Mark Poster, Derrida and Electronic Writing:The Subject of the Computer
from The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 99-128.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Is Deconstruction Computer Ready?
The question I shall raise in this chapter concerns the status of Derrida's concept of writing in relation to the computer: does the introduction of computer writing herald a stage of communication unforeseen and unaccountable by Derrida's method of textual deconstruction, or does deconstruction itself rather open theoretical analysis to computer writing by destabilizing, subverting or complicating writing in a pre-electronic age? This question is not meant to invoke and oppose two technologies of writing: manuscript/printing vs. electronic writing, although the issues I want to raise do have a certain link to the technologies that are a condition for the possibility of various forms of writing. Instead I am interested in the relation between the subject and the text as these terms are reconfigured in the move from print to electronic writing. I am interested in the differences in the way the subject is constituted by the process of writing in the two cases.
More specifically I shall analyze how the introduction of electronic writing functions to destabilize the figure of the subject as it is drawn in the great traditions of Western thought, the Cartesian subject who stands outside the world of objects in a position that enables certain knowledge of an opposing world of objects, or the Kantian subject
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who is both outside the world as the origin of knowledge and inside the world as an empirical object of that knowledge, or the Hegelian subject who is within the world, transforming him or herself, but thereby realizing the ultimate purpose of the world's coming into being. Electronic writing, I shall argue, disperses the subject so that it no longer functions as a center the way it did in pre-electronic writing.
Gregory Ulmer argues that Derrida's interpretive strategy accounts for these effects of computer mediated writing on the subject. He contends that "Derrida's texts . . . already reflect an internalization of the electronic media, thus marking what is really at stake in the debate surrounding the closure of Western metaphysics."1 Yet in order to raise the question of the mode of information Ulmer finds Derrida's position insufficient. He finds it necessary to carry Derrida's thought further, developing what he calls "applied grammatology," in order "to provide the mode of writing appropriate to the present age of electronic communications."2 In the end, Ulmer is unsure if Derrida already heralds the new age of writing or if he only glimpses it but does not really come to terms with it. Derrida's relation to the mode of information contains ambiguities that need to be clarified.
At several points Derrida explicitly points to electronically mediated communication as the context of his work. In Of Grammatology, he characterizes the present age as one in "suspense between two ages of writing," one in which "linear writing" and "the book" are at an "end."3 In Positions he claims that Of Grammatology presented "the current upheavals in the forms of communication, the new structures emerging in all formal practices, and also in the domains of the archive and the treatment of information, that massively and systematically reduce the role of speech, of phonetic writing, and of the book."4 In Etats generaux de la philosophie, a conference of 1979, Derrida's short intervention of 16 pages discussed the role of "information technologies" on five separate occasions.5 His main theme was the need for "vigilance" at a time when the media threaten to undermine "critical capacities for evaluation" by the "control, manipulation, diversion or cooptation of discourse."6 The Post Card too may be interpreted as an essay on the question of electronic or "tele" writing. Finally, in a 1988 talk at UC Irvine, Derrida pointed to the destabilization of the subject when the writer uses a computer, although he did so with his usual strategy of complication. Here he argued that the computer makes for reversibility and easy supplementarily of insertion of texts; yet, the computer protects
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linear writing by expanding its capacity for integration (that is, the ability to erase annotation, and thus other voices, from the principal text). Thus, Derrida urged, whether the integration is by an author, another person, or a collectivity, the computer destabilizes them, inaugurating a new situation of limits. But then again, he hedged, it may also be understood as extending old situations, old kinds of linear writing.7 Computer writing then is a minor but not insignificant theme in Derrida's work, a theme, significantly, that is often inserted in his texts at the point at which he is situating his position in relation to the general social context.
In this chapter I shall (1) analyze Derrida's early position on the relation of the su~ect to writing; (2) discuss several kinds of computer writing in relation to the subject; and (3) assess Derrida's later position, especially in The Post Card, as a theoretical strategy for the analysis of computer writing. In the chapter I shall explore both the way deconstruction enables a comprehension of electronic writing and the way computer discourse opens questions about the adequacy of deconstruction, especially with regard to the question of context.
Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins, and Dissemination argue that certain attributes of writing characterize all experience, that these attributes have been overlooked or repressed in the Western intellectual tradition, and that, in the present situation, the urgent theoretical task is to explore these attributes of writing in order to upset and destabilize the intellectual tradition, because it is limiting or constraining in some way. In order to clarify what he means by writing, Derrida often uses bookish terms even though he is not referring to books in the literal sense. One of these terms is atextuality." In the Western philosophical tradition, thinkers analyzed texts for their "meaning" whether this was construed by logical or rhetorical analysis. The metaphysical assumptions of the tradition define "being," including the being of books, as contained, closed, stable, finite entities which are transparent on the one hand to the author, in the case of texts, and to the actor, in the case of social action, and, on the other hand, to the reader or interpreter of those beings or realities.
In this quest for meaning, certain features of the analytic field are not noticed, even though they are important to that field. Derrida's most common term for this occluded level of reality is "textuality." Dominick LaCapra aptly delineates the term as the "relational networks of 'instituted traces' in general."8 When Derrida writes that there is nothing "outside the text," he is using the term to refer to qualities of "experience in general,"9 not just to qualities of books.
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These "networks of instituted traces" are differences that make it possible to argue that stable, bounded meanings exist but, at the same time, undermine the claim that these meanings are closed and self-suffficient. Structuralist linguists argue that a speaker cannot competently use a language and at the same time attend to the structure of differences that enable that language to function as a language. Derrida contends that a reader of texts or an interpreter of culture who attempts to uncover stable, closed meanings cannot at the same time elucidate the "textual" conditions under which alone it is possible to have meanings at all.
For example, in printed books words are differentiated by spaces and traces or marks. Also, as contrasted with face-to-face speech, printed books may be distant, temporally and spatially, from their authors. These seemingly innocuous, elementary but fundamental aspects of texts present serious difficulties to those who assume that the world and book consist in knowable entities that are representable in some final way. In this spirit Plato distrusted writing to the extent that he aimed to define truth as a mental experience in which an ideal reality corresponded perfectly to its mental representation, in other words, to the extent that he sought something we call "truth." In its distance from that mental experience, writing is in opposition to speech and is haunted by a certain distance from it. Writing is thus burdened by the "disgrace" of being a mere copy of a mental reality. The theses of the full presence of the word to the mind, of the mind to the real, and of all three to the truth are hallmarks of Western rationalist culture, even though these terms take on very different relations to each other at different points along the trajectory of that tradition.
Derrida's move from speech to writing is an attempt to see writing as always already anterior to speech even as it may "follow" speech in a given situation; it is a method of interpretation that moves from a search for metaphysically fixed meanings to an exploration of the ambivalent play of differences in the "text".10 His nodal categories--writing, difference, pharmakon--display the concepts of the logocentric tradition as binary oppositions which do not account for this logic. Writing as Derrida uses the term is not in opposition to speech but anterior to the distinction between speech and writing. Speech is always already haunted by the non-identity of author and truth, always already "writing." Since a positions which makes a duality out of speech and writing does not take this into account, Derrida develops a different sort of category, a noncategory, one that follows an "undecidable" logic in which an element of "writing"
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is already within speech, in which the opposition between hierarchical terms is not final or clear, in which writing and speech perpetually "oscillate" so that each cannot be fixed in relation to the other.
