Reconstruction 6.4 (2006)
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Blogging and (Expatriate) Identity / Lauren Elkin
<1> In Lettres parisiennes: Histoires d'exil, an exchange of letters on exile between francophone writers Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbah, Huston, a native of Alberta, Canada who moved to Paris in her early twenties, explains that she doesn't write in cafes because she would hate to be mistaken for the stereotypical "American in Paris": "one of those young women who I resemble a little too closely, with their blue, blue eyes and their bizarrely healthy skin, who you find sitting at café tables scribbling ostensibly in their diaries ("today: Mona Lisa") or filling out postcards ("Dear John, can you believe it? I'm writing to you from a café in Montparnasse!")."[1]
<2> In 1985, when Huston and Sebbah's correspondence took place, the web log, or "blog," was still a full decade away. But Huston and Sebbah, in their collaborative attempt to articulate the particularities of their existence as foreigners in France, share a similar set of aims and methodology as (expatriate) bloggers today--who would be equally loathe to be classified along with that stereotyped américaine à Paris.
<3> At this point I think we can safely say that personal narrative as the construction of identity is intrinsic to blogging as a genre, and that as bloggers we have a serious aversion to being taken for being a certain kind of blogger, the LiveJournaler par excellence. If we accept autobiographical writing to be the construction of the self through language, then it follows that personal blogs, which recount the daily vicissitudes of the blogger, are, then, another form of self-creation or identity production, and just as the American in Paris does not wish to be taken for the wrong sort--the tourist, or the philistine, say--the blogger does not wish to be confused with certain other strains of bloggers--for example, the teenybopper or the mommyblogger. And in this brief introduction, I will use the sub-genre of the expatriate blog to explore blogging as identity construction, to qualify the relationship between reader and writer and, more generally, to try to articulate why we blog--which was, after all, why we sent out a call for contributions to a wide range of bloggers to contribute to this special issue of Reconstruction.
<4> Expatriate blogs are generally personal blogs, drawing on the experiences of the blogger and the knowledge they accrue of their adopted country to recount the exotic, the mundane, the challenging, and the fascinating aspects of their new lives. The experience of living in a foreign country has ever been a bottomless well of inspiration for writers; when you pair that impulse with the uncharted possibilities of the blogosphere, the result is a proliferation of expatriate blogs. There are in fact several directory sites (www.expat-blog.com, www.GlobeofBlogs.com) which provide paired listings the various nationalities of the expatriate bloggers and the countries from which they blog.
<5> It is not surprising that personal blogs flourish when the writer is in a new, challenging context. The encounter of the Self and the Other, the decision to leave the Familiar for the Unfamiliar, and the alchemical processes evinced on the already unstable, already susceptible being that is the Self provides potent inspiration and material. It can be a spectacular thing to read, the expat blog; a multimedia, hypertext travelogue; and it often attracts readers who are or who would like to be in similarly exotic and challenging situations.
<6> As Huston and Sebbah discover over the course of their correspondence, for the expatriate writer, foreign soil is often more fertile than that of their native land: there is something in the experience of being a foreigner that gives root to inspiration, which in turn produces writing like ivy wrapping itself around a tree. But all this organic literary production relies on the distance retained from the adopted land, as well as the distance from the place of origin.
<7> The same is true for the expatriate blogger. In order for the blog topics to remain compelling for the reader, I would argue that the blogger must not get too close or assimilate too deeply to the adopted culture. Everything depends on the blogger's ability to stand back and comment on what they see in such a way that they are still able to present it as interesting and fresh for their readers, and perhaps, by so doing, understanding and making the new experience part of themselves. Once blogged, the experience can be absorbed into the Self, which is always already in the process of comglomeration and transformation.
