I totally understand Foucault's position on the confessional...

I just can't successfully summarize it.

"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; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence..."(Foucault 60).

Okay...so, we as people feel as though we should confess because we believe that the truth will set us free. If the way we act is contrary to what appears to be common, we feel as though the way we act is invisible, ignored...and thus, as the doer of the deed, we don't exist without the acknowledgement of the deed. We want to exist...existence is measured by being acknowledged by those who have power? So we confess, and our audience now has the knowledge of "who we are" and can place a value judgment on it. The confessional machine, in this case, would be easy to subvert. Still compelled to have an existence in order to form communities or dispel fear of deviance, our confessions can use and reclaim language flung at us by those that judge us, be made unstable through literary or musical devices...that way, we are still constructing ourselves (which in a way ensures our survival), but making these selves slippery to "power..."

Again, I need to rearticulate the trouble with normal...

Being silenced by power is what normalizes. It reduces action to meaningless, easy-to-swallow identity categories...

So wait, with all of this silencing how can we silence this power?

Subvert the confession machine.

Critical theory gives me a headache. I want poetry.

Beauty is a reason to get up in the morning. I live to be in a dialogue with others through poetry...my poetry certainly makes me exist and is written to construct an "I," some form of me by combining ever-changing, disparate, and often conflicting actions...but really it is loving and getting carried away by the music of others' poetic "I"s that keep me going through the monotony of putting food on the table. Poetry is just another way of loving each other, and love really seems to be the only truly revolutionary act. Look at how every other strategy has backfired. I am going to keep writing about my indecipherable "I" so I can love.

I'm talking about loving people...

I'm so easily distracted!

The "I" may be a construct, but that doesn't make it any less important. Acknowledging that it is a construct changes its power...

Everything is a construct but you have to live within constructs in order to be able to survive. Confessional art has the power to reveal the harmful connotations of some of these constructs...

Um, yeah, new entry if I need...working on actual body of paper!