As Derrida is fully aware, to argue such a position requires that one submit one's own argument, even in the process of making it, to the logic of difference, to the instabilities of textuality. The seemingly precious or frivolous playing with words in Derrida's writing is but one of his strategies to keep his own writing open to its own qualities of textuality, to prevent its closure and therefore its return to the very position he is attacking. If Derrida were simply to reverse the poles of the binary opposition speech/writing, for instance, to give fixed priority to writing over speech, he would be rendering his own position subject to the very same criticism that he is making of logocentric writers. For that reason he continuously searches for terms that illustrate the qualities of textuality which operate to prevent closure.11
The Derridean effort to forestall a closure of meaning in his own text, the insistence on vigilant, unrelenting subversion of textual stabilities, the consistent disruption of logocentric discourse and its attendant subject - these hallmarks of deconstruction have been interpreted by some, including at times Derrida himself, as the first step toward a new politics, a politics that goes beyond the outworn standpoints of liberalism and socialism.'2 The political problem then is the creation, the genesis, the giving birth to the new. Derrida positions his intervention at a transitional point in history: the program of deconstruction appears when the age of the book is over and when the politics associated with that epoch is exhausted.
Such a self-positioning, let it be noted, is not itself new. At least since the Enlightenment, probably since the Renaissance, influential thinkers perceived themselves in an age of transition and saw the need to give outline to a new politics. Closer to Derrida, Nietzsche certainly contextualized his work in this manner. As we shall see in a moment, like Derrida, Nietzsche resorted to the figure of the mother and spoke of the new politics as a "birth." In one joyous mood, he writes, the "free spirit" will give "birth to a dancing star."l3 Alternatively and more ominously, Nietzsche imagined his creation as a terrifying threat.
The question I want to raise concerning the relation of deconstruction to computer writing is about the issue of context and politics. Derrida's contribution to an understanding of computer writing is limited, I shall argue, by the way he figures the inscription of his
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position in the present situation, and this limitation has political consequences. I accept
1 that deconstruction is a profound critique of logocentric texts and the (male) subject's relation to them, a critique that draws auention to the disruptive role of textuality understood as written traces;
2 that Derrida presents this critique in a situation he rightly defines as one of general confusion amidst massive historical change, inscribing his position as a step necessary to clarify that historical situation;
3 that because logocentrism plays a key role in the present culture its critique has prime political importance;
4 that one major problem is to develop a politics that avoids the totalizing strategies and stabilizing closures of the old "modern" politics, which are closely related to logocentrism.
My differences with deconstruction begin with the way Derrida defines his relation to the present. I am struck by the difference between the meticulous care with which Derrida treats logocentric texts as opposed to the elliptical, vague statements he often uses to define the current situation. His characterizations of the present are general, contradictory, hesitant and unclear about the relation of deconstruction to new forms of writing. It is as if he cannot decide if deconstruction is the philosopher's "gray on gray," depicting the contours of a past age of print writing, or if it is the seer's dancing star announcing the birth of electronic writing. The present situation is an abyss, and looking into it one sees only monsters.
Derrida characterizes, albeit very indirectly, both the new age and, I would argue, deconstruction precisely as "monsters." Derrida situates himself as an expectant mother, but an unusually anxious one. In "Structure, Sign and Play," he distinguishes two kinds of interpretation, one logocentric, the other affirming "play." He urges not a choice between the two but an effort to "conceive of the common ground, and the differance of this irreducible difference." This is the position of deconstruction: not to oppose aplayful" readings to logocentric readings, but to conceive of the differance underlying both. With that in mind Derrida then turns to maternal metaphors:
Here there is a kind of question, let us still call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward
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the operations of childbearing- but also with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of rhe nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.14
Deconstruction is here presented as a kind of giving birth. In the opaque convolutions of the last sentence cited above, Derrida "glances" in two directions: one way toward giving birth to a "conception" etc. of a "question," another way toward those who tum their eyes away from the "unnameable." The former direction appears to be that of deconstruction; the latter that of a new society, a "monstrosity." In the same historical moment, Derrida thus gives birth and the society gives birth. In his giving birth, Derrida does not turn his eyes from society's monstrous birth.
In Of Grammatology there is a similar mention of a monstrosity: "The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity."15 Deconstruction, while not named as a monster, may be taken to be that which "proclaims" the monstrous future. After all, in this passage, it is Derrida, the "mother" of deconstruction, who "proclaims" the future as a monster. How then does a mother with such fears prepare for the birth of the new historical epoch? Derrida's preparations are characterized by a double movement: on the one hand, he plays with texts, for some to a point of exasperation; but on the other hand, he is vigilant, obsessively vigilant. At one moment deconstruction jokes and teases with the text; at another, unusual caution, care and seriousness are practiced and urged. Derrida recommends vigilant care in the reading of texts with phrases like "patient meditation" and "painstaking investigation"'6 or again "prudent, differentiated, slow, stratified readings."17 Fastidious preparation is characteristic of the deconstructionist mother faced with "an absolute danger" of bearing a monster in a monstrous age.
In these passages the term "monster" may be read as a sober image of a time threatened by nuclear cataclysm, ecological disaster, totalitarian politics, a post-holocaust epoch in which no nightmare is inconceivable. Or the "monster" may be deconstruction itself, but as seen with trepidation from the outside by those content with logocentric positions. While both of these readings are possible and perhaps even "intended" by the author, the rhetorical/performative
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force of the image carries a semantic excess, one that spills over the defensive posture toward the outside, one that preempts a bit too quickly the reader's response to deconstruction. It suggests a third reading, perhaps a deconstructive one: Derrida sets into play a binary opposition of the outside, consisting both of society in general and those hostile to deconstruction, and the inside, deconstruction itself. The inside prevents contamination by the outside through the strategy of taking the outside's position and from there designating deconstruction as a monster. But as we know from deconstruction such oppositions do not work the way they are intended: the inside takes on the features of the outside in the textual process of preventing that occurrence. Thus Derrida proclaims that the future is monstrous and that the theoretical strategy that interprets the future, which Derrida is giving birth to, is also monstrous.18 If my reading has any merit, it might help account for the contrast in deconstruction between fastidious textual analysis and inchoate political gestures.
The pohtics of deconstruction is connected with and limited by the metaphor of the anxious mother, one who is ambivalent about the future prospects she bears within herself. Some feminists have argued that Derrida approaches texts in a "feminine" manner, not only undermining the male subjea that constituted them, but refusing to confront the "opponent" in a "masculine," competitive style.l9 Rather than destroy logocentrism, Derrida, in this reading, prefers to expose its difficulties and limits, allowing them to subsist only now with a more complicated recognition of its partial failure, of its inevitable impasses. Yet Derrida does not take sides with feminism, does not enlist himself to the cause of its attempted cultural revolution. Instead he holds back from this commitment, and I believe he does so in part due to the "maternal" anxiety that the baby will emerge as a "monster." Such hesitation leads to a limited textual politics, one that is proclaimed in the name of opposition to closure and totalization. With the new fancied as both urgently indispensable and ominously forbidding, deconstruction confines itself in a half-way house where interminable labor and playfulness with texts is the main pastime. Deconstruction inserts itself in a field of forces, preferring not to contest the terrain directly but to poke at existing positions, often provoking the opposition's hostile, unconscious impulses.
