On weblogs and letters

in which T.V. inexplicably continues the metablogging discussion against his better judgement and indeed his very will

Jeff Ward, thinking recently about carless dudes, parataxis, and the "rhetoric of blogging," veered close to that blog = conversation equation again, and then later in clarification veered away from it.

Which got me thinking. The metadiscussion of blogging often relates it to "conversation" or "orality"--and I balked at this awhile back, even though the reasons for the comparison are there. Let me suggest a better analogue: letterwriting. This might let us have our cake and eat it. Letters inhabit a kind of middle ground between writing and orality. They are written, but they are formally dialogic in much the same way that speech is. Letters exist in the context of an ongoing correpsondence--they proceed by turn-taking, they respond to previous mentions and "calls," and they anticipate responses, which means that any statement made in a letter may have to be elaborated or revised or rescinded across narrative time in dialogue with another person. Statements are never finished in letterwriting the way they are in a "closed" form like an essay, which does not open itself formally to dialogue in the same raw way.

This dialogic aspect of a letter places it closer to orality than a "closed" essay form, and the letter's proximity to orality has always provided the potential for a mystique of authenticity even in the midst of a profusion of formal models for letterwriting. (This was particularly true in the great boom of Anglo-American middleclass letterwriting in the 18th century: Sam Richardson pushes the letter's mystique of authentic, spontaneous interiority to its fullest expression in Clarissa, and yet he started out publishing how-to books of letterwriting with unspontaneous models for every kind of "sincere" letter you could imagine: how to write a letter expressing grief, how to ask for money, how to resolve a dispute.) At least since the "sensibility" of the eighteenth-century, the letter has been readily confused or conflated with orality even though it's not oral.

And yet although it mimics some features of orality, the letter offers plenty of room for careful arrangement, hypotactic elaboration and various effects of "textuality" that are difficult to achieve in oral discourse--unless you've absorbed the structures of written language through advanced literacy in a major way. Letterwriting does in the end remain subordinated to the surprises of an ongoing exchange, but any given letter can choose the extent to which it "centrepitally" organizes itself into a self-contained, autonomous text or "centrifugally" yields itself up to the drift of the exchange. Generically, a letter is very fluid. It can move between the tight organization of a formal essay and a zippy one-liner which depends entirely on the narrative context for its sense and prompts an equally zippy response. Blog entries show a very similar flexibility and variety.

More analogies. In the eighteenth century, private letters often got passed around or even read aloud in families, so they were sometimes semi-public--and yet having even these semi-public letters fall into the wrong hands was felt as almost a bodily violation, as the epistolary novel frequently attests. The complicated issues of "circles of trust" and of writing for a peculiar space between privacy and publicity--so much a part of the epistolary tradition--find certain echoes in discussions of blogging. When I complained about feeling the Blog Panopticon a few posts ago, I got the impression that people just dismissed it as whining. But in fact a lot of bloggers report a kind of honeymoon's-over mood when blogging starts to feel not quasi-public but fully public. This point often seems to occur about four to six months after they start, and it is takes several forms. With the crystallizing of a "readership," some people report feeling that the weblog becomes an obligation or a monkey on the back rather than a playful pleasure. Or people report that, once the traffic rises above a certain point, a certain pall of self-censorship infects their writing--quite apart from their conscious intention.

For example, this from Alex Golub.

Or this more belated pause from Ruthie's Double (April 3):

I'm still ambivilant about being a public person. I want to be a secret.

Or here's a representative one that I copied to my commonplace file months ago:

I remember when my website felt more like a private space where other eyeballs were few and far between, but when I hit the double digit visitors a day mark, I got a creeping gut feeling that any word I wrote might well come back to haunt me. When the mark didn't stop there, I began to lose the courage to be myself on the Internet. I decided on a mostly opinionless, journalistic kind of personal expression. lettucethink.com

With a little archive surfing examples could be multiplied with ease. There's an interesting ambiguity here about the liminal point between a quasi-public circle of friends and a larger publicity that might threaten the unguarded expression made possible by that smaller circle. Epistolary expression in its golden age was very interested in this liminal point--interested in its tensions and interested, I think, in defending it. (Whether blogs allow one to occupy this liminal space is a question that I'm interested in but finally skeptical about--but clearly blogging evokes the question for people in much the same way that letterwriting once did.)

