Presence, Intimacy

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FCJ-010 Email and Epistolary technologies: Presence, Intimacy,DisembodimentPosted By FCJManager On December 6, !!" # $ :!! am In article, iss%e! &

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Esther MilneMedia and Communications, Swinburne University of echnolo!y

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“Presence” is a major f ocus f or researchers an d artists o f d igital culture, computer n etworks a ndnew medical, communication and entertainment t echnologies (Donati and Prado, 2001; Lombardand Ditton, 1997; Mitchell, 1999; Murphy, 2000; Ryan, 1999; Sheridan, 1992). Presence ref ers t o the

degree to which geographically dispersed agents experience a sense of physical and/orpsychological proximity through the use of p articular com munication technologies. In areas asdiverse as v irtual reality, video conferencing, M UDs ( multi-user d omain), newsgroups, electronicdiscussion lists, telemedicine, web-based education, ight simulation software and computergaming, a sen se o f presence i s v ital for t he su ccess of the p articular ap plication.

It ought to be noted that the term “telepresence” h as been used both interchangeably with and inopposition to the t erm presence. Jonathan Steuer, for example, adopts t he l atter u se ar guing that thepoint of departure between the two terms d epends on the d egree t o which the sub ject experiencestheir env ironment as t echnologically mediated. As h e ex plains, presence ‘ refers to the ex perience o f

natural surroundings … in which sensory input impinges d irectly upon the o rgans of sense’. [1] [1]

Incontrast, telepresence ref ers to ‘the experience of p resence in an environment by means of acommunication medium’ (Jonathan Steuer, 1992: 75-76). Steuer’s m odel, however, has b een criticised

because it relon the other hand, “mediated” telepresence. This, argue Giuseppe Mantovani and Giuseppe Riva,fails to acknowledge the mediated, culturally constructed nature of all communicationenvironments. As they p ut it:

presence i s al ways m ediated by both physical and conceptual tools t hat belong to a given culture:“physical” p resence i n an environment is i n principle n o more “r eal” o r more t rue t han telepresence

or i mmersion in a si mulated virtual environment. (Mantovani and Riva, 1999: 547)

In addition to these critiques, a number o f w riters h ave attempted to historicise the socio-criticalformulations of presence, telepresence an d virtual presence b ut these phenomena h ave u sually beenconned to representations w ithin electronic m edia ( eg Coyne, 2001; Sconce, 2000; Sobchack, 1994).The p ast several decades h ave al so p roduced a su bstantial body of work that explores the w ays t hatglobal communication networks re congure our exper ience o f time an d space. As a result of therapid ow of data t hrough digital information systems, distance ap pears to shrink and time see msto collapse. The sp eed up of communication and the concomitant perception of a col lapsing timeand space w ill often produce an intense, quasi-spiritual sense o f presence: ‘through the co mputer,thought seems to come across like a owing stream from mind to mind’ (Heim, 1986: 283). Thissentence is i nstructive because i t c ollocates “ disembodiment”, “presence”, and an eclipse o f t he

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material vehicle o f communication, conditions, that, as w e shall see, are a dening formal propertyof the com munication systems u nder investigation. However, current theorising about what DavidHarvey calls ‘time-space compression’ ( 1990), generally limits itself t o a history that b egins withtechnological inventions such as t he t elegraph. What remains u nder-examined is t he ext ent to w hicholder t echnologies, such as t he p ostal service, also foster t he sen se t hat t he co nstraints o f space andtime can be overcome. In response, this p aper t races t he persistence o f tropes o f pres ence a ndintimacy though the texts an d socio-technological representations o f t hree sites o f c ommunication:letters, postcards an d email.