I have suggested that there may be a problem with the politics of deconstruction for a very specific reason. I argue below that deconstruction is particularly useful in illuminating the relation of the subject to various forms of computer writing and that this
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capacity of deconstruction provides it with a generality that extends its scope of analysis beyond the limits of its current practice. Like Baudrillard's semiology of commodities and Foucault's discourse on technologies of power, Derrida's textual deconstrtion affords access to the complex interplay ot electronic writing and new configurations of the subject. However the manner in which Derrida contextualizes his own position may not not maximize the ability of deconstruction to explore this relation. And I regard the problem of contextualization as a poltical question in the specific sense that it determines the field to be opened for analysis.
How then does Derrida characterize the context in which his idea of writing was developed? And what is the relation between the idea of writing and the historical context of Derrida's works?
Text, Context and Electronic Textuality
The politics of deconstruction has often been criticized for its inability to decide one way or another, to take sides, to be with the Left or to adopt some less committed stance. Derrida rightly retorts that deconstruction situates itself at a point of transition between two eras and that the old politics of Left and Right, initiated during the French Revolution of 1789 and derived from the seating arrangement of delegates in a legislative body, no longer applies, or at least no longer serves as a point of orientation to the issues, issues that have yet to be defined.20 Deconstruction situates itself at an amorphous point that is prior to the formation of a clear politics, prior to any emergence of coherent relations of forces amidst which one may choose sides. The problem of the politics of deconstruction needs to be analyzed in relation to the way it defines its own situation: does deconstruction define itself in relation to the present in such a way that the concept of writing may serve as a point of departure for a critical theory of society?
Derrida is ambiguous about the relation of writing to the present. In crucial passages at the beginning of Of Grammatology, he asserts both that writing is part of the "logocentric" past and that writing is beyond this past, inaugurating a new critique of language in the present. While such ambiguity may be unavoidable if the situation is periodized as one of transition, the decisive question is whether Derrida has defined this ambiguity adequately.
Derrida begins by revising the scope of the then current category of language:
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for some time now ... one says "language" for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectiviq, etc. Now we tend to say "writing" for all that and more: to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the torality of what makes it possible and also, beyond the signifying face, the sign)fied face itself. And thus we say "writing" for all that gives rise to an inscription in general . . . the entire field covered by the cyberneeic program will be the field of writing.21
The category of writing, announcing the "death of the book," "covers" electronic messages which are part of the domain of "inscription in general." But then a subtle shift occurs in the argument: a distinction is made between "phonetic writing" and writing of another sort:
The development of the practical methods of information retrieval extends the possibilities of the "message, vastly, to the point where it is no longer the "written" translation of a language, the transporting of a signified which could remain spoken in its integrity. It goes hand in hand with an extension of phonography and of all the means of conserving the spoken language, of making it function without the presence of the speaking subject.... phonetic writing, the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West, is limited in space and time and limits itself even as it is in the process of imposing its laws upon the cultural areas that had escaped it. But this nonfortuitous conjunction of cybernetics and the "human sciences" of writing leads to a more profound reversal.22
The onset of electronic information repositions "phonetic writing," relativizing it and bounding it, altering the relation of the speaking subject to the message. The question then is this: does deconstruction serve as a critique of "phonetic writing" from the new standpoint of electronic writing, or does it aspire only to a critique of phonetic wriing while wimessing from the outside the "more profound reversal" of electronic writing? On the one hand Derrida includes under the cover of his concept of writing "inscription in general." But the "more profound reversal" initiated by the "conjunction of cybernetics and the human sciences" is asserted after he defined the field of writing and he makes no attempt to define the nature of the reversal in question, to define the specific ways in which it alters writing, or to characterize the nature of the "profundity" of the reversal. More precisely, does the increased spacing of electronic
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writing as compared for example with print initiate a fundamental rupture in the relation of the subject to language and if so how?
Derrida is reluctant to raise this question because, I believe, to do so requires an examination in depth of the context of his own writing, an examination which he calls for but apparently has no desire to carry out. In Of Grammatology, for example, he vaguely defines the context of his concept of writing in terms of a certain "situation" of writing that is emerging. He continues: "Why is [the situation] today in the process of making itself known as such and after the fact?"23 The question is posed but without further ado is just as quickly dismissed: "This question would call forth an interminable analysis."24 Since Derrida has already defined his own program as interminable, inexhaustibility is no excuse to bypass the question of context. The program of deconstructing logocentrism finds its opening in the interminableness of the task of contextualization, but interminableness of the question of defining the context of deconstruction is an alibi for a closure of discourse. The only conclusion one can reach is that deconstruction both recognizes its attachment to its context and is unable to define that attachment, rigorously to problematize it and fully to acknowledge the political implications that are linked to that attachment.
In "Signature Event Context," Derrida elucidates the problem of context in relation to his theory of writing, providing a systematic just)fication for his assertion of the impossibility of specifying the context. He inscribes writing in a problematic of differance, as an irreducible absence that resists the identity of meaning and author.
This is the possibility on which I wish to insist: the possibility of extraction and of citational grafting which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark as, writing even before and outside every horizon of semiolinguistic commumcation; as writing, that is as a possibility of functioning cut off at a certain point from its "original" meaning and from its belonging to a saturable and constraining context. Every sign...can break with every given context and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring.
All communications, all utterances, all signs contain as their structure, Derrida contends, the possibility of separation from their senders, their speakers, their referents. This postulate is at the heart of deconstruction and is central to its heuristic strength.
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But the non-identity of authorial meaning and sign does not justify the subordination or abandonment of the question of context. The theme of "Signature Event Context" is that a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather ... its determination is never certain or saturated."26 This "or rather" is an annoying move, one ftrequently found in Derrida's prose, because it destabilizes the assertion --in this case, the absolute indeterminacy of context--in a paralyzing fashion. The implication of an incomplete determination of context is very different from that of absolute indeterminacy but neither position is authorized by Derrida as the position of deconstruction. If context is never absolutely determinable there is no point in pursuing it; if context is merely never "saturated" by any particular determination the question still might be worth pursuing and might yield important or at least interesting results. Derrida has not completely excluded the study of context with these assertions. Yet m practice his writing too often ignores context so that incomplete "saturation" becomes de facto absolute indeterminacy. The contexts of texts by Plato, Rousseau, Husserl, Levi-Strauss, Heidegger are for Derrida apparently not germane for his analysis of them.
