he’s performing “Lovelace the rake” for Belford but, just as certainly, he’s aware that he desires Clarissa. Even he can’t possibly believe that her success in rebuffing his advances will make him happy. But here’s where it gets weird—I’m not sure that, on some level, he doesn’t believe himself when he’s writing to Belford. We have had a great deal of discussion about Lovelace’s ability to pick and choose which “Lovelace” is the most advantageous for him to perform in any given situation. I wonder if, especially in moments like this, he isn’t performing a particular Lovelace for himself. With all those identities to choose from, things have to get confusing every once in a while. I’m quite sure that at certain points in the novel, not even Lovelace knows anything about Lovelace except that he is a master of rhetoric.

In this way, he confirms some of Plato’s deepest fears about rhetoric in the hands of the sophists. Sophistic rhetoric, for Plato, is dangerous, just as one might argue Lovelace is dangerous; there isn’t anything underneath. The fear is that, lacking a system of ethics, rhetoricians wield a powerfully deceptive tool (Lovelace in a nutshell—am I wrong?). This tool is so powerful that it might allow a rhetorician a frightening degree of control over otherwise perfectly independent, rational, capable citizens. Sound familiar? There’s a way here, I think, that Lovelace comes to represent rhetoric itself, and represent it in a not-quite-flattering light.

If, as I suggested in my post about Clarissa, narrative and writing and authority in the novel comes in the form of authorship of written words, whoever is the best writer (or rhetor) has the most power. And, worryingly, the only identity that Lovelace espouses with any stability throughout is that of an accomplished rhetor.

Authority and Authorship. Steve Cohen.

“Let me now repeat my former advice—If you are not married by this time, be sure delay not the ceremony. Since things are as they are, I wish it were thought that you were privately married before you went away. If these men plead AUTHORITY to our pain, when we are theirs—Why should we not, in such a case as this, make some good out of the hated word, for our reputation, when we are induced to violate a more natural one?”

I lifted this from the “Clarissa Harlowe and Anna Howe” section, because it’s been rattling around in my brain. In the comments after this post, several (Megan and Keri in particular) observe that, while Anna tends to write about the “bigger picture” in the novel, Clarissa tends to take events one at a time and respond to them accordingly. While Clarissa is capable of being very persuasive in some individual cases, she doesn’t seem to respond in effective ways to the whole of her story—what Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen (1983) might call the “macro” narrative of her life.

It seems to me that the idea of AUTHORITY is central to the novel, and that it is bound up in the idea of authorship—so when Anna talks about men pleading authority she’s talking (at least in part) about the textual exchanges between Clarissa and her father, brother, uncles, and Lovelace. It is in these textual exchanges that Clarissa attempts to consolidate power over her own life. The evidence we get of her failure to do so is also textual; her brother writes her a letter saying she has to marry Solmes whether she likes it or not. She doesn’t see her father; her only exchanges with him are letters, and she doesn’t see Lovelace either (until the beginning of the 3rd volume). In other words, authority is exercised in the novel primarily through written words: it’s through Clarissa’s authorship of her letters that she works toward an authorship of her life.

Since this is the case, and since Clarissa is such a gifted writer, it seems surprising that she fails so completely. Anna, in the section of the letter that I pasted here, exhorts Clarissa to exercise some authority over her reputation, which Clarissa has acknowledged she values more than her life. But I’m not sure that’s at all possible in the world of the novel. The story Clarissa writes about herself in the early parts of the novel is that she is too dutiful a daughter to marry Lovelace against her parents’ wishes, and so she is reluctant to marry him to save her own reputation. But the story Clarissa writes about herself is up against not only the stories that everybody she knows is telling about her (which is that she ran away from home to be with Lovelace) but also her own “negative valuation” (Gergen and Gergen, 1983, QA: Page) of the act of running away with Lovelace. It seems the narratives her family writes about her—“perverse girl” “ungrateful” “stubborn”—are the stories that carry the most weight—even to the point that she allows them to challenge the story she tells about herself. At first, reading through this first volume of the novel was frustrating for me because I couldn’t see why Clarissa wouldn’t just marry Lovelace and have been done with it—not the most desirable of situations, certainly, but better than being the girl who ran off with the rake. But as I read further, I began to understand that Clarissa is really kind of paralyzed in a worse way than when she was imprisoned in the house. Midway through the novel, she is torn between two narratives of herself. Is she a wise girl, a paragon of virtue, an “example of her sex,” or is she the girl who fell for the trap a vile rake set for her? I don’t think she knows. And I don’t think she knows how to be both at the same time.

