Viviane Serfaty, 2003. The
Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs.
(Amsterdam Monographs in
American Studies, 11). Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi. 144 p.
Paperback. ISBN 90-420-1803-8
Review by Jose Ángel García Landa
Viviane Serfaty is the author
of a Ph.D. dissertation on the political use of the Internet (1999, pub. 2002).
The Mirror and the Veil is a more
specific study of a recent development in the web—"blog" became
a buzzword only in 2004. A blog or
"web log" is supposed to
be a rather formless and gaseous undertaking; although it is possibly not
fuzzier as a concept than "diary," or "zebra", or, for that
matter, "concept".1 As usual, there will be a number of
family resemblances within items falling under the blog umbrella, although none
of the members of the group share one
crucially defining trait which is at the same time absent from all non-blogs.
At its loosest, a blog is a web page that keeps growing and is updated with
chronologically organized entries. The blog's URL (Internet address) takes
visitors to the main page, containing the most recent entry and usually a few
recent ones. Earlier entries are usually accessible in separate pages in the
blog's archives. A blog may include other elements, such as a small directory
of internal links to permanent contents (writings, photographs, etc.), and
external links to blogging tools or preferred software, on the one hand, and to
other blogs read by the author, on the other. Bloggers sometimes use their real
name, but nicknames are far commoner.
The
concepts of online diary and blog intersect but need not coincide. An unblogged online
diary may be, to take an extreme case, an electronic edition of Pepys' Diary,
or, more commonly, a diaristic web
page which does not take the reader to the most recently dated entry, but to
the initial one. If such an online diary is regularly updated, though, it becomes
almost (though perhaps not quite) a blog. Diaries are usually personal
self-narratives, and blogs provide a powerful medium for the publication of
online diaries. But the contents of a blog need not be diaristic or personal at
all; and blogs need not be authored by a single individual; indeed, they rarely
are, although most have one main author or editor. That said, there is much
common ground between online diaries and blogs. Viviane Serfaty's book deals
with this shared ground, the book's main object of study being blogs which are
used for personal expression and life-writing, rather than as specialised
journalism, collective forums, or pure weblogging (understood as a mere
sequence of links to interesting new sites). Serfaty's focus on the intersection
between online diaries and weblogs leads her, though, to disregard those
aspects of the blogging phenomenon which do not fall under this head (e.g.
newsblogs, collective blogs, technical blogs, professional blogs, sex blogs,
moblogs, etc.) and to argue rather sweepingly that "the distinction
between diaries and weblogs is increasingly meaningless, as one form seems to
have morphed into the other" (22). She does note, though, a crucial
difference regarding software: "Weblogs are different inasmuch as the
software is in charge of displaying readers' answers; the blogger has very
little scope for editing or deleting answers. In addition, responding to an
entry is usually not done through email but through a form located at the
bottom of the page" (66). But even that would need to be contextualised,
as bloggers are given more and more options by an increasing number of blogging
platforms and software developers.
The
introduction makes it clear that for Serfaty, "for all their apparent and
sometimes actual novelity, online diaries and weblogs are but the latest
avatars in the long history of self-representational writing" (1). The
introduction provides a sketch of this history, and much of the rest of the
book, especially chapter 2, emphasizes the kinship between blogs and previous
forms of life-writing in the tradition of modern self-expression. French
theorists, such as Philippe Lejeune and, most prominently, Georges Gusdorf,
provide the theoretical and historical background at this point. Three major
sources are pointed out for the development of modern life-writing: Catholicism
(St. Theresa, J. H. Newman), English Puritanism (e.g. Bunyan) and Libertinism
(leading to Pepys and Rousseau). "The development of a private space,
where thought could roam freely" apart from dogma (6) leads eventually, in
Rousseau, to the rule of desire as the prime mover of the modern individual.