Epistolary p resence

The construction of imaginary presence is a fundamental feature of letter w riting. In ClaudioGuillén’s w ords,

there i s h ardly an act i n our d aily experience, rooted in life itself, that i s as likely as th e w riting of aletter to propel us toward inventiveness and interpretation … [T]he ‘I’ who writes m ay n ot only bepretending to act upon a friend …. but acting also u pon himself, upon his evolving mirror image.(Guillén, 1994: 2)

These ep istolary inventions are b oth performance an d interpretation. The letter w riter p erforms aversion of self and the reci pient reads t hat performance. These i nterpretive acts h elp to produce t heimagined bodies of epi stolary communication. As Ruth Perry has ob served, through the ‘solitarypleasures’ of reading and writing, the l overs of e pistolary rel ationships ‘summon up images of eachother, without need for the visible presence of t he other, and then react joyfully to their ow n

crea tions’ (Perry, 1980: 101).

In face-to-face communication, questions of presence can seem unproblematic. Epistolarycommunication underlines t he fact that, as Jacques D errida h as ar gued, presence d epends on and isthe eff ect of a co mplex set of assumptions an d strategies ( 1976; 1978). As I shall argue, “presence” i sdependent on (and in part created by) rhetorical strategies an d effects s uch as i ntimacy, immediacy,spontaneity and disembodiment. At rst sight, the last of these t erms m ight appear no t to belong tothis l ist; yet in email and epistolary correspondence, presence o ften depends p aradoxically on a t ypeof disembodiment. In some instances this involves t he ecl ipse of the m aterial medium that supportsand the temporal or p hysical obstacles that would otherwise thwart communication. As the au thor

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) r emarks to one of h er cl osest ep istolary friends: ‘thankswarmest & truest, my dearest Miss M itford, for yo ur d elightful letter, which is cer tainly delightful,as i t made m e feel just as i f I were si tting face t o face t o you, hearing you talk’ (16 September, 1844,9:136). [2] [2] Disembodiment, as t his qu otation suggests, is in epistolary co mmunication coincidentwith the em ergence of a fantasy o f bodily proximity or p resence.

In a l etter s ent to Mary R ussell Mitford (1787-1855), Barrett Browning provides i nsight into the w aysin which the si gniers of presence op erate w ithin epistolary d iscourse. Barrett Browning writes:

If I do not empty my heart out with a g reat splash o n the p aper, every time I have a l etter from you,

& speak my gladness & thankfulness, it is lest I shd. weary you of thanksgivings! (EBB, 24 March,1842, 5: 269)

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Barrett Browning’s cl aim that she writes l etters by emptying her ‘ heart out with a great splash onthe p aper’ suggests au thenticity, intimacy, immediacy and spontaneity. However, Barrett Browning’sclaims t hat he r l etters ar e w ritten in blood that s purts f rom the a uthor’s h eart also draws at tention,in a somewhat m acabre fashion, to the body. Within a discourse of d isembodiment, there is acomplex r elation between the imagined body of epistolary discourse an d the real “esh and blood”corporeality of t he epistolary actors. Since o ne is n ot physically co-present with one’s i nterlocutor,references t o the co rporeal body play signicant rhetorical and social functions i n the p roduction ofmeaning within letter w riting practice. The physical absence of on e’s ep istolary partner p rovides

both the impetus and the “materifunctions ai med at creating an imagined sense o f presence. References t o the p hysical body, to thescene o f writing, to the p lace w here t he l etter i s r eceived or t o postal technology are o ften used byletter w riters to convey and invoke a sense o f immediacy, intimacy and presence: ‘Mr Kenyon ishere. I must end & see hi m – for the p ost will be fast upon his h eels’ (EBB, 24 March, 1842, 5: 268);‘this tiresome p ost, going w hen I had so m uch m ore t o say’ (EBB, 19 September, 1842, 6:83).

