E-Mail: Connections, Contexts, and Another Space

Did somebody say alienation? Its constitutive fact on-line is one thing; e-mail remains nothing if not basically a system of deferred interaction, or else why not make it real-time, if you can? And yet there are ranges or degrees of on-line alienation—some so wide and all-encompassing as to transpose alienation into severance of the body from its whole life-world. Donald Lowe is undoubtedly correct: " We can never know the actual lived body in the world" (Lowe 1995: 5). Yet a body whose reality does not intersect with language, body practices, and the social (Lowe's own particular favored coordinates) would not be a body in any sense we could recognize.

Much of the continued provocation of e-mail is that it does eradicate time. With good reason, Mitchell exclaims over wireless time as comprising " the electronic present continuous" (Mitchell 2003: 104). But the prospect would not be nearly so seductive in the first place if we did not abide in our own respective moments of time, continuous with our physical existence itself. Moreover, a technology, no matter how disembodied—or rather disembodying—that does not suffer a fall back into the temporal, conditional realm of the lived body would not be worth the provocation that e-mail continues to possess. The provocation is profound. " What if we could go all the way with shaking ourselves loose, " wonders Mitchell, shuck the last few atoms from our souls, and simply live on server farms somewhere" (Mitchell 2003: 167)? But the fall is no less decisive.

Mitchell himself fudges the issue, musing that the " server crash" of " mortality" need not be somehow implemented, since " by other means" (surgical procedures, all manner of downloading dematerialized information) we " are already asymptotically approaching that networked cyborg state" (Mitchell 2003: 168). In a real sense, Žižek's body-that-never-was reappears as Mitchell's cyborg body that now—from the time Neanderthal man picked up sticks and stone— at last is. But in an equally real sense, these bodies are hopelessly abstract. In particular, the body that e-mails rebukes them because it is fated to live out in actual social terms the circumstances that give rise to a fantasy of pure networking (Mitchell elsewhere refers to its access as " all very Platonic" [Mitchell 2003: 142]) in the first place. In order to illustrate how what we have at present are both the circumstances and the fantasy, let me relate a final story.

A friend once taught at the branch campus of a large Pennsylvania state university. She also belonged to a Latina feminist listserv. Issues of mutual interest were regularly discussed, along with professional news, conference notes, and so on. One day a member of the listserv became unusually belligerent. My friend was startled. It seemed everyone in the group suddenly become unsettled. She decided to write to the member, directly, offlist, and ask her to calm down. When she did so, she got an abusive response. Another attempt to mediate, still offlist, brought another belligerent reply. It seemed the woman (who now revealed herself for the first time as a lesbian as well as a Hispanic) accused my friend of "insulting me and my people. "

She made a final reply to the woman, wishing her and her people good luck, and declaring that she would no longer answer any of her messages. Result? The woman posted something of the off-list words to the listserv and at the same time sent copies of all of the personal correspondence to the dean of my friend's branch campus. To the dean, she demanded satisfaction for being insulted, since, after all, the university owned the server and therefore was ultimately responsible for its e-content. Rather than ignore the woman, the dean seized the opportunity to challenge my friend, who was in fact a critic of hers. The dean wrote an e-mail, mentioning the abusive woman's communication, and demanding to know if my friend was " for diversity. "

The technology " creates community? " In this instance it shattered its own and erupted destructively into another. The Internet sponsors a " decentered" self? Here, it was remorselessly centered, and poised to attack the selfhood of another. E-mail alienates the body? It depends not only on how the body is imagined but who gets to define its circumstances. Discussions of e-mail, it seems to me, routinely define the e-body from the position of [solitary] production. But it could just as easily be defined from the position of [collective] reception, where the body becomes inescapably less " virtual. " Such was the case here. My friend was shocked to see how quickly e-mail could loop from personal to social and back again, or how manifestly words could be suddenly made manifest in, or rather on, a body.

Finally, the body was hers. The dean's initial e-mail was, to her, the last in a long, intricate sequence of personal challenges, inequities, and insults. "Diversity?" It may be happier when it is virtual (and therefore discursive). Indeed, perhaps one reason it got to be so desirable is because the technology exists to keep it virtual—full of electric energy that can be transmitted on-line rather than material conditions that must be established off-line. What my friend did is to treat her administration's acceptance of the absurd accuser as equivalent to being disowned. So she resigned. And she resigned in a manner that provides a sort of coda to this story, for she did not write a letter of resignation. Instead, she sent the dean a terse e-mail. The dean was almost instantaneously pleased to accept the resignation.

