"Dear diary"

Politics of the confessional

Tracey Emin, “Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made” (1996)

Me voici.

I return to this newsletter after quite an absence, after assuming for sometime that it could not (would not?) be revived. Original subscribers will be not be surprised to hear that I remain skeptical of the desire to publicise, instrumentalise, and optimise every corner of our lives. Those who identify as culture writers will also know the pressure to always be sharing opinions, to instantly have a ‘take’ in a way that I find ungenerous. It mimics the temporality of crisis and scarcity—we reach for the closest thought, which is not always the right one, and almost never the most interesting. I find that these conditions encourage us to think quickly rather than deeply, and to believe unfailingly in the importance of our own voice. Substack reinforces this: the newspaper and magazine forms are dying, and with it their chorus of writers and collaborative editorial processes, replaced by the heroic, intrepid, entrepreneurial individual. Call it celebrity, cell it neoliberalism, call it branding—in any case, it makes me worry about the future of media and public discourse.

I wonder whether this privileging of the personal also has something to do with the recent turn in publishing toward the format of the diary. A few weeks ago, I went to a launch event for Sheila Heti’s new Alphabetical Diaries, in which Heti recomposes scraps of diaristic observation from the past decade or so and organises the sentences alphabetically, rather than chronologically. I have yet to read the book, but the excerpt that she recited at the event was beautiful. I wonder whether there is something more intimate about eschewing order and sense, shedding the didactic narrative arc of the personal essay, and foregrounding something haptic, fleeting, and scrappy? I mean this literally, considering that my other case study would be Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (2023), which takes the form of brief observations and personal ephemera that take seriously the debris of everyday life as meaningful, even theoretical.

This diaristic mode is concerned with a sort of random assortment of details that lack closure and so create room for dissonance, flux, and contradiction. Cynically, I also imagine that they offer a kind of straightforwardness for publishers as they seemingly require less editorial oversight (spelling and grammatical errors are often purposefully left in published diaries). Whether this is true or not, they certainly create the effect of the unmediated and immediate, a fetish particular to late capitalism where consumers feel disconnected and disembodied. In her classic book of literary criticism Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, the academic Rita Felski describes the marketability of the confessional genre as having the effect of authenticity—a term coveted even more highly today than when she was writing in the 1980s.

Authenticity has a vexed status here (and for me in general—I don’t really believe in it). Heti’s project in Alphabetical Diaries is, by her own admission, exactly that: a project. I recently read Lauren Elkin’s Paris bus diary, No. 91/92, which has the same ambition to eventually be read, to be worked on deliberately as a kind of literary output. Literature scholars tend to distinguish this form of writing from what they call the journal intime (say in French), which is meant to be private, though may eventually be published posthumously. Yet—being the deconstructionist that I am—I am still skeptical that such a purely private and personal state exists. Indeed, intime translates to both “private” and “intimate” which to me are decidedly not the same—intimacy suggests proximity, and therefore necessitates an Other. It is continuous with privacy only insofar as it is a privacy that is shared. One’s intimates are trusted friends and family—confidants. And in a vestimentary sense, intimates reference lingerie, that which both shows and conceals at the same time.

This dynamic between the diary and the self has been a self-conscious part of feminist writing projects for generations. Most famously, perhaps, Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1998) meshes the epistolary genre (letter-writing) with the diary; her unhinged, wonderful communiqués to the man with whom she is in love from afar, Dick, eventually collapse into treatises on art, gender, and philosophy, such that Chris suggests “Dear Dick” has started to become “Dear Diary.” Understanding the loved object as also always a projection, a phantasm that is purely abstract or imaginary, Chris performs a writing to ‘Dick’ that is really a writing to herself (which is also to say psychoanalytically that she claims the phallus).

Almost a century prior, the 19 year old Mary MacLane did something similar with her incendiary I Await the Devil’s Coming (1901, then published as the much less interesting The Story of Mary MacLane). As a teenager in Butte, Montana, MacLane felt bored and dissatisfied with life, and so wrote a diary that foregrounded her yearning and thus declared the self she longed to be, writing a wild literary persona into existence. It worked—the diary sold 100,000 copies during its first month. For both Kraus and MacLane, perhaps the diary was less about hiding and more about being seen. Perhaps it always has been.

I am inclined to turn to Michel Foucault, who would wisely tell us that confession is not about the catharsis of repression, but is rather impelled by power—confession is encouraged and constitutes subjectivity and discourse, rather than evading its snare. Kraus and MacLane both participate in and mess with this, but the concept is still extremely applicable to our time, where visibility is equated with empowerment, wherein the revelation of secrets is seen as a good. Feminism in particular has been susceptible to repackaging through the confessional genre, sold as a project of personal development where the literal movement from private to public is an end unto itself.