Diaries constitute truth as a space of interpretation, where dating entries is
essential but revision and reinterpretation may also enter into the picture,
thus compromising any claim to a faithful portrayal of reality. Individuals
represent, justify and re-create themselves through their life-writing, with
the writing itself feeding back into the process of self-making and
self-understanding. The book's introduction also addresses the ethics of
Internet research, as many diaries raise thorny issues of privacy and
copyright. Different views as to the ethics of research may appear depending on
whether the diaries are considered to be "literature" with the
diarists' self-representation being understood as a fictional construct, or
documents for social science research. But, as Serfaty deals here with diaries
freely accessible on the Internet, she has assumed "that the texts
uploaded by diarists were certainly personal, often intimate but not
private" (12). The title of the book, The Mirror and the Veil, refers to the double function of the computer
screen, which simultaneously enables diarists to achieve public
self-representation and concealment, in a dialectic of disclosure and secrecy
inherent to weblogs. Serfaty approaches this dialectic with the tools of
Lacanian psychoanalysis (including an assessment of the researcher's own
involvement with the material).
Chapter
one, "Offline and Online Diaries" sketches a history of weblogs, from
personal newsletters on advances in computing issues, through personal web
pages and messaging channels, to the massive development of specific weblogging
software and companies from 1995 on. The crucial step in this development was
the spread of free web space for blogging together with fully automated
templates for storage and online interaction (through the readers' posting of
comments to the diarist's entries). Serfaty provides a thumbnail guide to the
best-known blogs and bloggers, and the main debates around the blogging
phenomenon: jargon, communities, etc.2 Readers who are unfamiliar with these recesses of the
Internet will find here clear information on many interesting facts and
possibilities, from the Waybackmachine which allows you to see previous
versions of many web pages, to the first complaints about the
"bloghorrhea" induced by this diaristic form. This chapter analyzes
the main defining characteristics of online diaries: accumulation (of text, multimedia
and links), open-endedness, self-reflexivity and co-production. Accumulation of
text, often trivial, but multiplying representations of reality, and favouring
"a diachronic vision of the self" (28). Accumulation, too, of images,
especially with the new digital technology in cameras (and, let me add,
multimedia cell phones); accumulation of links, which unlike mere footnotes, do
more than reference information, as they entice the reader to immediately
follow them out of the site. The "netiquette" governing interaction
in personsl weblogs is generally laudatory as far as diaristic sites are
concerned (sites which are more journalistic in character would belie Serfaty's
assessment here, but they fall outside her self-imposed scope); punctuation
defies grammar so as to enhance expressiveness. This accumulation of signs
"counters the comforting simplifications of everyday life to point to the
radical singularity, the absolute uniqueness and the endless complexity of a
single individual–traits that are supposed to be downplayed in day-to-day
social interactions, in which one has to sustain one's image as a public
character, whom others expect to behave in certain, stereotypical ways"
(27). Serfaty is also attentive to many generic aspects of online writing, such
as the interplay of sequentiality and fragmentation produced by the dated
entries, the tension between (a) the diarists' attempt at controlling their
self-representation and (b) the way this construction of a unified self is
problematized through proliferating representations and the opening of new
spaces for interpretation. Unlike autobiographies, diaries promote an
expressive, open-ended version of the self. Insofar as their online avatars
enhance some of these functions, they "can be seen as a means to think
through the seam between the private and the public self, and as such, they are
more attuned to contemporary uncertainties about the self" (29).
Open-endedness is also enhanced through the interaction with 'wreaders'. There
is a reflexive dimension to online diary-writing, as a self-consciously modern
practice; the diarists are often highly conscious of the poetics of Internet
writing, and this becomes a topic in many entries. Re-writing of past entries
is not uncommon. The combination of intimacy and public accessibility breaks
many taboos on self-representation, on which many diaries are experiments;
though they become open to the charge of "escribitionism".
Diary-writing can be a way of coping with the formlessness of experience, a search
for truth or authenticity, constantly beset by the self-imposed vigilance of
the limits of disclosure inherent to the genre. Many diarists are aware of the
constructed nature of the authenticity they achieve, of the inevitable split
between self and modes of representation; in many, this leads to the production
of new modes and more text, "a text which in turn becomes the enigmatic
metaphor of self" (39). Feedback by readers is a crucial distinguishing
feature of online diaries: "where traditional diaries were written for an
implied, ideal reader, online diaries explicitly search for an audience and in
so doing, turn themselves into a collaborative project" (39-40). If the
representation achieved by the diaries is a fiction, it is a collective
fiction, with the audience playing the part of a mirror for the writer:
"The feedback of readers is therefore required in order to reinforce the
sense of the diarist's own identity" (40): unlike traditional diaries'
emphasis on the individual's interiority and privacy as the basis for identity,
online diaries articulate an identity which is essentially interpersonal
(without thereby bridging the gap between self and other, the irreducible
separateness of the diarists and the society they join).
