on blogging

Original Remixed is a blog without a theme. I’m beginning, as I usually do in life, by breaking the rules.

I know, the world does not need another blog, even less, a blog about nothing in particular.

So why do it?

Well, there is a certain appeal – the whole desire to be known, understood – and I have thought about it for a long time, since I knew such things as blogs existed. I have spent countless hours tweaking the minima template on Blogger, but never got around to writing very much. The whole ideas to paper thing has always been exceedingly difficult for me. I write well enough, but not easily. I like the idea of writing, not the practice.

The real stumbling block was deciding what to write about. I have a number of interests, but no real expertise. Opinions, but they don’t count for much. For a while I thought I might have two or three blogs – one for commentary, one for reflections, yet another to chart my creative endeavors, knitting projects and the like. But what about finances, homeschooling, yoga, cool people, cool companies? To separate my interests like that would be disingenuous. Someone reading the knitting blog would think of me as a knitter and someone reading the anti-globalization/alternatives to capitalism blog would think of me as a wannabe intellectual. Neither would be accurate; in real life I am a complete dilettante. If I am successful at anything it is in having integrated my multiple interests into something of a seamless life, though I have no clue what the glue is holding it all together. My life lacks a unifying theme.

And the reality is multiple blogs mean multiple balls in the air, and my life is enough of a juggling act already. I have a full-time (and challenging) job, I homeschool a ten-year-old, and as if that weren’t enough, I am finishing an MBA – all while doing my best to stay hip, tranquil, and fit, see an occasional movie, eat home cooked meals.

Blogging can’t be another project, another “to do,” or it simply won’t get done. I won’t even keep up one blog.

I am wondering, though, if it could be a tool – if blogging, while letting me practice writing, find my voice, so to speak, could make my life easier.

According to the British psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas, the goal of analysis then is the restoration of “true subjectivity,” which he defines as “that understanding of oneself that permits us sentient knowledge of the originating activity behind our experience of ourself and our objects.” Paradoxically, the receptive capacity, which renders the patient capable of self-understanding, is only achieved by having been understood. This raises the question whether it is necessary to have been understood by another. Is it possible, outside of an analytic relationship, to develop this capacity? Could a journal, a BLOG, serve, like the analytic relationship, as a holding space for what the poet Wordsworth describes as “emotions recollected in tranquility.” (See The Shadow of the Objects: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known.)

Wordsworth’s experience suggests that tranquility is a precondition of evocative experience. I have found activities that quiet the mind – meditation, yoga – to be very healing, writing less so. For me writing is often disintegrative, things fall apart before they come together. But the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recommends creative endeavors, practices that, like psychoanalysis, provide access to the unconscious.

This suggests blogging could replicate the analytic experience, or aspects of it. Typically, in the course of analysis, the analyst initiates the patient in a new relationship to the self as object. According to Bollas, there are multiple transferences at work, and multiple counter transferences. As the analyst shares with the patient his experience of his counter transference and later, as the patient begins to attend to the internal counter transference, the so-called “grammar of the ego,” heretofore inaccessible to the cognitive processes, is revealed. Bollas writes, “[b]y rediscovering this dead language the patient can now occupy that position that the analyst has been occupying; the analysand can now receive his own discourse.” Whereas prior to the analysis, the discourse was uttered only through the patient’s manner of being, in such a way it could not be received, now “the discourse is uttered to an internal other, that other constituted in the patient through identification with the function and psychosomatic race of the analyst.” The analyst becomes part of the intrapsychic world of the patient; the inclusion of the empathic analyst in the internal discourse transforms the internal “other.” The analytic space is recreated internally in such a way that the patient is given “a more generative way of holding the self as an object of care.” The patient “internalizes the analyst’s receptive capacity in his own relation to himself as object,” allowing for the emergence of more authentic way of being.

Writing, for all its difficulty, is a transformative tool. This may explain its difficulty – writer’s block is not a resistance to writing so much as a resistance to change. In the process, we engage ourselves as “other” and in the internal dialogue, something happens. There is a shift, on two levels. On an epistemological level, we begin to see things differently. And on an existential level, we discover we are different (but, ironically, not the less authentic for having changed).

It is in these moments, when meaning begins to emerge from within, when it becomes something lived and not thought, that we outgrow our narratives, our external structures, sometimes, our relationships. A new way of being suggests itself. This capacity for self-reflection is, according to Stephen Mitchell, what marks the analysand’s readiness to move on. To the extent writing, or blogging, develops this capacity, I think it could be a viable alternative to analysis.

There is an element of narcissism in blogging, and I am aware of it. But there is a narcissistic phase to analysis too; it’s part of the cure. Overall, I think the blogosphere is a good thing. I think it is as level a playing field as the humble crafter will find in this world. There are some beautiful, inspiring, understated blogs out there, and I think we would all be better off if more people engaged in such creative acts, in pursuit of self-knowledge. In the end, ironically, it is getting to know ourselves, becoming who we are, that allows us to move beyond narcissism. Julia Kristeva has noted the connection between self-knowledge and the ethical awareness found in Buddhism: “The Buddhist ethical ideals of compassion and wisdom arise from meditation and other practices giving access to self-knowledge; they function as an expression both of the emptiness of the self and of the essential inter-relatedness of all that exists.” (See her essay “Kristeva’s Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing.)

A long apology for yet another blog. This need to apologize is something I’m working on.