You will never gu ess what I am doing – my beloved friend – or rather suffering! – oh – you willnever gu ess. I am sitting … rather lying for m y picture. That sounds l ike v anity between two w orlds,indeed! – only the exp lanation excuses me. (EBB, 16 A pril, 1841, 5:36)

By referring to the “h ere an d now” of corporeality – ‘you will never guess what I am doing … lyingfor m y picture’ – these corr espondents s trive to collapse t he t ime a nd distance t hat separate t hem.Depending on the skill and eloquence o f t he letter w riter, the recipient can feel as if he/ she isactually face-to-face with them. But, of course, a key point is co ntained in that s mall phrase ‘ as i f.’Were the two writers p resent t o one an other, there w ould be no need to correspond. Yet for m any

letter w riters o f t he nineteenth century, the face-to-face encounter i s n ot n ecessari ly superior t oepistolary communication. Indeed, on some occasions, epistolary discourse may be the su periormode. Letters can provide one w ith the opportunity to express w hat was un said, or could not besaid, during a physical meeting. After M itford had visited her f riend Barrett Browning in London,for exam ple, the former wrote:

My beloved friend how can I thank you enough! You came – you w ent away like a dr eam and as if itwere a real dream, I never exp ressed or t ried to express all the t hankfulness & sense o f your gr eatgoodness, which penetrated me through and through. You will let me thank you now, will you not?– an d you will believe i n the earnest ness of the t houghts w hich revert to that day & go forward to

you? (MRM, 18 November, 1843, 8:50)

For m any correspondents, “absence” i s cr eative; it opens a d iscursive space in which desires an dsubjectivities t hat might not otherwise be a rticulated can be ex plored.

A dening feature o f epistolary d iscourse, then, is t he d ance bet ween absence an d presence: writinga letter si gnals t he absence of t he recipient and, simultaneously, aims t o bridge the gap betweenwriter an d recipient. As William Decker puts it, ‘exchange of letter sh eet t hus articulates andsubstantiates t he cen tral paradox of epistolary discourse: that the ex change o f personally inscribedtexts conrms ev en as it w ould mitigate separation’ (1998: 46-47). Letters – like postcards a nd

electronic mail – are conventionally u nderstood as a t echnology t hat allows communication between bodies that are abs

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Yet the boundary between disembodiment and embodiment i n epistolary practice is d ifficult tomaintain strictly. Writing and reading letters are, of course, operations i n which the b ody must playa role. As n oted, the body of t he absent correspondent can become “visible” in letter exc hangeswhen, for example, the author refers t o the epistolary scene of w riting, its m aterial s upports an ddelivery systems o r m akes m ention of t he letter’s t emporality. These st rategies ai m for a sense o fimmediacy and presence by foregrounding the body of the writer. A related but not i denticalepistolary convention is one where the materiality of the letter is made to stand for thecorrespondent’s b ody. Due to its p hysical proximity or con tact with its au thor t he letter can workmetonymically; a function most obvious in amorous ep istolary discourse w here t he letter i s ki ssed,held, cried over or ad ored in place o f the l over’s bo dy. In this w ay, the g ap between letter w riter an dreader seems bri dged. As Barrett Browning writes i n a l etter to Mitford, ‘I should like t o be n ear yo umy beloved friend, to kiss both the dear hands twenty times w hich wrote & touched the paper ofthis m ost tender l etter!’(30 March, 1842, 5:286).

Illustrations such as t hese m ay seem relatively unproblematic as s igniers of “embodiment”, proofthat t he eshly body of t he ep istolary author i s “p resent” at the t ime o f writing and therefore canguarantee au thenticity of communication. But even in cases w e m ay call unproblematic, the signthat s tands f or t he b ody seems at times t o eclipse i ts ow n materiality. Still more rem arkably, at t imesthe m ateriality of the b ody that writes, along with the si gns i t makes on the p aper, are ecl ipsed forthe r eader by a s trong sense of communion between m inds or spirits.