Here's something else that seems "epistolary" to me: you sometimes see the interplay between public interblog dialogue and a simultaneous, parallel private email correspondence between the same interlocutors. The "private" dicussion is sometimes quoted or alluded to in the public one. At other times it remains (presumably) a private matter between bloggers, kept private by mutual assent or some unspoken rules of ettiquette. This bears some comparison to ye olde letterwriting, though more caution is necessary here in drawing out the analogy. I'll stand by my previous assertion that the full global publicity of Web publication is distinctive, perhaps unique, in a way that remains underanalyzed and that tends to subvert all of these historical comparisons. Still, if you think about it, there are some familiar echoes with an older epistolarity.

I provide an instance. Postie textualists, so deeply in love with the Big Saussurean Grid in the Sky, like to pretend that there's nothing but public text and that interiorities and privacies are just rhetorical fictions. But it ain't true. Take the correspondence of one Esther Burr, mom of the duelling vice-prez, who wrote typical letters of Richardsonian intimacy to a close friend and yet also passed them around the family and mused about collecting them for publication at some unspecified date in the future. Therefore: sneeringly: "Bosh! All this guff about private interiority. But even in their most ostensibly 'private' moments they have the public in view. 'Privacy' is always a public performance."

But it's not so. For Esther and her friend also frequently included what they call "packets" within the letters, whose contents were alluded to very obliquely in the main text, with instructions to burn the packet after reading it. And, dear reader, the packets really were burnt. All of them. None have survived for literary history and their contents cannot be reconstructed from the hints in the main letters. This kind of intimate privacy, which was successfully shielded from public record, had numerous psychological and cultural effects which are very difficult to analyze precisely because they were shielded from the public record. This is all the more reason to take them seriously and not dismiss them as epiphenomena of a performance which is by circular definition always-already public.

Blogging practice sometimes echoes this double line of discourse, private alongside public, and this double mode has a lot to with building of trust (though I think the pressure of High Publicity is much greater in the age of blogging than in the golden age of the letter, and the problem of trust arguably greater).

So maybe blogs are like letters, if we think of the more complex and elaborate form that the letter took in the eighteenth century. When email established itself as part of our everyday lifeways a decade ago, there was a lot of lament about its brevity and illiteracy, its sinister supplanting of "real" letterwriting and all of the attendant pleasures. Email is very obviously an instance of secondary orality in which writing stays very close to the patterns of speech--and habits of real-time typed conversation in chat rooms and MOOs keep this proximity to orality pretty tight (and as for the lament: yeah, it's sort of true, but personally I always thought emoticons were cool. What better way to keep "writing" "oral" than to invent hieroglyphs for facial cues on the spot? The cultural efficiency of this instant development was sort of awe-inspiring to me, from a linguistic point of view).

We could see blogs as something like the return of the more nuanced and elaborated kind of letterwriting that we associate with the eighteenth-century epistolary novel and the Victorians--that is, the sort of letter whose demise was being lamented during the rise of email. The analogy seems all the more appropriate when you remember that in the eighteenth century the genre of "the letter" could stretch all the way from a private letter to those "letters to the editor" I was talking about in a previous post, which for awhile became a favorite way of expressing ideas in public. Once upon a time many public essays were actually "letterish," half closed, half open, private-public, formal-conversational. (Some critics claim that one of the necessary generic markers of the letter is a specific correspondent, but if that 'specific' correspondent can be the "Dear Sir" of the newspaper--which is a stand-in for the public sphere-- then we have a flexible genre indeed.)

Obviously there are differences between blogs and letters too. But I like this analogy better than most others. And since I like letters, it gives me something nice to say about weblogs for a change.

posted by Turbulent Velvet on 06/28/2002