Chapter
Two discusses the "Social Functions of Online Diaries in America."
While rapidly expanding to the rest of the world, online diaries originated as,
and largely remain, a predominantly North American phenomenon. Not that they do
not exist everywhere else, but English is the majority language by far and the
figures show a consistent dominance of North American (in number of diaries,
webrings and readership). A 2002 overview showed 1% of American Internet users
created a web log. This can be explained in part as a side effect of the fact
that Internet activities as a whole are still dominated by Americans. Sefaty,
though, tries to build up a case for an ideological explanation based on an
interpretation of American cultural traditions: "The practice of keeping
an online diary may indeed be seen as a direct offshoot of the philosophical
outlook developed in America in the nineteenth century, Transcendentalism"
(44). And she does argue a good case, commenting Emerson's essays
"Self-Reliance" and "The American Scholar", arguing with
Rosenwald that Emerson first fused the diaristic form and the commonplace book
(46). Emerson's democratic appeals to the value of the ordinary "are
echoed with uncanny accuracy by the statement of intention of a diarists'
webring: 'No one's life is insignificant . . . ' "
(48). Online diaries would
be a contemporary manifestation of a peculiarly American quest for self which
tends "to ground value in the individual and to issue a declaration of
independence from conformity and external rules" (49). There are some
problems with this formulation, though: first, whether "independence from
conformity", while present as a discourse in the American cultural
landscape, can be described as a minority or a majority ideal (that is, the
problem of which is the actual social grounding of this discourse). The
majority of American society would certainly seem readier to conform to
simplistic narratives than to contest received ideas (thence the consistent
success of presidential candidates like George–especially W.–Bush,
or the widespread belief, of nearly 50% of the population of the US, in the
most simplistic brand of creationism). Serfaty does not discuss, either,
whether the self-reliance espoused by the Emersonian discourses, whatever their
actual influence in America, is real or merely illusory (from the cultural
critic's viewpoint, that is). Be as it may, the main weakness of her analysis
is its emphasizing of an early nineteenth-century ideology, Transcendentalism,
as the cornerstone of a phenomenon so inherently associated to (very) late
twentieth-century technology and communicative protocols. This is not to
dismiss as nonsensical Serfaty's very well-argued analysis; only, such a
complex phenomenon must not be traced back to this one main root; especially
not while letting other more evident roots in postmodern urban culture,
multimedia communication, and computerized literacy pass largely undiscussed.
She does mention, though, that "Difficulty in meeting other people and
connecting to them is indeed one of the best researched aspects of contemporary
social relationships" (57), with blogging circles acting as virtual
Utopian community to compensate for the shortcomings in "real" life.
Still,
one of the main strengths of Serfaty's book is her study of the continuity between
Romantic diaries—with the blank page instead of the screen acting as the
simultaneous mirror and veil—and contemporary personal weblogs. The image
of the mirror is developed with some remarkably clear applications of Lacanian
theory, especially Lacan's theorization of the construction of the self-image
and of the role of desire; while the diaries' interactivity leads Serfaty to
invoke Bakthin's polyphony. The book is quite free from theoretical obscurity,
though, and these post-structuralist theories are used in a spare and
illuminating way. A relatively small number of diaries are discussed, with a
handful of the diarists being subjected to closer scrutiny, especially as
regards the stylistics of their self-presentation and their negotiation of privacy
and of reader-response. The oralization of writing both in entries and in the
readers' commentaries is perhaps of especial interest from a stylistic
perspective; but Serfaty's study stands on the whole at the crossroads of
cultural studies, literary theory, sociology and stylistics.