Barrett B rowning gives an eloquent i llustration of t his “eclipse” in a letter written shortly afterMitford had visited:

My dearest friend’s letter w as like a shadow of her pr esence t hrown back & brought to mind sostrongly all the p leasure I had had in the “d ear Su nshine” t hat the letter i tself was f or t he m omentannihilated … not thought of! I thought of YOU too much. Oh, what a hap py week for me! (EBB, 19

June, 1844, 9:23)

Barrett Browning is describing a transparency which many forms of c ommunication have as anunachievable i deal: in the m oment described, the m aterial conditions of r epresentation are effaced,‘annihilate’, ‘not thought o f’. Interestingly, then, t his suggests that o n occasion the media ofepistolary systems m ay need to be f orgotten in order t o function efficiently, or c onversely, that thereare times when the materiality of a letter seem s actually to get i n the way of i ts ability to

communicate. Arguably, this is a feature of rep resentation in general; the desire to experienceunmediated “reality” appears sat ised when the m aterial conditions of r epresentation (the p en, thescreen, t he keyboard) are eclipsed. The presence, intimacy and immediacy created betweenepistolary su bjects relies u pon a co mplex d ynamic bet ween, on the one h and, materiality, physicallocatedness an d embodiment an d, on the other h and, references t o the material conditions ofepistolary communication and the corporeal body. In order to create a sense of p resence andimmediacy one m ay refer t o the m aterial conditions of t he p ostal service o r t he co rporeality of t heletter w riter. But if too much attention is d rawn to the v ehicle t hat is cr eating the sen se o f presence,then the con struction and artice of t his “i mmediacy” becomes ap parent; one sees t he si gnier no tthe signied. What, at rst glance, may appear t o be a reference t o the materiality or “em bodied”quality of l etter writing actually might b e operating at a different regi ster since the letter’smateriality turns i nto a sign for t he p resence o f the a bsent correspondent: ‘Your l etter, my dearest

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friend, is t wenty times w elcome – & stands for yo u, for t hat coveted presence, right worthily’ (EBB,21 November, 1843, 8: 53).

Paradoxically, then, references t o the real, lived, situated, physical body of t he epistolary exchangecan produce a “f antasised body”. That is, the letter f orm allows corr espondents to enact an identityand even adopt a p ersona t hat may d iffer from their “ real” o r l ived body and personae. This is no tmeant t o imply there exists a n authentic self from which the letter w riter d eparts. Rather, this“imagined body” or v irtual self is a productive effect of t he epistolary exchange. As Lori Lebownotes, ‘letter w riting involves t he w riting self as a j oint venture u ndertaken by the w riter an d reader.Writer an d reader c onstruct identity from textual cues b ased on the received responses f rom theselected audience’ (1999: 75). The p erformance o f presence i n nineteenth century epistolary cultureis enacted by a complex interplay between absent l etter w riters, face-to-face meetings and thematerial, epistolary system that renders p roblematic a strict dichotomy between embodiment anddisembodiment.

Postcard presence

Epistolary communication has b een formally and aetiologically viewed as cl osely related to privacy,the ‘ condential inscription of private, inward, individual experience’ (Decker, 1998: 79). For D ecker,the expectation of p rivacy and condentiality is t he ‘enabling condition’ for the production ofintimacy (1998: 5). What happens, then, to the “ discourse n etwork” (Kittler, 1990) of the n ineteenthcentury when these cat egories of aff ect are put in question by the 1865 invention of t he postcard?Descriptions o f t he shift from a system dominated by the letter t o one that e mployed letters an dpostcards are oft en couched in terms of ap ocalyptic loss an d destruction: ‘Differing from a l etter, a

post card is a letter t o the extent that n othing of it remains t hat i s, or t hat h olds. It destines t he letterto its ru in’ (Derrida, 198 7: 249). [3] [3] Indeed, the postcard has provided critical practice with aneloquent trope for representing transformations to certain regimes of symbolic and materialorganisation (Seltzer, 2000; Siegert, 1997).

