<nettime> (S)end

[David Teh <dteh@arthist.usyd.edu.au>]

dear nettimers,

what follows is an excerpt (Chapter 3) from my thesis of 1999 entitled
"postmodern apocalypse" and can loosely be described as an analysis of
<'writing' after e-mail> or <discourse after Derrida's "The Postcard">.

to put it in context:  Chapter 1 was a reading of Arthur Danto's End of
Art thesis, carrying the suggestion that he unwittingly employed the
apocalyptic tone - 'pluralism as apocalypse'.  Chapter 2 was an analysis
of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, which similarly proposed that an
apocalyptic structure underwrote his aesthetics of writing after
'globalisation'.  I would welcome any comments and feedback. many thanks
to Geert for his perspective.

+++++++
In the latter half of his astounding demystification of the apocalyptic
tone, Derrida takes up a range of motifs first elaborated in the "Envois"
of his book The Post Card.   While not ostensibly an apocalyptic text, this
book might be said to support all of the author's eschatological oeuvre in
a unique fashion.  The candour of the "Envois", a catalogue of Derrida's
correspondence with an unspecified addressee, derives from their mostly
being unedited excerpts from an apparently private discourse.  Inspired by
a post card encountered in Oxford's Bodleian Library, which depicts Plato
standing behind a seated Socrates who writes, The Post Card is primarily
concerned with challenges to the governing communicative order of any
restricted economy of knowledge, like that raised by the puzzling reversal
of the Platonic genealogy seen in the card.  The post card in the context
of the traditional monopoly of posts represents for Derrida an embodiment
of precisely this sort of challenge.  By abandoning the formalities of the
letter - the concealment of the envelope; the absence of the sender's
identity and address; and its not being 'private' - the postcard signifies
all that is "haphazard", "marginal" and thereby irregulable in the system
of ordered postal communication.   In thus flouting its conventions, the
post card threatens the system, it ignores the "rules of address".

In his later essay on the apocalyptic tone, Derrida specifically accords to
the common, even endemic variations of tone in humanist discourse, a
certain disruptive function within the process of exchange which
constitutes academic communication.  So the apocalyptic voice, as a prime
example of this 'detoning' , undermines the restricted classical economy of
discourse, that is, the common rationality of knowledge cherished by Kant.
The parliament of faculties is therefore itself directly challenged by all
unconventional  tones:

By its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres and codes, apocalyptic
discourse can also, in dislocating destinations, dismantle the dominant
contract or concordat.  It is a challenge to the established receivability
of messages and to the policing of destinations, in short to the postal
police or monopoly of posts.

This "established receivability", which Derrida also calls the "assurance
of destination" , is characterized first and foremost by certainty in who
is speaking, a certainty ordinarily secured by the system's laws of address
- in discourse the laws of publication, academic quotation and footnoting
carry this burden.  A unity of tone, which one presumes is now all but
impossible, would therefore be tantamount to a guarantee of identity; at
any rate, it finds its antithesis in the use of the poetic, mystagogic
language of apocalypse, which by its very nature 'detones', assuming forms
- such as the imperative voice of "Come" , Derrida's apocalyptic injunction
par excellence - which defy any specificity in their transmission and
reception, thus concealing authorship.  That this differentially
proliferating division of voices and tones , equally endemic to both
'discourse' and 'communication ' , is thus an eminently apocalyptic
structure should bear very serious consequences for any analysis of recent
developments in telecommunications technology.

While it may seem rather unusual to conclude a reading of two aesthetic
theorists with an examination of the internet, a new technology, and its
properly unfathomable implications for theory generally, it should be clear
enough from my discussion of Jameson's pluralist postmodernism (chapter
two) that recent advances by this communicative tool, and the mass media
with which the concept of this technology is becoming coextensive, are
inseparable, both formally and historically, from accounts of recent
cultural (or aesthetic) transformations.  For the 'medium' is the primary
instrumental agent in the progressive acculturation of the economic sphere;
or in other words (Jameson's), it must be recognized that the mode of
aesthetic production is becoming impossible to differentiate from the mode
of economic production proper, from the very mechanisms of wealth
accumulation and capital transaction.  I would therefore like to re-examine
these phenomena in light of the burdensome implications raised by Derrida's
figures of apocalyptic exchange.