Blogging Clarissa. Steve Cohen.

For me, the most obvious affordances in blogging Clarissa are the affordances of digital communication; space and time worked differently in the experience we shared than they do in other graduate seminars I’ve participated in.

In terms of space, the blogging moved the story out of the novel. Moving the narrative into another space allowed for a different kind of focus on what was significant. We spent a good deal of time talking about similarities between “letters” and “blogs,” but choosing what out of the novel to include, which chunks of letters were most “bloggy,” underscored not only that there may be significant differences between the audience(s) for blogs, letters, and novels, but also helped us as a group of readers to hone in on what a particular letter in the novel would be most productive to think about. What things would we take with us when we moved, and what might be left behind? Answering that question collectively helped us to arrive at what we all saw as central concerns for this particular reading—questions of narrative, identity, and authority. All of which the blog worked toward answering as a collective, rather than individual document.

That the document was produced outside of the space of the classroom I think is also important, because it changed the way time works in a seminar as well. John Steinbeck remarks in East of Eden that “Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.” The long space between weekly seminar meetings can be productive in terms of reading and thinking, but the more frequent interactions we had through the blog made for a more continuous conversation that was helpful for me in sustaining thoughtful engagement through some of the longer, less “eventful” passages in the novel; frequently, blog posts during the week encouraged me to go back and re-examine passages that seemed “eventless” to me. Productive discussion with a group of engaged readers was enhanced by the blog’s ability to carry on that conversation outside of the weekly time slot of our seminar. The constant contact and re-thinking made for a reading experience that was fuller.

Clarissa as a novel forces a great deal of attention on time: each of the letters carries a time stamp and part of the fun of reading it is parsing out the timeline in the separate streams of letters. Our conversations focused often on the volume of writing Clarissa and Lovelace were capable of producing in a day; we often wondered how they had time to do anything else! In this sense, I think, producing the blog was a kind of parallel to what was happening in the novel. The daily or sometimes even hourly composition of our blog posts and responses, and waiting to see what others comments might be, helped us think back through the kind of constant written communication that comprises Clarissa.

A Screenshot of the blog Radical Faggot

Discourse and the Blog: Radical Faggot as Dialogic Response

Steve Cohen

 

What is a Blog?

Many scholars, especially in the field of genre studies, have taken up the blog as a point of interest. Work by scholars such as Marika Lüders, Lin Prᴓitz, and Terje Rasmussen (2010); Inger Askehave and Anne Ellerup Nielsen (2005); and Susan Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Elijah Wright, and Sabrina Bonus (2005) has sought to define the blog as a genre, citing the technology’s capacity to encourage self-expression as a central definition of its purpose. Over the last decade or so, as blogs have proliferated, this work has been complicated by the appearance of new forms of blogs, with what some see as very different purposes. The productive question for genre studies, then, has shifted from “what is a blog?” to “what are the different kinds of blogs, and what do they do?” Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd (2009) addressed this question in “Questions for Genre Theory from the Blogosphere.” There, Miller and Shepherd (2009) pointed out that, since the advent of social media sites like MySpace and, more familiarly, Facebook, there are at least two distinct purposes for the blog: “self-expression” and “community development.” They write, “while the personal blog takes advantage of internet technologies of interaction and connection in the interests of identity construction, these same capabilities have been put to other uses, which have action and social change as their goals” (p. 271). They further emphasized the difference between the two “kinds” of blogs, explaining “the blogs that seem most different on this dimension from personal blogs” are what they term “public affairs blogs” (p. 271). While Miller and Shepherd (2009) admitted that both self-expression and community development “can be achieved by the self-disclosure that blogging permits and seems to encourage” (p. 268), the dichotomy they create between personal and public affairs blogs seems inadequate to describing the purposes and functions of a blog like Radical Faggot. While the purpose of Radical Faggot is to make specific interventions in public affairs, it does so through self-disclosure. The particular identity that Radical Faggot produces works toward the disruption of what the blogger sees as normative forces in identity production in order to advance the interests of marginalized communities. The public affairs work the blog accomplishes, then, rests at least in part on the blogger’s expression of a self. The title of the blog, for example, employs the term “faggot” to simultaneously produce an identity for the author and enter into a dialogue with the use and meaning(s) of the term. This relationship with language and with the larger culture characterizes the blog as a whole; the personal disclosures of the author exist in what Bakhtin (1981) would call the “dialogic” relationship with the larger political discourse.