Derrida poses the question of context in relation to the general attributes of the sign. I prefer to raise the issue of context instead in relation to the way an author situates himself/herself in a cultural/ social world and even more particularly the way such situating plays a role in determining the author's problematic. I want to claim, in the manner of Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason, that writers always totalize the contemporary field or context when they select their topic and the manner in which they choose to treat that topic. In relation to deconstruction, I want to argue that its theme of writing is totalized in relation to the context of logocentrism but that it might very fruitfully be totalized in relation to the context of the mode of information, the set of upheavals in the wrapping of language that has occurred in the twentieth century. If deconstruction is specifically set in the context of computer writing, one important subset of the mode of information, a fruitful field of analysis is opened up and, reflexively, teconstruction itself is somewhat reconfigured. By extracting deconstruction from the context of logocentric philosophical and literary texts and reinserting it in the social context of computer writing, deconstruction may better conttibute to the work of critical social theory, to its reconstructive task of analyzing late twentieth-century society.
To pursue this problematic I shall first present an analysis of three
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types of computer writing. Next I shall explore Derrida's text "Envois," from The Post Card, indicating the ways in which it opens and fails to open the question of computer writing and the subject. Here I shall return to the issue of the political problem in deconstruction. What is needed first then is an analysis of electronic writing in relation both to the way deconstruction may shed light on its links with the constitution of the subject and the way electronic writing, in turn, is an unexplored context of deconstruction, one that points to its political and theoretical limitations.
Writing at the Border of Subject and Object
Compared to the pen. the typewriter or the printing press, the computer dematerializes the written trace. As inputs are made to the computer through the keyboard, pixels of phosphor are illuminated on the screen, pixels that are formed into letters. Since these letters are no more than representations of ASCII codes contained in Random Access Memory, they are alterable practically at the speed of light. The writer encounters his or her words in a form that is evanescent, instantly transformable, in short, immaterial. By comparison, the inertial trace of ink scratched by hand or pounded by typewriter keys on to a page is difficult to change or erase. Once transformed from a mental image into a graphic representation, words become in a new way a defiant enemy of their author, resisting his or her efforts to reshape or redistribute them. To a considerable degree, writing on a computer avoids the transformation of idea into graph while achieving the same purpose. The writer thus confronts a representation that is similar in its spatial fragility and temporal simultaneity to the contents of the mind or to the spoken word. Writer and writing, subject and object have a similarity that approaches identity, a simulation of identity that subverts the expectation of the Cartesian subject that the world is composed of res extensa, beings completely different from the mind.27 Writers who begin to work with computers report their astonishment at how much easier many aspects of the process of writing have become or that writing is now very much like speaking. The screen-object and the writing-subject merge into an unsettling simulation of unity.
At the phenomenological level of the user's experience, computer writing resembles a borderline event, one where the two sides of the line lose their solidity and stability. Positioned on the line dividing subjectivity and objectivity, computer writing brings a modicum of
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ambiguity into the clear and distinct world represented in Cartesian dualism. Human being faces machine in a disquieting specular relation: in its immateriality the machine mimics the human being. The mirror effect of the computer doubles the subject of writing; the human being recognizes itself in the uncanny immateriality of the machine. In those instances where the novice user of a word processor discovers the powers of the machine that resemble those of the brain (when moving paragraphs from one position in the text to another, when appending one text to another, when using a spell checker or thesaurus), the mirror effects of this aspect of the mode of information are noticed with shock. It is not simply that new technical feats are possible but that the feats of computer writing appear to equal and in some cases outdistance the achievements and capabilities of the mind. A postCartesian representation of the world might consist in a continuum with simple machines at one end, humans at the other and computers, androids, robots, and cyborgs in between.
When using an electronic thesaurus, the writer instructs the program to search for a string or sequence of letters. The search of the database that ensues is technically unranarkable. But with an unexceptionally fast computer, synonyms will appear on the screen almost instantly after the search command is given. The machine program produced or materialized the word that the computer writer strained to recall but could not: the program achieved an "act of recognition or recall" that resembles successful acts of the brain. The mere thing has accomplished what in this case the human brain could not. Or take the example of rearranging paragraphs: the first time the computer writer accomplishes this task, a sigh of gratitude is involuntarily released. The writer recalls the effort and time it used to take to accomplish this act of editing that now is effortless, consuming barely more time than it takes mentally to rearrange the paragraphs.
To be sure, these examples hardly represent the cutting edge of computer technology; they are small achievements in comparison with the latest developments in art)ficial intel1igence and nonlinear computing. They are not the examples chosen when the computer is seriously matched against the brain as in a Turing test.28 But debates over the issue of computer intelligence are beside the point. At stake in the theory of the mode of information is not whether the machine is an exact replica of the brain or even superior to it, but whether computer writing puts into question the qualities of subjectivity long associated with writing and more generally with
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rationality, indeed with masculine forms of identity. The analysis of computer writing as an instance of the mode of information unveils just such an abrupt change.
Advanced computer writers may object that I am pointing to the experience of novices. The thrills of using a computer to write rapidly dissipate as the writer becomes inured to the technology. Computer writing, this objection holds, becomes identical to typewriting or handwriting: the technology, however superior, is just that, a tool and nothing more. Far from unsettling the Cartesian subject, computer writing enables such subjects to compile longer vitae, have more productive careers and generally promotes the institutional patterns of writing that already are in place and that are associated with the autonomous rational subject. While there is much truth to this objection, it overlooks the slow earthquake of the mode of information that is in the process of bringing major changes to the methods of the constitution of subjeaivity. One of the signs that such an earthquake is taking place is precisely what may be called the normalization effect. The new forms of subjectivity induced by computer writing quickly become commonplace, taken for granted and denegated. The difference introduced by aspects of the mode of information such as computer writing is repressed and refuted, both negated and denied in the effort to maintain a stable normality. One integrates the new experience thereby living with the changed situation while denying that anything at all has occurred. This normalization or reality effect helps to get one through the day, especially when the day is taking shape so differently from its predecessors.
The interrelation of computerized word processing and authorship changes other aspects of the subject. To the extent that the author is an individual, a unique being who confirms that uniqueness in writing, who establishes individuality through authorship, the computer may disturb his or her sense of unified subjectivity. Unlike the handwritten trace, the computer monitor depersonalizes the text, removes all traces of individuality from writing, de-individualizes the graphic mark.29 So too does the computer storage media. Compare a novel written on a computer and stored on a floppy disk with one composed m manuscript or even in typescript. Manuscripts have value as originals. Students and scholars consult them in the hope of getting closer to the author's intention, of finding in them the atrue" text or of discovering the evolution of the text. The process of composition, of the formation of the text, is materialized in the changes made by the author, changes which are often visible in
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erasures, substitutions and deletions, in marginalia and additions, in subtle shifts in handwriting, in the entire process of creating a material thing. Large sums are paid by collectors and libraries for such marks of authenticity. One cannot imagine similar interest paid to a file on a floppy disk where traces of originality, authenticity, individuality are precluded.30
Computer writing subverts the author as centered subject in yet another way, by introducing new possibilities of collective authorship. There exist numerous methods of collaborative word processing: a disk can be passed or mailed back and forth between authors; two or-more computers can communicate on phone lines by use of modems; local area networks provide simultaneous access to a text by more than one computer. In these cases the process of collective authorship, a practice that is common in some disciplines, is facilitated. The computer provides nonsynchronous simultaneity for collective authors: composition and editing can be done in different places at the same time. It also greatly simplifies the entering of additions and deletions to the text. More significantly, the computerized writing lends itself to experimentation in new forms of collective authorship.