For correspondents of the late n ineteenth-century, the p ostcard introduced a n ew system of postalwriting in which traditional epistolary v alues an d protocols w ere c hallenged and questions of classwere rai sed. Fears w ere regu larly expressed that postal clerks o r s ervants w ould spend their t imereading the postcards that p assed through their hands. A newspaper of 1870 warned of the‘absurdity of writing private information on an open piece of card-board, that might be read by half

a d ozen persons b efore i t reached its d estination’ (Carline, 1971: 55). Yet, those w ho have noted thethreat to epistolary privacy posed by the p ostcard have invariably overlooked the p oint that in somesense, at l east, the privacy of ep istolary communication has often been at r isk. During the midnineteenth-century, for exam ple, there w as t he d istinct possibility that government officials, on thepretext of p rotecting national s ecurity, might op en one’s letters ( Robinson, 1948: 337-53). Even ifone’s l etter ar rived inviolate, one co uld not al ways a ssume t hat i t would remain with its i ntendedrecipient. Quite often Barrett B rowning, Mitford and their other friends would circulate letterswithout rst securing the p ermission of their authors.

The disjunction between the imagined privacy of communication and the actual or possibledissemination, of t his m essage to a wide audience, suggest that t he latter m ust at l east in part beoccluded if epistolary communication based on the former is to continue. When intimacy or

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immediacy is the desired effect o f a letter (not a ll letters strive for these qualities: businesscommunication, for exam ple, is i nformed by other c haracteristics), correspondents ass ume a level ofprivacy and act accor dingly. It i s w orth noting, then, that p rivacy is a historically contingent an dculturally determined term. Cultural t heorists who posit t he postcard’s erosion of p rivacy, arefantasising about a level of epistolary privacy that, perhaps, has n ever b een available. This i s n ot todeny that the p ostcard dramatically changed postal communication. Perhaps for t he rst time thepostcard made v isible t he d iscursive practices o f the general public. The t exts o f “the everyday,” theproducts of “ordinary” w riters, were now being circulated and read in a m anner and on a scale thathad not p reviously been possible. Nevertheless, this loss o f act ual (as opposed to imagined)“privacy” did not make i mpossible ep istolary effects such as i ntimacy, immediacy an d presence.

The correspondence between William and Elsie Fuller provi des a rich archive for m apping thedegree t o which narratives of pres ence an d intimacy play out in postcard communication. WilliamRobert Fuller was bo rn in 1899 in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne. In 1915 he enlisted in the

Australian Army, serving as Lance Corporal with the 21st Battalion and was awarded theDistinguished Conduct Medal in June 1918. He was r epatriated to Australia on 20 October 1918 an ddied of Spanish inuenza i n July of 1919 aged twenty. [4] [4] [5] [5]

An important element in the p roduction of presence an d intimacy i n the Fuller correspondence isthe image carried by the p ostcard. These p ictures con vey a ran ge of emotions, desires an d fears aswell as f ullling particular r hetorical functions. Fuller com monly uses t he p ostcard to reproduce f orhis s ister s omething he h as seen o r felt. The ass umption seems to be t hat if both writer and readerlook at t he “same” sight, the latter w ill share the experience o f the former: ‘at t hat bu ilding I have

been on duty and where you see

The relation between picture and message is complex and takes a number of d ifferent forms.Sometimes, as with the ab ove example, William appears to have seen the sam e monument, gure orstreetscape t hat the card depicts. On other occasi ons, however, presence i s p roduced despite t he factthat William may not have seen the act ual monument to which the p ostcard refers: ‘these are a f ewphotos o f what I have seen or i ntend to see, I have n ot seen the pyramids yet but I intend to seethem. They are only a few miles ou t of C airo. I will tell you about them’ (13 March, 1916). In thiscase, a sh ared present is cr eated by the f act that neither W illiam nor E lsie h ave seen the p yramids. Itis s trengthened by, perhaps, their s hared desire t o see t he p yramids an d by the si mulacrum of t hepyramids t hat they have b oth seen on the p ostcard. In this cas e, the si mulacrum helps t o effect an

intimacy o ne ass umes is felt as na tural and spontaneous.