Radical Faggot and the Dialogic

In “Discourse and the Novel,” Bakhtin (1981) pointed out the stratified, ideological nature of language itself. Bakhtin (1981) further pointed to the novel as a place where “a diversity of social speech-types” come together into a single, unified “system of…‘languages’” (p. 262). For Bakhtin (1981), the speech of narrators and characters in a novel represent heteroglot languages that a given novelist organizes into a “higher unity” (p. 262). The blog is not a novel. But, it is a place where a blogger can draw together the utterances of others, forwarding or subverting their original purposes, by fashioning them into a unified whole of his or her own creation—the blog. Radical Faggot for instance, organizes a music video titled “We Coming,” into a blog post contributed by “Pittsburgh-based emcee and activist Jasiri X,” which itself quotes another blog, “Davy D’s Hip-Hop Corner.” These voices and languages (Hip-Hop artist, social activist, and blogger) all contribute to the meaning and experience of labor. They are set in dialogic opposition to the title of the post “Happy Labor Day!” by the blogger. These languages are carefully composed to protest the more familiar meanings of the phrase Labor Day—the post itself organized into a unified protest by the blogger, who identifies himself as “Radical Faggot.”

Similarly, in a later post titled “Why Now?: A New Whole Foods and the Future of Job Justice,” the blogger weaves together such disparate voices as Michelle Obama commenting on the shortage of nutritious food in low-income communities, Wal-Mart workers protesting low wages, and Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb’s famous comment that “it’s a myth that you can’t eat healthy for less money; you may have to be willing to cook” into a story about a proposed Whole Foods market in a depressed urban area. The languages of corporate America and politics are positioned dialogically in a blog post that questions the labor practices of Whole Foods and seeks to advance the interests of the community in which the new store is to be built.

While this blog doesn’t create a personal narrative in the traditional sense, it certainly creates a unity out of heteroglossia in individual posts that themselves become a dialogic narrative. Its overarching rhetorical stance toward social change brings the disparate posts into an overall unity. The quotes in the post become part of the fabric of the language of the blog. While there are important differences between the blog and the novel—notably that the language of the people quoted is “found” rather than a product of the imagination of an author—the blogger is able, nevertheless, to dialogically juxtapose languages in the construction of a narrative about his neighborhood.

Identity and “The Word”

The unity of the blog is due in large part to the particular stance the blogger takes in relation to his community as a whole. An integral part of this stance is the identity he constructs. In the “about” section of the blog, Radical Faggot introduces himself as “a multiethnic, mixed-class, queer man who is dedicated to radical education, brown feminist theory and community-committed activism.” Further, he declares that “Posts may be written in English, Spanish, ballroom slang, hood speak, and academic jargon, but all languages and dialects are welcome,” a clear recognition of the variety of languages he utilizes to construct the whole. More central to his identity claims, however is his choice of the word “faggot.” He explains that this choice was meant not to offend, but to express himself. In “an era of mainstream media representation, invisible trauma and neoliberal reform, it is to remind myself and others who stand by me that we are different, we are abject, and we do exist in opposition to current social, political and economic orders.” Language itself, then, is central to the identity work the blog is doing. It is through particular language that the blogger identifies himself, and it is through positioning his own language in relation to that of others that the arguments in his posts gain much of their rhetorical force.