One such experiment, in which Derrida participated, was carried out in France in 1984 5. Jean-Frangois Lyotard directed an exhibit at the Centre Georges Pompidou entitled "Les Immateriaux," one portion of which consisted in a collective computer writing experiment. Twenty-six writers, from a variety of fields, were asked to compose short comments on 50 words which were selected for their relevance to the exhibit. These "definitions" were stored in a database in a central computer. The writers then had access to the database and could append comments to anyone else's text, with as many as three persons connected simultaneously to the central computer. Writers were asked in particular to comment on "the modifications that this situation brings about in your experience of writing."31 Lyotard anticipated that, through the use of computers in the composition of texts, language itself might be changed, becoming less oriented toward consensus than toward what he calls "differends" by the multiplication of definitions and their ease of alteration.
Derrida's contributions to Les Immateriaux are attentive to the way the technology affects writing. In response to the word "author" Derrida noted that by submining to the rules of this experiment authorship becomes "indeterminate" and "disappears" as the computer technology erases the author's voice and hand. He conjectures
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that this postmodern experiment in writing upsets the stability of the position of the author and leads him and others to search for "supplementary authority." But he notes also that each intervention is signed by its author reconfirming older, "modern" copyright laws so the experiment is not as radical as computer technology permits.32 If authors' names were not attached to it, the computer text, with its multiple definitions of terms, responses to them and responses to the responses, would constitute itself in anonymity, working, as Lyotard hoped, to destabilize language, reforming it in an incessantly provisional play of terms. The new text, I might add, would return to act upon the writing subjects, dispersing them, releasing them from the fixity and hierarchy of their positions in the world.
In sum, while computer writing dematerializes the mark, merging in a new simulation of unity the written object with the writing subject, it also subverts the individuality of the writer in the marks it does leave, the files on the floppy disks. Finally, it creates new possibilities of collective authorship.
Communication and New Subjects
If the "Les Immateriaux" experiment suggests new methods of composing texts, computer message services offer new ways to carry on conversations. Computer conversations, I contend, construct a new configuration of the process of self-constitution. The subject is changed in computer communications, dispersed in a postmodern semantic field of time/space, inner/outer, mind/maner. Computer communications consist in electronic mail, bulletin board messages and computer conferencing. In these cases, the computer serves both as writing pad and transminer: the individual composes a message on the computer and then, using a modem, sends the message to a distant point where the messages are collected for future reading or, less frequently, immediately available to the addressee for response in a "real time" conversation. The messages may be restricted to a single addressee, available for-any designated number of addressees, or open to the "public," to anyone who has access to the electronic apost office." If computer writing substitutes for the printed word, computer communications substitutes for the postal system, the telephone, and more radically for face-to-face meetings. The postal system and the telephone are "tele" communications, sending messages to a remote addressee. In the former case, the message is written and communicated asynchronously; in the latter it is
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spoken and communicated immediately, requiring a coordinated, synchronous positioning of subjects (or at least a tape recording device at the receiving end). Computer conferencing is a more drastic transformation of the communication situation: participants in the conference remain in distant locations, "attending" the conference only by connecting to it through their computers. Complex, coordinated communications are mediated by the computer, not simply single messages as in the cases of electronic mail. The implication of computer conferencing is that, in principle, human beings no longer need to be in the same place at the same time in order to exchange messages in group situations.
As distinguished from word processing, electronic message services and computer conferedcing substitute (computerized) writing for spoken conversations. In this sense they extend the domain of writing to cover areas of communication that previously were limited to face-to-face interactions, mail and the telephone. These forms of computer writing appear to have sefinite effects on the subject:
1. they introduce new possibilities for playing with identities;
2. they degender communications by removing gender cues;
3. they destabilize existing hierarchies in relationships and rehierarchize communications according to criteria that were previously irrelevant; and above all
4 they disperse the subject, dislocating it temporally and spatially.
Electronic message services take numerous forms but are normally associated with but distinct from computerized information services. The latter-are no more than databases that are accessed through a modem. The user of these services normally pays for access time and is free to explore or "browse" the data to search for desired information. Thousands of such services are available in many different countries, services including everything from library card catalogues to shopping information. Distinct from the information service, the message senice provides the user not with fixed information but with contacts to other users. An individual may leave a message for any other user whether or not that user is known. What is so new about message services is that the only identity an individual user has in many of them is a name or "handle," which may be, and most often is expeceed to be, fictional. The telephone may also be used to contact any number, anyone connected to the network. But conversations with individuals selected by this method are unusual, normally considered intrusive, in bad taste, and practiced
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mostly as pranks by teenagers. By contrast, participants in message services are normally eager to "talk." In addition, phone conversations presene the signature of the individual in voice and tone so that conversers feel that their "true" identities are being revealed along with their mood. In message services no such traces of identity are preserved. Anonymity is complete. Identity is fictionalized in the structure of the communication.
Conversationalists on message services assume that their partn,ers are not "real" people, even if they are using their actual names, normally considered inappropriate, or if they are expressing themselves as they would in face-to-face conversations. The subject is thus in question in a historically new sense. In the small communities of tribal society, individuals are "known" from birth, enmeshed in extensive kinship structures that reproduce identity in daily experience. In this context the subject is social, constructed and reproduced as a relational self In cities, by contrast, the individual is extracted from such identity reproduction, but here conversations, before the mode of information, required face-to-face positioning and therefore bodily "signatures" which specified the individual so that, if necessary, actual identities could later be recalled.33 With writing and print, identity is further removed from communication, but authorship, even under assumed names, serves to fix identity. With computer message services, language use is radically separated from biographical identity. Identity is dispersed in the electronic network of communications and computer storage systems.
For the first time individuals engage in telecommunications with other individuals, often on an enduring basis, without considerations that derive from the presence to the partner of their body, their voice, their sex, many of the markings of their personal history. Conversationalists are in the position of fiction writers who compose themselves as characters in the process of writing, inventing themselves from their feelings, their needs, their ideas, their desires, their social position, their political views, their economic circumstances, their family situation--their entire humanity. The traces of their embeddedness in culture are restricted to the fact that they are competent to write in a particular language, writing perhaps at the infinite degree.
Through the mediation of the computer and the message service, written language is extracted from social communication to a point that identity is imaginary. This imaginary is different from the Lacanian imaginary produced in the mirror stage of development through which all subjects are always decentered and self-alienated.
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The computer conversationalist does not reproduce the structural difference between the ego and desire, the gap within the self structured by the unconscious. Instead the written conversation creates the (imaginary) subject in the process of its production without the normal wrapping of context.34 It may be the case that the subject is always an imaginary one, and that the unified ego is an ideological illusion of bourgeois culture. In computer conversations, however, a kind of zero degree or empty space of the subject is structured into practice: the writing subject presents itself directly as an other.