I have very little interest in participating in this genre, though I am interested in the form of the diary, or the diaristic book or newsletter, for its expediency—for describing and accounting, rather than offering something that is complete, that has an arc. I confess (ha!) that I want to save much of my more precise analytical labour for projects that, quite frankly, pay and get read widely. But I also like that the diary can be a means of refining one’s faculties of attention—last year at Charleston Festival, I heard Margo Jefferson and Olivia Laing speak about the republication of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and Jefferson said that for her the diary is useful as a critic, since it allows her to actually figure out how a work of art made her feel, rather than simply slipping into a stock reaction or template. As I attempt to resuscitate this newsletter, perhaps that will be something like my intention: figuring it out as I go, bending away from convention without claiming to transcend it, thinking and writing as a process and not a final, sealed destination.

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What I’ve Been Writing

• In September, I interviewed Lauren Elkin about her new book Art Monsters for LARB, discussing the canon of feminist art and how she composed such a thorough and roving book on the subject. For what it’s worth, I also liked Grace Byron’s negative review of the book—even if we differ in a couple of our readings, I think her overarching arguments about transgression as genre and aesthetic offer a compelling and necessary point of departure.

• Toward the end of last year, I did a lot of film coverage. I took part in a program for emerging critics at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and wrote reviews of Fingernails and Orlando, My Political Biography. I also wrote a cover story on the legendary filmmaker/artist Joan Jonas, which appeared in Document’s Winter issue.

What I’ve Been Reading

• I am currently in the final stages of reading for my PhD Special Fields exam, sometimes also known as a Qualifying Exam. Basically, I have a list of 90 foundational texts split across two fields (my Major Field is 20th and 21st-century American literature and my Minor field brings together gender & sexuality studies with performance theory) that I have been reading since July and on which I will take a three-week exam at the end of April. I haven’t read much of anything off the list, so highlights have ranged from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.

• For Lux, Emily Janikiram and Megan Lessard write a terrific essay called “Tradwives and Femcels” that unpacks the co-optation of feminism against abortion rights, trans liberation, and alternative kinship/non-marriage. These attacks are not just coming from incels or far-right podcasters, but from “self-styled radicals” who often align themselves with the Left, socialism, or skepticism about liberal capitalism. In other words, the call is coming from inside the house, and we need to shut it down. I’m deeply concerned about the revival of heteropatriarchal normativity and the mental gymnastics that people are willing to perform to defend it these days. (As it happens, I am currently polishing a conference presentation on this very subject—something along the lines of Namwali Serpell’s reading of what she calls the “hit me novel”.)

• Ben Tarnoff’s takedown of Elon Musk, “Ultra Hardcore,” ran in a January issue of NYR, but I continue to reference it as a definitive summary for everything that I hate about Musk and that for which (and for whom) he stands.

What I’ve Been Watching

• Through Le Cinéma Club, I watched Jumana Manna’s Foragers (2022), a docu-fiction hybrid project that investigates the Israeli prohibition on harvesting za’atar and ‘akkoub, staple plants in Palestinian and Arab cooking. In an accompanying essay for e-flux, Manna poignantly describes the relationships between occupation, home, loss, and environmental justice, as well as how certain forms of life are deemed worthy of protection over/by others. The documentary is likewise a reminder of the quotidian struggles for culture and survival that predate the current genocide in Gaza, which includes starvation and the weaponisation/targeting of nutritional aid. To that end, there are a few signed books left in the fundraiser Books for Gaza, which has so far raised £69K for critically injured children in Gaza, or you can also donate to the fund directly.

• Feminist cinema: As much as I am a known Greta Gerwig fanatic, I have found the hype for Barbie disconcerting, largely because of how it has been hailed as a revolutionary work of feminist cinema… mainly by people who seem to know absolutely nothing about feminist cinema. I say this with as little snark as possible, but more so frustration at the fact that for many casual film watchers, Barbie is not only a feminist film (dubious) but the feminist film, as if it is the pioneer of a genre, and not a tepid entry into a tradition that has in fact had a long and rich life (and that has arguably lost rather than gained ground in recent years). To those who wish to break such an illusion, I offer a very brief list of essential alternatives culled from my list in Gender/Sexuality/Performance theory for my PhD exams: Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce (1975), Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996), and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Needless to say, there are plenty more where they came from, but I think these are each exemplary in their own ways of different but complementary goals.