In choosing “faggot” as a central identity marker for himself, the blogger is both claiming the word and its meanings and intervening in them. He is redefining the word for himself and re-inscribing it for his readers. In Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, he is “striv[ing] to get a reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual system that determines this word, within the alien conceptual system of the understanding reader” (p. 282). In the blogger acknowledging his “opposition” to “current social…orders,” through the use of this word, he works, not only to understand himself the ways the label positions him, but also to ask the reader to consider that positioning as well. It is an acknowledgment of Bakhtin’s (1981) assertion that “the word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word” (p. 293, emphasis mine). The blogger’s use of the word “Faggot” to describe himself has to be understood as dialogic; it is first a term and a tool of oppression and it must be understood that way in order for the “understanding reader” to grasp the ideological shift in the utterance. Readers must understand the dominant cultural (or centripetal) forces that inhere in the word in order to understand the (centrifugal) force the author imbues it with.

This shift in one word is central to the work of the blog as a whole. If “language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294) then the borders this blogger draws position the identity produced in ways that come to define the stance of the blog as a whole. The blogger, in Bakhtin’s (1981) words “actively choos[es]” his “orientation among […] heteroglot languages” (p. 296).

Audience and Response

A central feature of the blog is the invitation for audience participation. In “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Bakhtin (1986) characterized language as always-already in process, and argued that in using language “any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree” in the act of speaking, positing “the existence of preceding utterances—his own and others—with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another” (p. 69). As I’ve said before, blogs are not novels. But there is a way in which the dialogic nature of language is more readily evident in blogs. Not only can blog texts be cut and pasted for use elsewhere, the texts often invite responses to the posts themselves, responses that create and re-create meaning within the same narrative. In a move that’s similar to one made by readers of a novel, a blog reader takes the position of a listener, who “simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 68). A blog reader can either “agree or disagree” with a post “completely or partially” or “augment it, apply it, prepare for its execution, and so on” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 68).

Responses to Radical Faggot vary. Many responses, like the one from Rose Kahendi, simply offer praise and encouragement as in “I love your blog and the thought that you have put into articulating your opinions!” Others go a bit deeper, as Adelita does in saying “Hey RadFag! I started following your blog cause I think your articles are dope, informative, interesting, militant, etc. I saw last night that you are informed by ¡ella pelea!, an organization I was a part of while in Texas. I was wondering if we could chat via email. I’d love to hear how you heard about us, and what you’re up to. I also saw your reading list and liked a lot of them. Anyway, I don’t want to write too much down as a comment. Let me know if you are interested and maybe we can exchange emails.” There are quite a few of these kinds of responses to different posts. If the blog aims to mobilize a community toward solidarity and political action, the number of these responses would seem to indicate at least a small measure of success. The uptake and re-circulation of words like “queer” and “militant” from the blogger into “other people’s mouths” suggests that the blog is participating in a whole community working, at one level, to reinscribe these words with new meaning.

 Conclusion

The work of Radical Faggot exceeds the personal and personalizes the public. “Faggot” is language tied to the body; its meanings here as a personal disclosure and as a political act are inextricably linked. In working to examine the blog as a phenomenon, we have come to see it as a process through which the self is publicized, but we have perhaps not looked closely enough at how certain kinds of public disclosure can do political work. Blogs, especially blogs like this one, are rarely simply disclosures of the self. They orient a self to the culture, and as readers participate in what some have considered a personal form, they too consider their orientation(s) toward the blogger and toward a culture. Radical Faggot, is not simply a traditional narrative, an online diary, or a commentary on public affairs; rather it is all three simultaneously in different ratios in different posts. This blog, and blogs like it, are language in action, centripetal and centrifugal, exceeding genre categories and queering the boundary between the personal and political.

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