While the anonymity of the computer message may be experienced by the computer conversationalist as a liberation from social constraint, I am not arguing that such is at all the case. The computer conversationalist is not "free" at all but bounded in many ways: first, to the new, computerized system of positioning subjects in symbolic exchanges; second, by the prior constituting of the self, typically the experience of that self as restricting, evoking the sense of transgression when that self may be concealed or suspended; finally, to the language used in the conversation, with all its semantic, ideological and cultural specificity, a specificity which does not diminish when converted into ASCII codes. I suspect that computer messages may strengthen certain aspects of the subject that were constituted in daily life in a denegated form. I am not claiming that in fact electronic messages enable some "total" or "true" act of selfconstitution, but instead that a reconfiguration of the self- constitution process, one with a new set of constraints and possibilities, is in the making.
Message services are commonly found on computerized bulletin boards. Major cities in the United States each have hundreds of them. Bulletin boards are set up by individuals on their phone lines, sometimes in association with a computer club or other special interest group. They are usually free to the caller and offer public domain software files, games and a message service. Messages most often concern questions about computers or about the software available on the bulletin board. Some friendships get started by the exchange of messages and some messages are sent between people who have prior, non-electronic knowledge of each other. One bulletin board in Orange County, California, "the French Connection," is intended to stimulate and simulate a singles bar or dating service. One may participate in private communications with a "lover," "locker room" chats with other men and "powder room" chats with women, or a "public" area where one "meets" other participants.
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This message service limits the user to one "handle" thereby reducing one's ability to play with identities. Yet through the handle identities may be shaped that multiple one's everyday self. On the French Connection, a certain "Alice" is remembered for her striptease, accomplished by writing on the screen in the "public area."
Message services are offered by commercial computer information services in the United States and by government communication services in Europe.35 The most extensive and fascinating experiment m computer commumcat~on services for the general public is undoubtedly the French Minitel. Throughout the 1980s the French government, anxious to catch up with other nations in the area of high tech communications, distributed free of charge millions of small computers to phone customers, initially as a substitute for the telephone directory.36 In addition to phone listings, thousands of services are offered to users of Minitel, primarily databases with current information on a great variety of topics. Although much has been made of the "Minitel Rose" or prostitution contacts,37 the message service (messagerie) is the most popular and most interesting phenomenon on the Minitel.
In Strasbourg, the GRETEL system added a "messagerie" in the early 1980s, a stunning success that quickly spread through the Minitel network. About half of all Minitel calls are for the messagerie.38 Marie Marchand, in her book about the Minitel, describes some of the reasons for the French fascination with the messagerie: "there are no taboos, one can talk about anything, to whomever one wants, at any hour of the day or night. One can look for a soul mate, pleasantly converse without worry to a total stranger, reconnect with one's regular discussion partner."39 For the French, "freedom of speech" is most perfectly realized under the conditions of the Minitel messagerie. In 1986 legislation was enacted to regulate "telematic services," like Minitel, under the category of broadcasting media, but special considerations were taken to provide them with the status of the press, ensuring that no programming or censoring laws would apply.40 In the political arena, the Right attacked the Minitel but the Left cheered its introduction as an extension of the Republican tradition.41 The Minitel messagerie is thus interpreted as an extension of the liberal politics of communication.
What is striking in these French perspectives on the Minitel is that freedom is now being associated not with the assertion of individual identity in either the public or the private spheres but with complete anonymity. Marc Guillaume, who imagines the Minitel as the basic communications device of the future, rejoices in the protection
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provided to individuals by the monitor, anonymous individuals who are safely ensconced in a position beyond responsibility.42 In Marchand's words, "thanks to the pseudo which can be changed at any time, one is able to play a game of masks, of trying on different identities.... one is there without being there, one can see without being seen, play at being someone else, venture into the unknown without any risk."43 The assumption of these writers is that in the mode of information, in the world of the Superpanopticon, surveillance over the individual is complete. The domain of freedom then retreats to the computer monitor and the invented identities that can be communicated through the modem.
This vision is decidedly yuppie: white, male and middle class. A profile of Minitel users that emerged in a 1983 poll confirmed that such is the case: 75 per cent are men; 40 per cent are bachelors between 15 and 40 years of age; most are middle class; 70 per cent of those who use Minitel use the messagerie and 70 per cent of these use pseudonyms because "it gives them pleasure;" 40 per cent assert that they "prefer the Minitel to TV."44 One may speculate that the Cartesian subject, trapped in a world of instrumental rationality of its own making, has discovered itself imprisoned in a dystopia. Playfulness, spontaneity, imagination and desire all are absent or diminished from the public and private domains of career- building. Only the messagerie, with its fictional self-constitution and perfect anonymity, offers an apparent respite from what has become for many a treadmill of reason.
Connected to the messagerie, one's subjectivity flowers. "Computer cafes," "electronic singles bars," the messageries provide a new form of sociability, a "community" in the era of the mode of information. So attached have people become to their electronic village that, for his August vacation in Brittany, one Parisian would bring only his Minitel. A single woman in Besangon chalked up a record Minitel bill for one month of $11,666, requiring a connect time of 500 of the total of 720 hours for that month. As the success of the messageries mount, as the French telephone service's income dramatically rises and traffic on the Minitel threatens to overwhelm the technology, conflicts emerge between the old and the new social forms. Spouses become jealous over their partners' electronic flirtations; one husband furiously cut the wire to prevent his wife's "affair" over the Minitel (though she was able to splice the wires, upon which he threw the contraption out of the window); another wife left her husband for a "wonderful" man she "chatted" with on the messagerie, admitting to a friend that, when she decided to leave her husband, she had not
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yet met her new lover. These examples give the impression that the new subjects who emerge in computerized message services are none other than the old romantic individual. What I want to emphasize however is that computer conversations are often considered more important than conventional ones as when some users admit they reveal more intimacies on the Minitel than they do with longtime spouses.45 Invented subjectivities may be more "authentic" than the "real" self. In the heterosexual examples above, let it be noted, a relationship with "Harry" might prove to be a connection with Helene.
Electronic Communities
As genderless anonymity undermines the Cartesian subject in the messagerie, so other social hierarchies are put in doubt in computer conferencing. If the Minitel allows private conversations between two individuals, computer conferencing permits any number of people to participate in the same discussion but aat a pace, time and place of their own choosing."46 If the Minitel provides an electronic supplement for face-to-face interaction, computer conferencing substitutes for the gatherings of entire communities. In Jessie Bernard's imagination, computer conferencing changes athe sign)ficance of space for human relationships.... we do not need the concept of community at all tor understand how a society operates."47 Other observers are even more sanguine. In their important book on computer conferencing, Hiltz and Turoff cheerfully propose that
We will become the Network Nation, exchanging vast amounts of both information and social-emotional communications with colleagues, friends, and "strangers" who share similar interests.... we will become a "global village" . . . An individual will, literally, be able to work, shop, or be educated by or with persons anywhere in the nation or in the world.48
It is doubtful that computer conferencing will alter the world in all the ways and to the extent alleged by its proponents. Still electronic interconnectivity is a new form of writing, interaction and communication, one that further upsets the dominant configuration of the subject/language "interface."
