On confession

I have a habit of writing things through, particularly questions I’d rather not answer, or answered with the sensation that I left something dangling.  I’m a ruminator (oh how I wish that sounded ominous).  Ideas percolate while I’m on the metro, idly trolling through grocery store aisles, walking the dog.  This isn’t like that Seinfeld episode in which George only comes up with the perfect comeback days later – those are always at the ready.  But the meaningful responses to genuine questions have to actually be thought out, and usually away from the questioner.

I’ve gone so far as to create a separate file in which all of my ruminated and thought-out and scripted responses are kept.  They can be written, and revised, and edited, and re-written, so long as they get saved under the innocuous filename of “emails” (and thus, according to Speech Act Theory, making them emails). They rarely go anywhere, but I keep them because it’s good to know that at some (past the tipping) point I figured out the perfect thing to say, came up with a searing elucidation on what exactly it is that I mean.

I’m now ruminating upon this rumination – in working through Chapter Four I’m messing around with Foucault’s interpretations and uses of ‘confession.’ He talks about confession as a means of producing ‘truth’ (specifically in relation to sexuality; while central to my chapter, that’s not the part I’m interested in here).

…seeking the fundamental relation to the true, not simply in oneself – in some forgotten knowledge or in a certain primal trace – but in the self-examination that yields, through a multitude of fleeting impressions, the basic certainties of consciousness.  The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface.

Foucault talks about how this act, this ritual, is bound up in and enacts arrangements of power; even if you are just dragging confessions out of yourself into unsent emails there is a virtual or presumed arbiter and a mechanism of forgiveness – an internalized sense not of social propriety so much as an injunction toward individualization (which is, however, bound up in and judged by external shoulds and oughts).  We cannot pinpoint something as a ‘sin’ worth recounting without a sense of what norms we have transgressed.  Confession is recognized not only by its degree of difficulty but also by its implicit potential for exacting change:

…a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated . . . a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modification in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.

To a certain degree this is a matter of pattern recognition, that one of these things is not like the other.  What I confess, the truths of self I produce, are through the act of confession marked as different, through this process identified as somehow noteworthy, having bearing on how the ‘me’ they narrate fits – or doesn’t, or could, or needs to – into larger structures or forms of social control.  And along the way they’re ideally to tweak this ‘me,’ so that I become fitter, happier, more productive, not drinking too much…

Which isn’t to say I’m going to stop writing faux emails.  Or that I don’t believe something personally valuable can be gained through such reflection (which would invalidate this whole blogging thing).  Just another instance of life imitating theory, that’s all.