Blogging

editing? Is not blogging, as was suggested to me by one of the editors of this issue, the art (or non-art) of the unedited? Well, yes and no. The fact that blogging is self-generated and self-regulated renders it one of the more provocative new phenomena in the fields of contemporary theatre criticism and theatre scholarship. But we should also note that the first OED definition of ‘edit’ – ‘prepare (written material) for publication by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it’ – does not identify the work done on the text as necessarily by someone other than its author. There is a popular perception that blogging is a stream-of-consciousness form, with writers recording what they had for breakfast, offering thoughts on the celebrity antics and political events of the day, and – perhaps – commenting on a play or film they have seen. But some bloggers are subject experts who take the writing and (self)-editing of their posts very seriously. For example, theatre scholar Jill Dolan says of her award-winning Feminist Spectator blog that she writes and rewrites ‘until I know that my words do justice to my experience and what I’ve seen’. The Feminist Spectator, like all blogs, is self-published, putatively functioning outside systems of legitimation such as the mainstream media, academic publishers, and peer review. But blogs are nonetheless related to these systems, in ways that are still in the process of being articulated. This liminal status – at once personal and public; potentially participating in dominant discourses, potentially subversive – is the blog’s defining characteristic at present. This is a swiftly moving field: blogs have existed for less than 20 years, and as print media decline and the Internet grows ever more central in the dissemination of thought and opinion, it seems certain that blogs are here, in some form, to stay. In what follows I explore theatre blogging’s liminal status, focusing on questions of subjectivity, authority, subversion, legitimation, and affect. Most of my evidence and examples will be drawn from the theatre and performance scene in London, UK, which has nurtured, since approximately 2007, a thriving online theatre criticism community. Blogging