"Humor
in Cyberspace" is the focus of the third chapter—humour analysed as
"a device enabling sociability, even as it gives expression to drives
society would rather keep hidden" (75). Self-deprecation is
common, a "fake modest" attitude which in fact projects the image of
the diarist as a clear-sighted observer, and controls the excesses of
sentimental egotism. Humour is then a particularly useful device in the
construction and negotiation of a public self-image so crucial to the diarists'
communicative project.
Chapter
four, "The Private-Public Divide" begins with a reflection on the
paradoxical function of the Internet in opening up "the closed space of
interiority onto a space that is far larger than itself, without being totally
public, however" (83). Here again Serfaty, like Lejeune (2000), emphasizes
the continity between the "public" nature of online diaries and the
deceptively "private" nature of manuscript intimate journals which as
a matter of fact were often published, and, as noted by Lejeune, were anyway
written in order to be read and re-read. "Contemporary media and the
Internet may therefore be said not only to prolong an age-old trend, but also
to conform to the underlying, inner structure of diaries" (Serfaty 85).
Diarists write for an implicit audience, and have to deal with the gap between
that implicit audience and the actual readers' responses–which, however,
tend to be largely encouraging and laudatory, in keeping with the bloggers'
unwritten etiquette. They have to face issues of intimacy, of possible conflict
between their online and offline identities, of the unwanted revelation of
oneself to one's own family or social circle, or with the possible betrayal of
the confidence of third parties. Online diaries thus amount to an investigation
of "the social limits to openness in any given social group–limits
which diarists trespass at their own risk" (87). One can never reveal the
same thing to everyone, and the consequences ensuing from the revelation of intimacy
can never be taken for granted. Most diaries, Serfaty notes, are rather bland
and are clearly concerned with publicising a socially acceptable version of the
self. But other diaries reflect, or act, on the potentially subversive nature
of the diaries' fusion of intimacy and publicity. Miles, one of the diarists,
argues that "We are all engaged in resisting the idea that we are
disempowered by being seen, or that we can only find empowerment by being
private. Some of us even suspect that the need for privacy plays right into the
dominance structures that are predicated upon one way observation" (qtd.
in Serfaty 89). Still, the private-public divide cannot be
overcome by fiat, and fear of transparency battles in all such diaries with the
desire for total self-revelation (90). The dream of total transparency is the
electronic version of nakedness in an electronically restored Golden Age, with
no veil whatsoever between self and other. But, Serfaty argues, language always
acts as a veil; at most, diarists can improve their own access to their inner
lives through the multiplication and externalization of representations. In
this respect, Serfaty provides an interesting interpretation of the use of
pseudonyms in blogs, arguing that "both the real name and the pseudonym
fulfil similar functions in online diaries" (93). While this analysis,
like her emphasis on the continuity between blogs and handwritten diaries, is
perceptive, it would seem to reveal only part of the stakes behind these
practices (a window and a veil, perhaps). Erotic diaries, the focus of a
specific section, lay bare (apart from much flesh, textual or photographic) the
element of seduction implicit in diary writing—in all writing, perhaps.
"Erotic diaries and weblogs strive towards total representation, but their
attempts, fortunately, always leave something to be desired" (97).