A computer conference is like electronic mail, except that any number of participants (though usually no more than about 50) may
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be included in the "discussion." Messages are transmitted to a central computer which sorts and stores them, instantaneously making them available for other participants.49 The order of retrieval is entirely up to the reader, thereby diminishing sign)ficantly the role of authorship. To the contrary, the entire conference becomes a single text without an author in the traditional sense of the term.
The process of the discussion is alien and disorienting to those accustomed to synchronous meetings. In ordinary conferences, so much depends not on what is said but on who says it, how they make their intervention, what clothes they wear, their body language, facial and oral expressions. All of this is absent in computer conferencing, as a result of which the subject is placed in a substantially new situation. New conversational protocols to guide the dispersed participants in computer conferences remain to be invented, though some conventions and terms have begun to take shape. "Lurkers," for example, are those who read conference messages but do not contribute to the discussion. And awhispering" means private asides, messages restricted to one or a few of the participants. New asocial pathologies" have also emerged. In place of the little fears people experience in face-to-face speech, computer conferencers suffer the anxiety that their messages will elicit no response and in fact participants are in a sign)ficant number of cases quite casual about reacting to the communications of others.
Without the normal cues and routines of face-to-face speech to guide the conference, simple procedural issues may raise fundamental difficulties. Problems arise over matters like taking turns and keeping the discussion going. Certain types of statements, those of expository style and logical rigor, tend to stifle discussion, while open-ended statements invite responses and further the work of the conference. Even more importantly, participants continuously must be as explicit as possible about what they are saying, and frequently clarify their statements by the use of metastatements. A good portion of the d~scuss~on must be devoted to messages about messages, supplementary mformat~on to supply what is ordinarily embedded in the context of speech. Unlike synchronous speech acts, computer conference messages reflect on their own linguistic practice to an unprecedente`I degree.-Because the conventions of speech are so drastically upset, computer conferencing easily becomes talk about talk.50
In addition to authorlessness and self-reflexivity, computer conferences upset the power relations, both economic and gendered, that govern synchronous speech. Factors such as institutional status, personal charisma, rhetorical skills, gender, and race--all of which
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may deeply influence the way an utterance is received--have little effect in computer conferences. Equality of participation is thereby encouraged. New, serendipitous considerations, like typing speed, determine who "speaks" most often. In problem-solving situations at synchronous conferences, pressures are great to conform to existing paradigms or to an emerging consensus. By contrast, computer conferences, with the veil of anonymity and the temporal/spatial distance they provide, encourage open criticism and the presentation of unpopular or eccentric points of view.51
Computer conferences also promote the decentralization of power by the simple fact that meetings no longer require expensive and cumbersome spatial synchronization. Advanced telephone technologies, such as communications satellites, permit world-wide participation in conferences. Conference scheduling becomes infinitely more flexible and inclusive. The ideal of participatory democracy of the Greek agora and the Colonial New England town meeting becomes technically feasible in advanced industrial society. Hiltz and Turoff foresee the best: "The fundamental effect of computerized conferencing, we believe, will be to produce new kinds of and more numerous social networks than ever before possible. Along-with this will come massive shifts in the nature of the values and institutions that characterize the society."52 In their futurist vision, Hiltz and Turoff are not always attentive to the political process of such institutional change. They assume that the democratic tendencies of this computer technology will be realized by open, free access and wide distribution of skills. Computer conferencing, with its obvious advantages of economy- move words, not people- may become widespread. If so it will introduce a communication form in everyday life that upsets the positioning of subjects in their acts of enunciation.
Writing on a computer, conversing on a messagerie and computer conferencing all introduce new determinations in the author/text relationship.53 The most seminal change is a new configuration of subjectivity that is constituted not through a textual displacement of logocentric presence but by a form of dispersion of the subject at a level of enunciation different from the author/text relation. The electronic mark, as opposed to the graphic mark, permits a deep reforming of the space/time coordinates of writing and reading throughout everyday life. The electronic mark radicalizes the antilogocentric tendencies that deconstruction argues are inherent in all writing. The change from graphic to electronic mark permits the wide diffusion of electronic writing throughout the social space and undermines the temporal limits of pre-electronic writing. The chief
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question then is whether deconstruction54 offers the interpretive means to grasp the textuality of computer writing, or conversely and reciprocally, if computer writing challenges deconstruction to revise its strategies and move beyond the analysis of logocentric texts.
Deconstruction and Electronic Writing
Derrida comes closest to thematizing electronically mediated writing in his book The Post Card, no doubt one of his more elusive works The first half of the book, entitled "Envois," is purportedly a reproduction of the texts of a series of postcards dated from 1977 to 1979, many of which are missing chunks of prose. The postcards address the question of language as non- communication: "Who is writing? To whom? . . . To what address? . . . l owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know."55 There is no question of attributing the postcards to a particular author say Derrida (though they might be his and of course the book appears under his name), or ascertaining the addressee(s) (though he/she/they might be actual person(s)), or determining whether the contents of book reproduce, at least in part, actual postcards. Derrida's point appears to be rather that postcards, like writing, are means of not saymg m the form of saying. Postcards have the particular attribute of being addressed to~someone, being "destined." But they disrupt logocentric reason precisely when they do not reach their destination.56
The book jacket reproduces a postcard, much discussed in the text, portraying Socrates seated and writing, while Plato, standing behind him, dictates. This postcard, by inverting the relationship of the two figures, indicates Derrida's theme about writing preceding speech. Plato, the actual writer, precedes Socrates, the speaker so that a possible representation of their relation would reverse the roles, as the postcard does. But postcards, in Derrida's view, are a form of writing and as such play a disruptive role in the logocentric tradition. This patticular postcard then may also be said to represent that disruption. As a postcard, it portrays the destabilizing effect of postcard/writing and does so by transposing the Socrates/Plato relation.
Readers of The Post Card at first may be confused by the structure of the book. After Envois, the section containing the texts of the postcards, there are reprints of two long pieces on Freud ("To Speculate - on 'Freud'" and "Le facteur de la verite"'). The
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relationship between Freud and postcards concerns the similarity of the complex memory traces in the unconscious and the distance effect, the tale-writing of the postcard. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud regretted the progress of technology and its instrumentalist champions, quipping that while the telephone allows one to speak with distant friends, the same technological revolution made it possible for them to be so far away in the first place, and therefore in need of a telephone.57 Instead of the telephone, the "technology" that fascinated Freud and that became, according to Derrida, his chief metaphor for the unconscious was the wax tablet or "mystic writing pad." For Derrida, Freud understood that the tablet functioned as a writing tool by preserving traces but also consisted of layers which act differentially upon the writing, preserving and erasing marks in a manner not directly controlled by the writer. Just as the tabletlike unconscious is beyond instrumental reason and therefore similar to the "textual" effect of the postcard, so Freud's fascination with his nephew's game of "fort-da", of throwing the object and retrieving it, remind Derrida of "a certain state of the post ...58 In both cases the subject destines an enunciation to an addressee but the message is received by another. In these ways, Derrida finds it appropriate to link his postcards, many of which are love letters, an eminently psychoanalytic theme, with his continuing treatment of Freud.