A sense of intimacy, therefore, is no t dependent on a cl ose r elation between image an d text. One ofthe postcards sen t to his si ster, for exa mple, carries o n one si de a picture o f ‘the m osques o f SultanHassan and Al Rifai’ in Cairo. On the ot her s ide o f the p ostcard, however, William describes a sc eneone w ould not expect to see o n a com mercially available p ostcard:

While w e w ere w aiting for t he t rain to go, at Suez, I saw a t errible si ght, it was a young native boyabout sixteen, he had legs abou t one inch thick and could not walk on them so had to walk on hishands w ith his kn ees doubled up under hi s chin. Just for al l the w orld like a m onkey poor chap. I

gave him four piastres (one piastre worth 2 ½d) and he almost went mad. Some of our chaps gotonto the r iver an d just to pass the t ime aw ay t hey would push t he n atives i nto the w ater. It was ver y

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funny to see s ix of them in the w ater at once, but it did not hurt them for I could almost swear mostof them never had a wash for months. (13 March, 1916)

While conveying the young boy’s p light, William reveals som ething of his ow n “position” as ayoung Australian soldier. The language – a m ix of emotional commentary an d masculine bravado –tells m uch about the co lonial discourses t hat help shape h is vi ews. This es tablishes an intimacy thatis hei ghtened by descriptions of difference an d “foreignness”. Although Elise d oes n ot view a v isualrepresentation of w hat William is ab le to see – t he p icture on the car d is n ot t he image, event orfeeling that William wants to tell her ab out – a sense o f intimacy is ge nerated by the ideologicalposition they share.

These instances provi de the basis for t hinking through the claims made by contemporary mediatheory t hat the p ostcard, as em blematic o f a cert ain institutional and technological regime, brings t oan end structures of i ntimacy, presence an d affect. As n oted above, a number o f theorists focus on

the l etter as art iculating a ce rtain symbolic cap ital and cultural formation. The ep istolary subject, soit is ar gued, is au tonomous, has f aith in authorial power, and believes t hat c ommunication is t hetransparent exchange of t houghts from one con sciousness t o another. In short this is the Romanticsubject re-worked by Postmodernism. Siegert, for example, argues that t he combination ofphotography and the postcard had a signicant impact upon contemporary regimes ofrepresen tation and the b elief in the o riginality of subjectivity. He w rites:

In addition to standard postage, standard format and standard text, there now was a standardpicture, as w ell. With the ad vent of the p icture p ostcard, visual memories dep arted from the humansoul, only to await people t hereafter on the rou tes o f the World Postal Union. The p icture p ostcard

opened up the t erritory of t he World Postal Union as an immense s pace of f orgetting, the o bject ofwhich w as t he w orld itself … Once m emories c irculated as p icture p ostcards t hat could be sent anyplace o n the g lobe …. travelling itself became u nnecessary. (Siegert, 1997: 161)

Yet people co ntinued to travel. However s tandardised early nineteenth-century correspondents f elttheir po stcard images t o be, they did not stop collecting and sending them. Siegert’s ar gument aboutthe rel ation between letters an d postcards i s b ased on a misreading of the cu ltural signicance o f“standardisation”. It misses a k ey point about how dreams of pr esence, immediacy and intimacyendure i n the p ostcard era rat her t han, as h e seem s t o suggest, dissipate. The d ifficulty with Siegert’sargument is that he opposes t he formal, standardised, mass-produced format of the postcard to

notions o f i ntimacy, privacy, presence and individuality. The latter q ualities, he argues, are t ied tothe epistolary era and are thus m ade p roblematic with the new media of the postcard. But whyshould standardisation rule out the su bjective and individual realms? A fter al l, commodity cultureand mass production are sho red up by the b elief in the i ndividual and the r hetoric of “choice”.

Contrary to popular an d academic belief, therefore, the p ostcard did not d estroy postal intimacy.Refuting commonly-held views that the standardisation of postcard media t hreatened individuality

because it removed the privacy in ted correspondence demonstrates that p ostcard communication can in fact increase levels ofindividuality, presence, intimacy and affect. The postcards excha nged between Elsie an d William

illustrate the extent to which privacy is p erformed and imagined rather t han existing as a real,empirical condition. Despite t he f act that the Fullers’ correspondence w as av ailable f or t he w artime

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censors t o read, a fact of which the Fullers w ere aw are, these si blings found ways t o construct theircorrespondence as private an d intimate.