It cannot have escaped the contemporary reader of this deconstruction that
the questionable receivability (of the post card or apocalyptic utterance)
which so beguiles Derrida has proliferated wildly in the context of the
recent digitization of communication.  I shall now offer a brief
description of what I take to be the paradigmatic model of communication
yielded by the so-called "internet revolution" or "internet age",
particularly the ascendant mode of interpersonal, commercial  and
intra-corporate exchange that has come to be known as 'electronic mail'
(e-mail).  It is not my intention to attempt to theorize it
comprehensively, or 'map' this system as any sort of totality; rather, I
will try to reveal a few of its structural characteristics, and to isolate
and highlight some aesthetic ones, as a summary 'case-in-point' for the
Derridean analysis of tone.  In the course of this summary I hope it will
become quite clear that, firstly, the internet is a prodigiously, and
perhaps uniquely pluralistic  space; secondly, that the information
economy, and its internal economy of quasi-postal exchange, are governed by
an apocalyptic structure which exemplifies Derrida's system of 'dislocated
destination'; and finally that this medium, as it has been understood,
represented and sold (as technology) in the Western and global market,
surely constitutes the most articulate expression to date of both a
pluralist apocalypse and an apocalyptic pluralism.

The internet is the pluralist mechanism par excellence.  Cyberspace, in
furnishing the subject with a hyper-abundance of 'information', is itself a
product constructed in large part on the basis of a limitless promise, an
infinite autonomy and an unconditional hospitality , not to mention an
indefinite freedom and seductive (though properly 'virtual') anonymity.
Not only is everything allowed, but everything is possible.  Under the
guarantee of the latest technology, the most recent version, or the
ultimate connectivity, some sort of 'everything' is instantly accessible
and always simultaneously available.  From the first moment it is presented
to us, even in its formative years, before it has come to encompass the
entire sphere of production, even (and perhaps particularly) to the
computer-illiterate debutante unable to discern its real limits, it is
given in its possessive totality.  It has everything.  Its freedom is the
absence of prohibition and the infinite abundance of possibilities.  In a
realm where anything is possible (no rules), 'everything' (that is, what is
promised, but not 'each and every thing') becomes impossible.  The internet
is thus the only realm we know in which both everything and nothing are
possible.  You can do anything but you cannot do everything.  The prospect
of 'anything' which it offers is a freedom, a freedom which, in a peculiar
and restricted sense, is available.  But this universal digital pluralism
also offers all of itself, or 'everything', up for consumption at the same
time, as a graspable totality or a do-able whole.  To this extent it lies,
because choice, even an infinite choice, is not tantamount to freedom,
(just as the act of voting does not amount to self-determination).  The
promise of cyberspace is thus false and illusory, insofar as it is a
promise of everything.  All of which may be summarized in an observation of
the difference between "everything" and "every thing".

Amongst the more graspable of the absolutes it offers is the ability to
transcend geographical hurdles, not the least of which is distance itself.
Perhaps more instrumental are the mercantile perks: the idea of 'business
hours' becomes redundant, new consumers can be engaged around the globe
"24/7", and the threat of censorship all but dissipates, since the internet
also allegedly transcends the geo-political and regulatory barriers - where
the jurisdictions of each and every state may be so fleetingly visited,
practically none are engaged; it would be impossible for each sovereignty
to be observed or exercised without unfathomable depths of confusion.  All
of which is to say that the law of cyberspace is the law of the market, the
lowest common denominator of this international cacophony of regulatory
agendas, the mere grunt of an ultimate accession to the logic of capital.

Yet I should pause here to remark that even in the superficial sense, as I
write, it is not yet everything.  As the extension of and replacement for
the telephone, and its conflation with television, its ascendance is not
yet complete.  As the becoming of a total world market, the pot of gold
that has always driven the expansion of capital, it has not yet even
properly won the fidelity of trade.  But while it is not yet everything and
does not yet have everything, this has not stopped it being packaged,
presented and heralded as total and fully articulated
plurality/multiplicity, as an endlessness of combinatory possibility that
finally transcends the unity of reception, and of Being, the singularity of
the subject and the coherence of man.  That it will eventually achieve
these ultimate expansions seems inevitable to many though horrific to some.