<8> My own interest in blogging has flourished during my years as a foreigner living in Paris. When I first started my blog, Maitresse, I was still living in New York. It was not the first time I had experimented with rotating copy on a website; I had maintained an earlier site featuring photos, daily quotes, and quirky little stories on Geocities as early as 2001. So I felt a bit belated, opening up a Blogger account in 2004, but it also felt as if I were checking back in with a project I had begun several years before. Nevertheless, because of the extraordinary time constraints I was under as a graduate student at the time, I didn't get around to writing regularly in the blog until that summer, and when I moved to Paris in September 2004 it finally took off. Before, I had had the impulse to blog but no real reason to describe my life in such detail, but when I moved to Paris, suddenly what I was doing on an everyday basis became something to recount, and something people wanted to read.
<9> At first I regarded the blog as a means of letting my family and friends follow along on my adventures, but soon I had attracted a readership of perfect strangers who either longed to move to France or who already had. In addition to people who already knew me, my readers were composed of those who lived vicariously through "Maitresse," or other expatriates looking around to see how other people in similar situations were managing. I set out my own personal quest to demystify the Paris mystique, not to contribute to the unrealistically romantic myth of the "city of lights," but to extend some of that light on the senseless, cumbersome, and maddening bureaucracy, the inadequacies and paradoxes of the university system, the strict social hierarchies and fragile male psyches, but also the surprising everyday beauty, the charm and the heightened quality of life--in short, the agony and the ecstasy of being a writer and a researcher, and, above all else, a foreigner, in Paris.
<10> As time went on, a core group of Paris bloggers emerged; we linked to each other, commented on each others' blogs, met up in real life, and formed real friendships that nevertheless were based on a bizarre foreknowledge of the others' thoughts, feelings, and experiences culled from months of reading their writing. At this moment I can safely say, and not without some embarrassment, that the bulk of my social life in Paris was constituted through the internet. (See here for a centralized list of my Paris expat cohorts).
<11> And yet despite all that my blog has added to my life, I still occasionally chafe under the restrictions that come along with it; time and again I run up against inflexible boundaries in terms of what subject matter I can cover. The fact is, my readership is there because they want to hear about my life in Paris. And I have found the only way to write about Paris in a way that keeps the readers interested means keeping my adopted country at arm's length. I've discovered that I can only blog about Paris if I remain a foreigner in Paris; as I assimilate, I start to regard things as normale that a few years ago would have struck me as extraordinary. I'm losing my critical edge when it comes to everyday life, and sharpening it when I run into the more irritating aspects of life in France. Consequently, I find that I now only write about Paris or the French when I'm complaining--and no one like a grumpy blogger.
<12> With time, as I've begun to assimilate and settle down here, I've necessarily refocused concentrated my attention on my career, and I am no longer as attentive to Paris as I am to my reading, my novel, my dissertation. But I can't drag my readers anywhere they don't want to go, and the stats and comments don't lie: a post I wrote on DH Lawrence recently received three comments, while a post I wrote on the film " Paris je t'aime" garnered thirty-one.
<13> The extent to which bloggers allow reader response to affect their choice of subject varies from each to each, but it is an aspect which certainly cannot be ignored, and sets blogs distinctly apart from other forms of writing. And to acknowledge the power the reader has over the blogger, and the blogger over the reader, is to begin to quantify the power of blogs. A blog, no matter what kind, may give the illusion of being about the blogger, but this is not entirely true. It goes without saying that a blog is only as good as its blogger, but it bears pointing out that a blog is also only as good as its readership. F or this and other reasons, I would describe the relationship between reader and blogger as mutually constituitive; each exists in a dynamic, co-creative, and parasitic relationship to the other.
