The Presentation of Self in Everyday Blogging

I posted an early variant of this with Frank Wilson.

The blogosphere/identity issue didn't remind me of Goffman. It reminded me of "Borges and I" ("Borges y Yo"), one of Jorges Luis Borges' most famous short essays. It appeared in "Labyrinths" (1962) and "Dreamtigers" (1972), but I can't find when it was originally written in Spanish (probably much earlier -- ergo, he missed Goffman's 1959 text).

In the piece, Borges posits two people named "Borges" ("The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to") -- the writer created by his writings, and this Borges, the personal one, the "real" one. Borges being Borges, he playfully confuses things ("I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography" -- a good trick when you're blind). But then, theirs is a complicated connection, one with certain tensions: "It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me."

Utlimately, it's even a tragic relationship, a trap, the writer and his writing, even human consciousness or self-awareness itself -- just another one of Borges' impenetrable labyrinths: "Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

"I do not know which of us has written this page.

Did you mean "On Cooling the Mark Out"? A quick Google finds the text and these comments from your co-blogger as well as a bunch of JSTOR papers that use the idiom.

I know the Borges piece but hadn't thought of it in this connection -- good call.

And yes, that is the Goffman paper I meant. (To my ear "cooling out the mark" flows more naturally, so I misremembered the title.) Glad to know it's available.

But the transcription could use a copyedit, and it's not easy on the eyes in that format. Recommend reading it in print, if possible.