In The Post Card Derrida extends the field of the textuality of writing, with its spacing and marks, to include an account of the medium of postcards. Postcards are sent; they are messages that cover a distance. This "tele" messaging, Derrida maintains, is fundamemal to the content of the writing. Writing upsets the rational subject's ability to control the truth because it introduces material traces. These traces come between the thought and the utterance, delaying it, making it different, opening a fissure between the author and the idea. Postcards introduce a further complication. As a consequence of the distance they must travel, they might get misdirected. The intention of the author to send a message to someone in particular might be thwarted, and in principle is always thwarted: "a letter can always - and therefore must- never arrive at its destination ..."59 Derrida gives much importance to the relatively rare occurrence of the lost postcard because it upsets the instrumentally rational view of postcards as mere tools in the transmission of information. Derrida wants to stress that the off chance of losing the card is inherent in the tale- messaging and cannot be overlooked.
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He also stresses other such features of postcards, like the fact that it involves posts or stations, that the information goes from a post to a post. The post is a piace of power, he reminds us, not an innocent function. "The 'posts' are always post of power. And power is exercised according to the network of posts,"60 writes Derrida. As a place of power, the post also changes the message of the postcard, dispersing it in a maze of communicative positions. Post also has a temporal connotation as "after," suggesting deferral and thereby alteration. What is Pethaps the most important trait of the postcard is its material configuration: it is an "open" message that anyone who handles it can read, and therefore is communicated not simply to the addressee but to an unpredictable multiplicity of readers. If the writer wants the message to be understood only by the receiver, it consequently must be coded, encrypted for privacy. The postcard is then both public and private. The small size of the space available for the message constrains the writer as well. The message is often just a statement thee l am here, some-sort of relational message like a "How are you?" or "Hello" uttered when encountering someone, not meant to be taken literally but simply a way of reaffirming the relationship. These are the material traits of the postcard that make it a mediating media, that allow it to act like the Freudian unconscious and like writing in general to shape the intentions "behind" words and the meanings within them, to disrupt the control of the message by the sender.
In The Post Card Derrida is sensitive to the medium of language, to the way the postcard structures messages, the way it shapes the subject of communication and to the place of the postcard in the history of technology. As Derrida notes, the postcard is hardly the latest development in such technologies. He traces its inception to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 as a device to enable soldiers to communicate with loved ones back home. But the question of the situation once again evokes ambivalent conclusions from Derrida. In places he suggests that the postcard is a basic principle of writing of an epoch that stretches from Plato to Freud.61 Elsewhere he suggests that electronic forms of transmission are either different from the postal epoch or a continuation of it.62 The situation is finally undecidable: are we in the postcard age or is it over; is the postcard an extension of writing or a new form of language; are postmarks d~fferent from the marks of electronic mail?
For my purposes, the chief import of The Post Card is its presentation of a fragmented and disoriented subject. Derrida shows how writing is a distancing that multiplies and decenters the subject
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to the point that the reader cannot localize and specify the subject/ author to any degree. "Who are you, my love?" Derrida writes in one postcard, "you are so numerous, so divided, all compartmented, even when you are there, entirely present and I speak to you."63 Neither the receiver of the postcards nor their sender emerges as coherent individuals. They may be specified only vaguely in coordinates of time and space. In "Envois" the postcards are incomplete, with large chunks of texts lost or deleted. The receiver is never clearly named so that she or he could be several persons or one. Ulmer interprets these features of the text to indicate that the author, Derrida, is like the Freudian censor, the position that prevents direct communication.64 If we compare the postcard to the book, and both of them to the computer, we see a heightening multiplication and dispersal of the subject. In each case the textuality of the writing is quite different.
Derrida is indeed sensitive to differences in the media, differences that concern the crucial issue of the materiality of the trace, but seems reluctant to thematize those differences. He writes: "ln everyday language the post, in the strict sense, is distinguished from every other telecommunication (telegraph or telephone, for example, telematics in general) by this characteristic: the transport of the 'document,' of its material support. A rather confused idea, but rather useful for constructing a consensus around the banal notion of post- and we do need one."65 The last sentence shifts back and forth, hesitant to make an issue of the "material support." Instead of problematizing the cultural configuration of each technology, the interplay of language and situation, the wrapping of enunciation by context, as I am attempting to do, Derrida seems to prefer to minimize, at times even to disregard, technological difference in favor of the homogeneity of writing:
In the years to come .. . it can be thought that it will no longer be writing that will be transported, but the perforated card, microfilm, or magnetic tape . . . the "telepost" . . . in fact these great technologies always really have a metaphysician's naivete . . . for as long as it is not proven that into each of our so secret, so hermetically sealed letters several senders, that is several addresses have not already infiltrated themselves, the upset will not have been demonstrated.66
For Derrida, writing itself already contains the anti-logocentric principle: the difference of new technologies tends to be absorbed within the category of writing. Yet when marks or traces are as
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evanescent as pixels on the screen, it may be asked if there is anything at all to send, to post, to "destine."
Perhaps more than textuality per se, the situation of writing is today being changed. The spacing on the page of the book becomes, with electronic writing, the spacing of the message in the world. With computer writing, spacing is subordinated to a new wrapping of the text: writing could take place anywhere and the electrification of the mark (gramme) calls into question its materiality. With the mark losing its rootedness in space, so its temporality becomes complicated. Computer writing, instantaneously available over the globe, inserts itself in a nonlinear temporality that unsettles the relation to the writing subject. More than books, letters and postcards, computer writing challenges and radicalizes the terms of analysis initiated by the deconstructionist. If traces, spacings and marks destabilize the logocentric subject, what must be said of the textual effects of computer writing, messageries and computer conferencing? In moving from the one case to the other one has shifted from a challenge to epistemological authority of the centered subject to a reconfiguration of identity in a form that puts identity itself radically into question. Computer writing instantiates the play that deconstruction raises only as a corrective, albeit a fundamental one, against the hubris of logocentrism.
The decentering effects of computer writing on the subject are not, of course, entirely unanticipated. The industrial revolution inaugurated transport systems--railroad, automobile, airplane, spaceship-- that progressively increase the speed with which bodies move in space. By doing so these technologies may be said to disperse ehe self in the world.67 The practice of masked balls, personal ads and clothing styles provide opportunities for playing with identities. But computer writing, as it is being inscribed in our culture, intensifies and radicalizes these earlier forms. To what degree this is achieved will depend upon the extent to which computer writing is disseminated in the future. Only empirical studies of the phenomena can determine their true social and cultural impact. Yet computer writing is the quintessential postmodern linguistic activity. With its dispersal of the subject in nonlinear spatio-temporality, its immateriality, its disruption of stable identity, computer writing institutes a factory of postmodern subjectivity, a machine for constituting non-identical subjects, an inscription of an other of Western culture into its most cherished manifestation. One might call it a monstrosity.