<14> When it works, the relationship is mutually beneficial, but when it does not work, it can turn blogging into what Jenn at Reappropriate terms a "service industry":
When blogs build up established readerships, readers (understandably) return to the blog to read certain kinds of posts, a certain level of analysis, or a certain number of new posts each day. When blogging becomes a service industry, because of the anonymity of the Internet and the Blogosphere, readers can become demanding without much thought as to the human face behind the writing (even though they are ironically reading the blogger's public diary). They can feel entitled to certain kinds of treatment from the blogger they are reading, forgetting that the blogger is not only writing the content that entertains them, but often pays for the bandwidth and moderates the comment and discussion without receiving anything substantial in return. Conversely, some bloggers can be disappointed when a magnum opus doesn't get the kind of desired response: perhaps they can't get the number of readers they want or no matter how hard they try, the point of the original post is missed.
<15> The writer of the expatriate blog, is in a heightened state of alarm, and a markedly pronounced state of performance. No less is at stake than his life choices, and his right to live and observe and judge and form opinions. A writer wants to be read; an expatriate writer wants, all at once, to be read, and approved of, and supported, and, though not all would admit it, to impress, and to project a certain identity. The quality of the identity varies from blogger to blogger, but the moment the writing begins a performance is underway.
<16> The reader, on the other hand, brings as much of an agenda to the blog as the blogger. The reader may irrationally love or detest the writer, who they may have never even met; in the best of situations the blogger may serve as an inspiration for the reader to make certain changes in his own life. The reader empathizes with the writer's experiences, and envies them, and assesses them based on his own lived or longed-for experience. Finally, the reader wields the power to transform the blogger's experience from a harmless narcissistic activity to, as Jenn at Reappropriate writes, a "masochistic habit." On more than one occasion I've been the victim of what has been termed "drive-by commenting," where readers leave truly cutting or overly critical comments in the box, and I'm certainly not alone in this.
<17> Anticipating or responding to this vexed relationship, some bloggers choose to present their own, almost self-deprecating, defense: "Don't Hate Me Because I Live in Paris," reads Paris blogger La Coquette's tagline. "Le Meg has been playing the fool in Paris since 2004," reads Le Blagueur's. Expat bloggers almost invariably mock their own attempts to speak the language, and recount their social gaffes and faux pas, largely, it would seem, in order not to seem as if they are trying to outdo anyone else--and certainly not the reader, who may at any moment rise up and accuse the blogger of narcissism or pretension. Some expat blogs go even further and present themselves in opposition to the language or the myth of the foreign location, by obstinately refusing to learn it, and by averring their complete lack of interest in the new location prior to the move. Like Huston, these bloggers feel there is more integrity in refusing the myth altogether than attempting to modify it.
<18> So, faced with this complicated relationship between reader and writer, why blog at all? Our question went out to bloggers of all stripes and persuasions. We received, in return, a barrage of thoughtful responses ranging from the earnest to the revolutionary. They are here, in the section which follows, and they are well worth reading.
<19> When I read the responses, I was relieved to find my observations borne out by these other bloggers, people I hadn't heard of but who shared similar objectives and ran up against the similar frustrations and limitations. Emerald Tina, an American blogging from Iran, describes similarly the way blogging can keep the blogger at a distance from her adopted country, except in her case, she is keeping her distance from the potentially dangerous culture in which she lives. "I don't want to get used to things in Iran even though I am getting used to things," she writes. "The blog keeps me sharp. It keeps me from catching the Iranian's depression and keeps me from losing myself in their problems."
<20> The blogophere is, without a doubt, a dystopic utopia, a space where it seems at first that anything is possible. The limitations of identity, however, encroach, severely curbing what is actually possible. Nearly all of the essays here deal with the way blogging constructs, mitigates, or confirms a certain identity; even when treating the power of blogging as an alternative media, identity enters in, the image of the blogger as the more committed writer, journalist, detective, the maverick as opposed to the mainstream media drudge. As Douglas Rushkoff has it, "The question of the authentic life is at stake. Whose life is more authentic: the reader who has stayed home, or the writer who has left home in order to tailor life more to his standards?"