Email presence

Rose Mulvale, long-time member and passionate champion of the email discussion groupCybermind, died on 18 October 2002. [6] [6] Although her death saddened many list members, it didnot come as a co mplete sh ock si nce, two years ear lier, Mulvale h ad announced to the l ist she w as i ll.In a ser ies of vivid, descriptive yet oddly prosaic em ails, she explained that she had been diagnosedwith oesophageal cancer and needed an oesophagectomy. Requiring ten hours of surgery, thisprocedure results in partial or t otal removal of t he oesophagus. She h ad the operation on Monday11 D ecember 2000, writing to the g roup on the Fri day b efore t hat,

if al l goes w ell ( on e option is t hat t he whole re-positioned tum might “f all apart”) I ’ll be at m y

brother’s place by ec take car e of myself by myself). What greater Christmas gi fts than privacy and autonomy – an d thesure k nowledge that both can be sh attered by a si mple cal l for h elp! (2000) [7] [7]

Throughout the next two years, Mulvale regularly wrote to the group about her i llness. Duringperiods w hen she was t oo ill to write, other l ist members w ould report on her p rogress, havingcontacted her f amily by private em ail. Two years bef ore t he l ist lamented Mulvale’s d eath, she hadfaced her par tner’s qu ite su dden death. Mulvale w rote to Cybermind advising the g roup that herpartner, also a l ist member, had died:

Kerry died this m orning. I thought that writing those w ords t ime after t ime would blunt t heirimpact. It d oesn’t. I t hought t hat s eeking purpose in his d eath would divert grief. It d oesn’t. Ithought that thinking has t he p ower t o dispel emotion. It doesn’t. So much for thought. (2000)

Death and illness ar e not infrequent topics of discussion for t he m embers of Cybermind. Indeed,attempts t o articulate p ain, death and grief play a p ivotal role i n the co nstruction of presence, affectand intimacy within Cybermind.

But why do some forms of email communication give us a s ense of presence, as if we occupied thesame p hysical or c onceptual space as ou r interlocutor? H ow do the w ords w e r ead on a sc reen see m

to “embody” or represent t heir author? To draw a relation, as many of the participants inCybermind seem to do, between the subject post ing emails and the particular communicationstechnology involved and even between the subject posting emails an d the persona that subjectwishes to portray, presupposes som e kind of exp ressive relation between writing, the textualpresence con jured by that writing, and the a uthor. In other w ords, we ass ume t he t ext expresses orstands i n for t he a uthor.

In general, Cybermind list m embers t reat p osts as authentic expressions of t heir au thors. Thus,Cybermind group members regularly comment upon each other’s “personalities”. Thisphenomenon is exemplied in those instances when a group member writes in a m anner that seems

“out of character”. In such cases, members ei ther d eplore t he writer’s d eviation from what hadseemed their ch aracter o r invent w ays of r e-establishing that c onnection (the divergence is n ot

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substantial, we see a new side o f the p erson’s cha racter, we h ave p reviously been misled, there h as been a misunderstanding and so on)

member of Cybermind, Tara, suspected that another member, Markku, was, in some manner,stalking her. She believed this p erson knew more abo ut her email system than would be d iscerniblesimply through list interaction. Although the thread continued for a few days, none of t he listmembers contributing to t he d iscussion believed that Tara w as bei ng st alked. Some suggested to h erthat s he had misread the original email from Markku; others claimed Markku was not c apable ofsuch action. Tara, however, continued to believe t hat Markku represented some form of da nger t oher. He h ad sent her r ude em ails “b ackchannel” (an email sent privately rather t han to the l ist), shenoted, and the ‘constant patting of M arkku online’ was u nfair (Tara, 2001). At this st age in thethread Rowena r eplied with the following post:

Tara, you obviously dislike M arkku, that is of course t otally within your right. But I, and many of us,do like him, consider hi m a f riend. So, it is no t more t han logical from our point of view that when

we ( or at l east: I) see h im accused of something we d on’t think is [ in] line w ith his ch aracter as w eperceive it and that on the basis of something that w as cl early (as I t hink is n ow quite clear) amisunderstanding on your part of one line in a p ost of him, we reply in pointing out that you’vemisinterpreted his words and that as far as we know Markku is not the type to do what you’veaccused him of. (2001)

It i s, in part, because email l ist interaction is able to create a sense of p resence, intimacy andimmediacy t hat Cybermind members feel they can judge t he au thenticity of each other’s ac tions.

