I believe that memory aids us in our identity

here is a paper I wrote in High school

An identity is presented, taken up in the shape of writing. Is this how writing is discovered, as a conjunction of the narration of time and the stasis of the identity? Often the identity and the writing revolve around one another, each allowing the other some degree of temporal continuity. Seen in this light, the rhythm of writing only means: the rhythm of a limited heterogeneous identity. Writing preserves a self in time, guards against its dispersion through constructing particular motifs which the writer anticipates the reader will recognise. Indeed, the vanity of writing is precisely that it concerns the construction of an identity which plays into the hands of an imaginary “reader.” (The quotation marks do not indicate ironic distance, but the necessity to question the meaning of the term “reader”). The consequence of this relationship is that the passage of writing, like the enclosure of place, risks gradual estrangement as identity dissociates itself from the manner in which writing appears.

Prior to this blog, there was another attempt. Its contents have been erased, though traces, fitting to its contents, litter the caches and archives. The manner in which this previous blog emerged, the style adopted, today is alien to me. Reading it back, I see only hyperbolic indulgence at its worst. The writing remains where it began: at an impasse. Happily, the estrangement I experience from this old blog testifies to the disruption of identity and to the possibility of movement in time. With this present blog, I have made a deliberate effort to exorcise any stylistic affectations, to completely remove myself from the supposed tension between seduction and language. My failure to achieve this task is clear in that detachment has itself become an aesthetic stance. None of this particularly matters other than the two blogs are only brought together under the remembering gaze of the anonymous reader.

To think here of a blog and its readers: if such a relationship is possible, then it is surely only in terms of a passing-through, a transient encounter carried out, paradoxically, through the ritual of returning. I return to a blog, not as a continuation of thematic boundaries, but as a desiring curiosity, enforced by the presence of the writer’s identity. The sudden disappearance or silence of a blog often gives presence to the writing, in that the reader is obliged to turn the disruption back upon his self. In contrast, sometimes a writer of a blog will appear who will employ certain phrases and injunctions to their readers, as though they owe their readers a debt. This kind of cosy complicity, engineered to encourage a sense of community, seems entirely at odds with what is distinct about blogging: its fragmentedness and temporal discontinuity.

Given this strained relationship between a blog and its readers, how does the writing of a blog materialise in the non-face of the reader in time? As shame underpinned by the preservation of an outmoded continuity? Or as expectation marked by the need to maintain one’s readers? Both of these modes seem to celebrate the vanity of writing, as the presentation of a particular identity, soon to fall from its temporal foreground. Shame corroborates the false image of a delimited identity: expectation confers legitimacy to blogging, which sees itself as having definite future. As such, both position writing in time, and apprehend it remaining there.

To (over)think the relationship between a blog and its readers is thus to face the decay of writing. Writing falls from sight, disappearing from the gaze of the reader (in the case of the blog this is a literal move, as writing moves sequentially downwards). In the disappearance, the reliance on the non-presence of the reader to give presence intensifies. Excessive hyper-linking, backtracking, and allusions to other posts are all natural attempts to place blogging at an intermediary centre between writing and identity. The emphasis on the past-tense confirms the desire to express the fact thateven blogging has a history, and that such a history deserves to be tacitly acknowledged. From this position, the decay of writing is not to be understood as a loss of presence, but instead, as the formation of a superimposed order of time, in effect a mutated presence, and realised only through the disclosure of temporal discontinuity.