<21> The Happy Tutor argues that the internet is the perfect panopticon--that although it gives the illusion of being an open, public space where we can " run around wearing silly masks as at Carnival" while criticizing everything that normal everyday standards of comportment would forbid, in fact we are constantly under surveillance, and everything we write may at some point in the future be held against us. What we write on our blogs is always subject to judgment--if we remain anonymous, by our readers, and if we are not anonymous, by friends, family, colleagues, students, and, most worrying of all, a job committee. "Your so-called "real life," or "authentic self" is held in place by certain markers and rules, your Social Security number, your credit score, your resume or rap sheet, your job, the automobile registration, the handgun permit, the license for your dog, the petty rules of good manners, the neighbors watching your comings and goings, your boss, paycheck, policy and procedure manual, job description, org chart, and time clock. That is enough to make reality real."
<22> So if our "real" selves are held in place by rules and regulations, and if the blogosphere is subject to its own lot of rules and regulations, how are our blog selves different from our real selves? Why blog, then, if there is only an illusion of freedom?
<23> The Happy Tutor, for one, has elected not to blog. Other bloggers, however, find blogging to be about more than saying something you wouldn't say with your name attached to it.
<24> The collective aspect of blogging is, as I've proposed elsewhere, what sets it apart from other forms of media. In addition to the mutually constituitive relationship between reader and writer, there are the possibilities of group blogging, the open-source movement, and Wiki. The bloggers featured here unanimously agree that it is through its collaborative aspect and its potential to critique the late-capitalist mainstream media that blogging derives its power. This may take place on a microcosmic or macrocosmic level: Something About Harry writes, " In publishing my articles on the internet and in a blog, I receive the benefit of sharing my knowledge and small kernels of wisdom to others that might find it useful in the future"--whereas Robert Chrysler compares blogging to "storming the gates of the Bastille."
<25> According to MickeyZ, "The corporate media is a [...] potent impetus for the proliferation of blogs. More specifically, it's the shrinking limits of debate within the corporate-dominated elite media that have inspired many a blogger." And Rebecca Blood suggests that " The weblog's greatest strength -- its uncensored, unmediated, uncontrolled voice -- is also its greatest weakness. News outlets may be ultimately beholden to advertising interests, and reporters may have a strong incentive for remaining on good terms with their sources in order to remain in the loop; but because they are businesses with salaries to pay, advertisers to please, and audiences to attract and hold, professional news organizations have a vested interest in upholding certain standards so that readers keep subscribing and advertisers keep buying. Weblogs, with only minor costs and little hope of significant financial gain, have no such incentives."
<26> Whatever the blog, whatever the purpose of the blogger, the most accurate and the most questionable assessment is articulated by Sinthome on the way the seemingly negative aspects of the reader-blogger relationship can in fact be beneficial for both: "The net enhances are our possibilities for being irritated, which in turn leads to further development of the structures underlying our thought."
<27> It's a brand new genre, blogging. Who knows if it will last--we don't exactly know what we're doing with it, we don't exactly know what we're trying to say, and we're figuring out our narratives as we go along. As Geoff Klock writes, blogging helps the blogger realize his or her larger narrative: "Blogging allows each little observation worthy of a bigger argument to be published, and available, before the book they belong in has been written, or even imagined." Regardless of the status of blogging as a genre, what endures is the attempt, through writing, to know ourselves.
Notes
[1] My translation. Original citation : « Contrairement à toi, ne j'écris pour ainsi dire jamais dans les cafés, et cela par principe (certainement lié à mon ‘exil' à moi) : j'aurais peur de ressembler à une ‘Américaine à Paris', une de ces jeunes femmes qui me ressemblent trop, justement, avec leurs yeux si bleus et leur peau si maladivement saine, et que je vois attablées aux terrasses en train de griffonner ostensiblement dans leur journal intime (‘Aujourd'hui : Mona Lisa') ou de remplir des aérogrammes (‘Cher John, le croirais-tu ?, je t'écris depuis une terrasse de café à Montparnasse !) » (Paris, Bernard Barrault, 1986, p. 11). [^]