Issues of gender and desire are examined in chapter five, "Male and Female Cyberbodies", which begins with a discussion of the utopian and dystopian dimension of the Internet insofar as it promotes a new dimension of corporeity, providing its users with "cyberbodies" or "angelic bodies" as a virtual ground for self-fashioning strategies. A number of dimensions of this embodiment are examined: layout and pictures, chronological and narrative dimensions, attitudes to the software and hardware which are the support of cyberbodies, allusions to the "flesh" and other aspects of physical self, linguistic dimensions of corporeity, etc. The diarists' tantalizing poise between the extremes of secrecy and self-revelation also involves a politics of the body and gender, as many diaries "perhaps bespeak an obscure, unspoken attempt at coming out (Lejeune [2000]: 423), at achieving a self-revelation which would allow them to make their private and public selves coincide and hence put an end to the tension inevitably deriving from concealing important aspects of one's personality" (Serfaty 106)–it is hardly surprising, in view of this, that so many homosexuals choose to express their desires more openly through their cyberidentities, and that there are such a high proportion of lesbian and gay blogs. This is one way in which the management of a cyberbody/cybergender is a way of coming to terms with one's "offline" body and gender. On the whole, "the embodied identities in online diaries seem to blur conventional gender lines; fluiidity in self-definition appears to be the norm for both men and women, who use identical strategies to create and consolidate their fictional personae" (114). While this is hardly debatable, I do not think it warrants Serfaty's somewhat contradictory argument that gender "is not a useful category when looking at identity construction in online diaries" (115). There can be no struggle with gender definition if there is no gender definition, however implied, in the diarists' use of their flesh away from the machine, and no confrontation with culturally favoured generic patterns as they write. Other aspects of physicality approached by Serfaty involve the bloggers' location, use of snapshots of physical surroundings and other illustrations, attitudes to food and dieting, bodily symptoms and illness, or the expression of "normal" or "abnormal" bodily practices. On the whole, bloggers use their bodies "and their writing up of their experience of corporeity in order to integrate the discontinuous fragments of their identities, finally taking possession of their body through representation" (113)– although it often seems questionable whether the proliferation of representations ends in an appropriation and unification of self: learning to live with multiplicity and fragmentation, with an increasing multiplicity, would seem to be at least as common a result. For Serfaty, "that the attempt is doomed to fail is irrelevant inasmuch as the complex interplay of textual and graphic representations of corporetiy contains, in and of itself, both the means and the end of self-representational writing, where process is all" (114)—a conclusion which may be satisfactory for the analyst, but which will not provide much relief to those caught in the process. Finally, style and language use themselves become the ultimate site of embodiment; to bend a phrase, 'style is the cyborg'. "Online embodied writing thus becomes a fully rounded, thorough representation of corporeity channelling a necessarily self-defeating quest for a unified self" (122).
The book's conclusion harks back to Tocqueville's nightmare of the democratic citizen isolated from his community: "he lives next to them, but he does not see them, he neither touches them nor feels them" (qtd. in Serfaty 123), becoming quite literal in the virtual communities. The development of online interaction through blogs is a corollary of the development of modern individualism analyzed by Durkheim or Norbert Elias. The other side of the coin is, of course, the development of fellowship in virtual communities—a human contact always partly veiled—and the development of self-awareness through self-interaction on the screen—a mirror which hides as much as it reveals (mirrors hide the back of your head, to begin with).
The volume also includes 1) a short but useful bibliography on diary-writing, Internet weblogs, privacy, and virtual communities, 2) a webliography of online diaries cited, and 3) an index. It is well edited, written and insightful, and one finds few assumptions or intepretations to disagree with. Rodopi's volumes are not cheap, if we consider the leonine conditions their authors get, but in this case the price is not unreasonable.
For more details on the author, cover, orders, etc. see the book's page at the publisher's website, http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=AMAS+11
Amazon is more generous: they will sell it cheaper, and will let you peek at
the introduction here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/9042018038/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-1934509-5047860#reader-page
Alternatively, you can also
visit the author's own website http://www.chez.com/vserfaty/
Apparently, Serfaty doesn't keep a blog (maybe she uses a nickname), but you can read my own at http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/blog.html
—or, even better, start your
own right now, for instance at Blogger: http://www.blogger.com
1. On some quandaries
besetting taxonomists, see Gould (1990).
2. For an even more
up-to-date and comprehensive overview of blogs see Fievet and Turrettini (2004)
or Hewitt (2005). Earlier (and more recent) bibliography and webliography on
blogs can be accessed in the "Blogs" section of my Bibliography of
Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/bibliography.html
***
This review was originally
published by Atlantis 27.1 (June 2005): 117-22.
http://www.atlantisjournal.org/HTML%20Files/Tables%20of%20contents/27.1%20(2005).htm
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Gould, Stephen Jay 1990. "What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?" In Gould, In Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 355-65.
Hewitt, Hugh 2005. Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that's Changing Your World. Nashville: Nelson Books.
Fievet, Cyril, and Emily Turrettini 2004. Blog Story: Onde de choc. Paris: Eyrolles.
Lejeune, Philippe 2000. 'Cher écran': journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet. Paris: Seuil.
Rosenwald, Lawrence 1988. Emerson and the Art of the Diary. New York: Oxford UP.
Serfaty, Viviane 2002. L'Internet en politique, des
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