I have dozens of drafted posts that I didn’t post when I wrote them. Either I got distracted and didn’t finish them, or I was embarrassed to have been blogging so much and thought I’d save a post or two, or I decided I wasn’t sure I really wanted to publish that post after all, and they pile up. This morning I found one that is rather apt, and that I was glad to be reminded of. Here it is.
Is my weblog private or public? Is a blogger responsible for a community or beholden to none other than herself? Is a blog a garden for resting, as Tom Matrullo suggested, calling them loci amoeni? Or sphere of the digital age?
The in between and neither nor and this as well of weblogs keeps confounding us, confusing issues, upsetting discussions. I read another paper today, in French this time (such joy, I remember how, it’s easy!) by Florence le Cam, a paper about how blogs are used in a local (geographical) community, and on page 21 she writes:
En lieu et place d’une rÈdÈfinition des frontiËres entre espace public et espace privÈ, peut se poser une hypothËse qui
renvoie davantage ‡ une superposition de ces frontiËres qui amËne le carnetier ‡ síinscrire,
selon le contenu quíil aborde, dans líun ou líautre des espaces. In place of a redefination of the boundaries between public and private space, one might hypothesise it’s more of a superposition (above? between?) these boundaries that allows the blogger to inscribe herself in either public or private space, according to the content.
Exact translation from French isn’t my fortÈ, but I bet I got the general meaning of that. Neither this or that (enten eller), nor really and and and (bÂde og) but this then that this this. It changes.
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Drakulita
Eversince I stumbled onto your blog while searching for materials on Foucault’s “What Is An Author?” I can’t help but get fascinated with your blogging-related posts (in short, your blog theorising entries). 😀
Thanks for posting this. Will be checking the links you posted as well. I’m currently a BA Comparative Lit student here in the Philippines and I’ll be starting with my thesis this coming June. I hope you don’t mind me spending quite some time in your very informative blog. (Eeep!)
Thanks Jill!
Jill
Why thank you Drakulita! And how wonderful that you can find some inspiration from all this stuf of mine 🙂 Good luck with your thesis!
Francois Lachance
I’ve been mulling over the possible distinctions between “superposition” and “overlap” in English. I’m not sure if the distinction I make between covering over (superposition) and edging over (overlap) are ones that most users of English do or would make. I pose the question because I do not think that the choice to inscribe one’s writing in public or private spaces is driven entirely by the content of those writings. My musings about the intersection and divergence of the semantic fields covering the terms “superposition” and “overlap” also exist in a private handwritten memorandum ledger — content wise they do. Here recorded in a semi-public space ( a space managed by the blog-owner), the relation to the previous inscription is a matter stated. The choice of where to inscribe is not always if ever a verifiable event. The disclosure of the extistence of an inscription in private space creates a bridge to public space, if not to what is inscribed in private space, at least to its possibly verifiable
existence. The becoming public of the blog is not a road that content travels from the private to the public. It is an intent to make plunder possible.
Barthes, following Klossowski, is translated by Richard Howard “Exchange, gift, and theft the only known forms of economy) each in its way implies heterogeneous objects and a dislocated time: my desire against something else — and this always requires time for drawing up the agreement. Simultaneous proffering establishes a movement whose model is socially unknown, unthinkable: neither exchange, nor gift, nor theft, our proffering, welling up in crossed fires, designates an expenditure which relapses nowhere and whose very community abolishes any thought of reservation: we enter each by means of the other into absolute materialism.” [A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments]
simultaneous proffering — a nice hallucination. a figure worth picking up to describe blogging?
Jill
It’s too long since I’ve read A Lover’s Discourse. I love that book. Overlap is an interesting idea – I imagined one space literally above the other, neither touching the other. Superposition is a strange word, really.