Would this exchange have happened so decisively at an earlier " technological" moment, not so many years ago, when letters would have had to be typed instead of messages posted? Hard to say. Did my friend afterwards regret her resignation, if only because she was able to convey it so fast—arguably, too fast? I do not think so. How fast is too fast, and to whom? Different people, different e-mails, and different relations to their respective bodies. What I would venture is that to resign a position over e-mail would feel to me to lend the technology too much authority, as if it and not me was performing the communication, while I looked on as if abstracted from my own body.

On a recent trip to Brazil and Argentina I was struck by the difference between Internet cafes in each country. In Brazil, the computer terminals seem to be established on the model of video games, while in Argentina they are modeled on the basis of e-mail. Perhaps it was just the accident of the cafes I chanced to use in the respective countries, but in Brazil (primarily in one city, Curitiba), the users seemed mostly quite young, while in Argentina (solely in one city, Buenos Aires) they were much older. In any case, though, the clearest national difference had to do with the available technology itself: in Brazil, the Internet cafes feature computers, exclusively, while in Argentina the cafes include telephone booths.

How to explain this difference? In order to do so, one would have to examine the nature of telecommunications as it has developed in each country, as well as perhaps the national identity of each one (presumably more ludic in Brazil) as it can be recreated in terms of either Internet access or use. But how much does the comparison matter? Certainly not at all to the café user at any one time or space. As Mitchell writes, when he uses his cellphone or the OS on his laptop, " [m]ostly I cannot tell whether [intermediating machine intelligence] is supplied by local devices, by remote servers, or by some combination of the two, and it doesn't matter—as long as there is capacity available somewhere, and the connections are sufficiently fast" (Mitchell 2003: 35).

And yet I believe the very question discloses much about Internet use insofar as e-mail is concerned. For all the discourse of globality, e-mail is not free of local conditions, and for all the fact of wireless connectivity, e-mail is still not free from national configurations. (The attempt by the People's Republic to monitor all servers in China being the most obvious example.) Moreover, for all the apparent subjective freedom, a system—a server of some sort—must be in pace in order to permit connection in the first place. This does not mean that subjectivity is governed by the conditions of access; even Hardt and Negri agree that because the Internet has no center, it is difficult for communication to be regulated or prohibited (Hardt and Negrl 2000: 299). What does it mean?

It means that all electronic communication is subject to code. In his earlier book, Mitchell defines code thus: "The rules governing any computer-constructed microworld—of a video game, your personal computer desktop, a word processor window, an automated teller machine, or a chat room on the networkare precisely and rigorously defined in the text of the program that constructs it on your screen." Therefore, he continues, we should ask the same questions about this "programmed polity" that Aristotle asked about city-states: "Is it just and humane. Does it protect our privacy, our property and our freedoms? Does it constrain us unnecessarily or does it allow us to act as we may wish" (Mitchell 1995: 111)? Elsewhere, having characterized code as an arcane text, typically accessible by only a few "high priests," he repeats his cautions: "Who shall write the softwear that increasingly structures our daily lives? What shall that softwear allow and proscribe. Who shall be privileged by it and who marginalized? How shall the writers of the rules be answerable" (Mitchell 1995: 112)?

These questions are notably absent in Mitchell's latest volume. In both, code is stated to constitute the law. But in Me++, Mitchell exhibits no desire to interrogate the fact, as he does earlier. What has happened during the intervening eight years? Two developments in particular. First, code has evolved—become more "footloose," more "mobile," and no longer an affair of floppy disks or punch cards. As Mitchell summarizes, "Dematerialized and radically mobilized code has become allied with the memory and computation capability now embedded in gadgets and machines of all kinds and with the increasingly comprehensive networking of these devices" (Mitchell 2003: 90). No wonder the enticing prospect of "the full Foucault treatment" (with respect to the recognition of code's power implicit in the Y2K scare of 1999) is relegated to a footnote, and then handled over to the reader as an "exercise" (Mitchell 2003: 232). By 2003, Mitchell has ceased to believe in the power of such a treatment, which surely motivated his political concerns eight years ago. Today, code is simply "everywhere." Its law is implacable.

