Happy Belated Birthday, Hegel

So, yesterday was Georg Hegel's birthday (born 1770), and in tribute, I will blog theory (or rather, the meanderings of my brain which I'm going to pass off as theory).

So blogging. We were talking tonight in Queer Theory about Foucault, and the confessional imperative came up, as did the act of blogging. But is blogging truly confessional? Most blogs I see seem to be narrations--we seem more engaged in storytelling than in confessing. But isn't telling the stories of our lives a form of confessing? Are we all giving accounts of ourselves via the blogsphere? Or are we creating daily autobiographies, with all the implications of narrative reconstruction inherent in the autobiographical form? Why are we even compelled to blog in the first place?

I remember that in the late 80s and early 90s, before there were "blogs," people would post on discussion boards. Now, the interesting thing is that in some of the discussion board communities, not only were there threads about actual topics, but also fairly random, and fairly regular, posts that people would put up about their days--much like a blog entry. And rather then make comments, we would all just add to that particular thread.

And even though most of these bulletin board communities were fairly small, they were still public. All the boards would be listed, and anyone with a 2400 bps modem (like, oh my god! That's sooooooo 1989!) could access them.

So why do we blog? And what's at stake in our blogging? Although I'm sure there are blogs out there that are confessional, where the writers spill out all the spicy details of their lives (spicy? to whom?!), I see more blogs that seem to be "genuine" (back to this in a moment) people telling the stories of their days.

And in these stories there aren't really any secrets that are told, or any "trangressions" that are confessed to. No one seems to have been interpellated into a role that calls them to confess. No one seems to be giving accounts. Everyone seems to be "real" people--"genuine" people. On the Internet, of course, a person can be anyone. I could write a blog with any assumed identity of my choice, and no one would know any better.

But again, why is that different from "real" life? Because we can sustain the charade longer? When I meet someone for the first time, they have no idea who I "am." I can "pretend" to be really stupid, or outgoing, or funny. I can "pretend" that I am an office cube worker, or a truck driver, or a secret shopper.

But in "real" life, it's much harder to pretend to be a man, or to pretend to be Asian. And when we say that someone's identity online could be anyone, what we mean is that someone's gender and color online could be anything. Someone's age could be anything. It's interesting to see how heavily we establish identity with the body.

(Of course, in "real" life, people pass as___________ all the time. Successfully. Billy Tipton passed as a man for 60 years and had four wives--after Tipton's death in '89, an autopsy revealed that Tipton was female.)

What I'm saying, or trying to, is that "identity" doesn't seem to be an issue in most blogs. People don't "hide," it seems, unless they hide their name, or use a pseudonym, really. And in the audience of readers, there ARE people who know who that person "is." I don't think questions concering identity bring us back to why so many people feel the need to blog. And because I don't think identity is what's at stake, I don't think that blogs are necessarily confessions. After all, when we confess, aren't we compelled to confess something about ourselves, a trait, a behavior, that is a "PART" of us?

So if we don't blog under the confessional imperative, then why are we still writing? I would rather make the argument that we blog under an imperative that is primary to the confessional imperative, and that is the narrational imperative--that we are compelled to narrate, told to narrate, forced to narrate. And I would make the argument that this imperative to narrate stems from our immersion and birth in discourse, our entry into the Symbolic, the writing of language on our bodies. And I further would say that the imperative comes from language itself, the logos of language, where logos means both word and reason. The glue that holds together the signifier and signified creates the narrational imperative. We cannot make reason without words, we cannot make words without reason, and we cannot MAKE MEANING without logos, without signs. And we cannot make the signs mean without stringing them together. And we cannot make the world around us mean without stringing signs together.

And we cannot make meaning, or create anything, without also, and firstly, destroying the meaning or thing that was previously there.

And I had more I was going to say, but my brain just totally turned off. I will attempt to actually make the arguments I'm proposing to make in another post. But I am pretty certain that I'm about to stop making sense, assuming, of course, that I was making sense in the first place.

What do y'all think? Why do we blog?