Now given the conflation of ideological agendas uncovered in Danto's model
of pluralism, it will not come as a surprise that the pluralism of the
internet, promising to transcend all these barriers at once, is very often
mistaken for democracy itself, for the idyllic space of an unfettered free
speech.  The truth of the matter is of course far more complex.  A message
transmitted by e-mail undertakes a complex but sometimes instantaneous
journey ; its route includes multiple translations and any number of
intermediary computers, and thus comprises an indeterminate sequence of
'acts of transmission'.  Along the way it may be transcoded into the
language of a different computer operating system, or may silently cross
any number of national or geographic boundaries completely unchecked.  In
some instances it will be received and interpreted by an intended addressee
almost instantaneously, in others it might lie dormant in a nodal transfer
system before its passage is complete - but in every case, it leaves a
trace of itself at every juncture: it replicates itself and undergoes
démultiplication at every stage of its journey; and this fractious
replication is in some sense the impost upon its carriage: it will
inevitably and without exception be accessible (if not always immediately
legible) to an unknowable succession of interceptors.  So the anonymity,
the cloak under which an unprecedented explosion of transgressive
communication (of correspondence as well as imagery) has taken place, turns
out to be illusory.  If there is protection for the individual in this
medium, it is only that afforded by a sheer inundation, and not a
liquidation, of identity.  Far from affording anonymity, the internet
creates a new depth of identity, inscribed with an absolute 'traceability'.

In the traditional postal system of imperial capitalism invoked by Derrida,
there were always only three entities that were a party to any
communication - the sender, the receiver and the 'monopoly of posts'
(usually the 'state').  In throwing its content open to the eyes of all who
came in contact with it at any stage of this transmission, the postcard
scuttled the predictable economy of this system, threatening the monopoly
which was discharged of its primary function, the maintenance of privacy
and authorial specificity.  In the era of multinational capital , then, it
is perhaps to be expected that postal monopoly will confront its nemesis:
the supra-national network of e-mail, in which virtually every transmission
is a post card.

So to return to The Post Card, where Derrida himself did so, both
'discourse ' and the 'postal principle' are destabilized, and perhaps
surpassed, in the same fashion.  For omitted from the "Envois" was a bundle
of fragments of the same corpus, which by chance were hidden until after
its publication, and which make up a piece entitled "Telepathy".   It is
here that the ramifications of the apocalyptic structure upon how we
communicate in the present digital age are eerily and presciently exposed,
even in 1988:

I am not putting forward the hypothesis of a letter which would be the
external occasion, in some sense, of an encounter between two identifiable
subjects - and who would already be determined.  No, but of a letter which
after the event seems to have been launched towards some unknown addressee
at the moment of its writing, an addressee unknown to himself or herself if
one can say that, and who is determined . . .on receipt of the letter; this
is then quite another thing than the transfer of a message.  Its content
and its end no longer precede it.  So then, you identify yourself and you
commit your life to the program of the letter, or rather of a postcard, of
a letter which is open, divisible, at once transparent and encrypted.

Hence, we have seen that the apocalyptic tone, at once diagnosed and
practiced by Derrida, may be present in every act of communication, from
the once rigid disciplinary realms of academic discourse to the intricate
and hidden movements of the information economy.  If it has in fact been
embedded in even the most 'rational' forms of writing, if only on the level
of linguistic structures, it would nevertheless seem to be now encroaching
upon the very means of communication themselves, creating a system of
exchange in which some intimation of the end, and with it an entirely
questionable authorship, attach to every single transaction of meaning or
'information'.  In marketing itself as an infinite plurality, the new
medium realizes, in itself, an apocalypse of knowledge.  In the era of the
internet, not only does every utterance say the end of correspondence, but
the system itself is both an exemplary model of apocalyptic mystagogy, and
a sign of the end.


david teh, 1999.

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