The second development directly follows from the first: we have become coded. Code not only takes up residence in our networks, our software programs, our computers. (Destructively in the case of viruses.) Code takes up residence in us—in our bodies, our daily lives, our political choices. We have become inseparable—inconceivable—from our electronic extensions. In a real sense, Mitchell's above concerns about code in 1995 have been rendered supererogatory by 2003. Code evolved more quickly than he could have imagined. Nobody writes code; increasingly it merely appears as written. Moreover, one worries less about who is marginalized by code; more and more people are simply enabled by it, even whether or not they have computers or do e-mail. If there are writers of the rules, they are answerable to no one—and we do not care, since all we want to do is to log on or enjoy a secure connection.

At one point in Don DeLillo's latest novel, Cosmopolis, a woman makes the following glazed pronouncement, while regarding the various digital displays on screens in a limo: "People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information...Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They're melting into the texture of everyday life" (DeLillo 2003: 104). Cosmopolis provides a kind of fictionalized reading of Mitchell, from the lofty perspective of its protagonist, Eric Packer, a billionaire assets manager. Why a billionaire? In order for the text to test the possibility of standing outside the System (whether It is defined as Capitalism, the Internet, or something else). The array of "visual display units" testify to Its ubiquity, giving "data" so much pulsation as to be almost formless. "Hand-held space, " we read, is "almost finished now. The context was nearly touchless. He could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go blank" (DeLillo 2003: 13).

And yet, no matter how sovereignly connected (the sovereignty including its own resistance, and therefore foreclosing some Foucault-driven critique), Packer remains lodged in his body. He has sex twice during the narrative, as well as a digital prostate exam, and the catalyst of the narrative is his desire to get a haircut across town. The visual display units in the limo become a species of alternate flesh, the exterior form of electronic energy beyond not only form but content, purpose, and certainly code. "We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, " Packer muses, "or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment" (DeLillo 2003: 80). We can take e-mail as representative of activity on the scale of one of these monitors. (Cosmopolis disdains to mention e-mail specifically.) In comparison to the data stream, e-mail seems fleshy and context-bound.

Worse, e-mail appears hopelessly subjective. Its source, if not extension, is personal. It continues to flow beneath visibility—as we understand anew each time an instance of e-mail does accidentally become visible. As I write, for example, an e-mail message by a Wall Street Journal reporter working in Iraq has created something of a scandal, once it "made its way" to the Internet. (Reports do not say how the transmission occurred.) The reporter apparently intended the message for friends only. But the description of her own working conditions—in which she cannot leave her hotel room for fear of being killed—is felt to be at least as compelling as her more "objective" social and political reports on the chaos into which Baghdad has fallen. Presumably at least some of these reports have been conveyed electronically. What counts as e-mail, though, is the private register, and its subjective dimension.

But this, in turn, appears scarcely worth accounting for, particularly in the new mobile universe of dying computers and nomadic code. The least we can say is that the moment of "idolatry" is over for e-mail. Different than a letter or a telephone call, it is now nonetheless merely another available form of communication, about which we can afford to be incurious. "Obviously, " Mitchell remarks, "it is possible, in principle, to precisely track things through networks, but in practice we rarely care about this. We experience networks at their interfaces, and only worry about the plumbing behind the interfaces when something goes wrong" (Mitchell 2003: 15). "E-mail" has emerged as the name of the "plumbing, " the network that plumbing makes possible, the peculiar program that permits access to the network, and the particular kind of personal communication that the program, the network, and the plumbing afford.

In effect, therefore, e-mail has been absorbed into the "data stream" so thoroughly that the fact your program is subject to code, like all else, need be recalled only if you happen to forget your password. Another item from the day's newspaper: instant messaging is no more merely an affair of the desktop—now it has gone mobile and is increasingly being sent from cellphones. So is a discussion of e-mail at the present time obliged to try to distinguish instant messaging from e-mail? (Or even cellphones from computers?) What about the social and political effects of yet another new feature of electronic computation? Meanwhile, again, the technology proceeds, it seems, with a connective momentum of its own; as Mitchell notes: " [l]aptops are beginning to talk wirelessly to video projectors, projectors and cameras to printers, telephones to speaker systems, video cameras to monitors . . . and so on" (Mitchell 2003: 164).

The technology comprises all so much "talk," precisely. E-mail? Merely one register for the relay. We can accent the experience of subjective freedom e-mail affords on the individual level. But only, it seems to me, if we emphasize how both the freedom and the level are won by virtue of a code that cannot itself be experienced. The closest we get to experiencing it are those moments when the wondrous immateriality and immanence of electronic connection itself appears suddenly in some outer form—the Internet café you need to find when abroad so you can e-mail at all, or the workplace you realize is utterly fixed because the e-mail you took to be private was in fact being backed up all along. (As Mitchell notes: "Whenever you send an email . . . you create copies on multiple servers, and those servers are automatically backed up at regular intervals" (Mitchell 2003: 183). And then at these moments what can we conclude? Let me relate a final story to bear on the final question.

Once he went away to graduate school, a former student and I got to know each other better through e-mail than we ever did in life. Nay, our daily e-mails to each other eventually became as much a part of our respective lives as the morning's coffee or the afternoon's classes. We attached various items from the web, we exchanged papers, but mostly we just talked, often in the form of long posts about literature read, movies seen, convictions shared, and ideas pondered. Our e-mail continued in this manner for some years, through his eventual completion of a doctorate, a first job, and then a second, which coincided with my early retirement from my own position, and then four-year contract with a university in Japan. Bill's second job was with a huge, Internet-based business.

Early on, he told me of some sort of friction with a supervisor. I do not remember exactly what. Perhaps it did not really matter. This new corporate culture was rife with power, all of it intense, elusive, combative. In order to prove it, one day at a large employee meeting area the supervisor suddenly pressed a few buttons on a nearby laptop and flashed a page's worth of Bill's recent e-mails on an overhead screen for all to see. Bill was especially embarrassed to read the emails to his wife, full of private terms of affection as well as reference about the business. His fellow workers were all very amused at this demonstration. It was as if e-mail was suddenly revealed not to be, well, e-mail, but instead a public rather than private form of communication, written rather than oral, and fixed rather than fluid.

What to conclude? In our immediate experience of e-mail, few of us ever attain, or perhaps imagine, such a moment of visibility. And yet it seems to me that we had better proceed as if this moment is ceaselessly available, not to each one of us but instead to the systems in which our e-mail is programmed, transmitted, and stored. In each case, code has been written. Code remains the law. No more than Hardt and Negri, I want to waiver on the crucial matter of what their idiom would characterize as its "sovereignty. " My own immediate experience of e-mail abides as free and subjective. And yet I know not only that it is bounded but constructed according to certain laws that I neither know or care to know, by means of which is attained what Hardt and Negri term "the circulating society of the spectacle. " They are speaking of ether, or the third medium of imperial control (the first two being the bomb and money), in which—in part—sovereignty is articulated through communication systems. How? By "attack[ing] the very possibility of linking an order to a space" and "impos[ing] a continuous and complete circulation of signs" (Hardt and Negri 2000: 347).

What to do once an extreme limit of the dissolution between order and space is reached? I take this limit to be continuous with what Mitchell so devoutly imagines as the completely wireless (and therefore connected) globe. Hardt and Negri conclude as follows: "At this point we cannot conceive this relationship except in another space [their italics], an elsewhere that cannot in principle be contained in the articulation of sovereign acts" (Hardt and Negri 2000: 347). What this means for e-mail is simple: the need for another space becomes manifest in another account. Or even another, and another. People who have several e-mail addresses are not only acting out the plenitude of virtual selfhood that [cyber]space makes possible. They are performing the circulating society of the spectacle; no matter that there are few sovereign personages (of whom we can take DeLillo's Packer to be one) in position to comprehend it. Moreover, where to locate an impossible space where some need for sovereignty can at least be performed, and perhaps in addition where some reconnection between space and order can be made?

In the case of my former student—with whom, years ago, through e-mail it would have been a rare pleasure to explore this last point at some length—the process of the dissolution between order and space had grown too advanced. Not only were we now more physically distant. His new job imposed enormous demands—all of them having to do with e-mail. He took out a Yahoo account, possibly another, and then wrote for awhile from still another address that seemed to be that of his business. But the actual can only collapse so much into the virtual, and fixed space can only dissolve so far into cyberspace. Slowly, inexorably, the two of us ceased to communicate. To the end, we retained a connection: our respective addresses. But a connection is not the same thing as a relation. There is not yet code for a relation, and, it appears, still only a limited amount of space.