This ev idence o ffers a certain resistance to early cyberculture narratives in which the subject was

liberated from the exigencies o f m ateriality. In these narratives o f f reedom, “online” subjectivity isplayful, performative, exible and decentred (Danet, 1998; McRae, 1997; Poster, 1990; Reid, 1995;Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1995). A fragmented, decentred, multiple sel f is i n a “ position”, so to speak, torefuse t o occupy the p ower s tructures o f hegemonic su bject positions. Recent cyberculture res earch,however, is less sanguine about the possibility for “online” environments to produce thedecontexualised, incorporeal, genderless, raceless an d ageless su bject (eg. Burkhalter, 1999; Hall,1996; Kolko and Reid, 1998; Sahay, 1997).

To a large degree, the “identities” of C ybermind, the various personalities a nd selves that ar econstituted though the list, operate in a manner t hat i s rel atively predictable and therefore f airly

stable. This i s n ot to ignore t he f act that “i dentity” i s al ways, in varying degrees, a p erformance: it isthe result of c omplex cultural, technological, economic a nd institutional forces r ather t han being anatural, somatic or p sychological process that is fundamentally independent of historical inuence.This cultural d eterminism, h owever, m ay mean that “online subjectivity” is less “exible”,“mutable” an d “radical” t han was pr edicted by early media t heory. As Jon Marshall comments:

Though it has frequently been suggested that people use the Internet to explore a “p ostmodern”multiple or decentered self, this d oes no t appear t o be the cas e in practice. On Cybermind and theother lists an d MOOs I have exp erienced, the m ain aim, or exp ectation, seems to be to uncover, ordisplay, the a uthentic sel f. (Marshall, 2000: chapter 7)

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Similarly, I w ould argue that w hether sub jectivity is rep resented as, on the one hand, “singular”,“rational and autonomous” or , on the other hand, “multiple”, “fragmented” an d “decentred”, theassumption is that the self can be made present on Cybermind. To a large degree, the selves ofCybermind conform to a R omantic or “expressivist” p aradigm – ‘the internal made ext ernal’ – as M.H. Abrams p uts it (1953: 22). Authors as sume t hat the m aterial signiers of writing can be d eployedto express, to make present, the particular v ersion of s ubjectivity they wish to convey. Moreover,even the rep resentations of m ultiple a nd playful selves are, in fact, quite caref ully governed by theirauthors.

I conclude t his se ction by making some p reliminary observations abo ut the con trasts bet ween thesedifferent socio-technological r epresentations of presence. To what degree are the epistolarynarratives of di sembodiment and intimacy different from those evi dent in email exchanges? I n theirone-to-one com munications, the subjects of ep istolary discourse engage in what we m ight call adialogic performance, whereas f or t heir em ail counterparts the one-to-many performance is m ore

properly described as theatrical. The latter is, ar guably, m ore difficult to regulate, si ncecommunication involves the participation of multiple subjects. Although, of course,misunderstanding and misrepresentation are possible in epistolary communication, in emaildiscussion groups t his p ossibility is am plied. Subjects m ust negotiate n ot only the p ortrayal of self

but also the audience reaudience’s r eaction.

Arguably, the t heatricality and the p otentially instantaneous exc hange o f communication means t hesense of p resence an d intimacy experienced by participants in Cybermind is l ess st able than thatgenerated between epistolary partners. Part of this is due to the “interactivity” of a theatrical

audience. As Brenda Laurel has ar gued, conceiving of ‘computers as t heatre’ helps t o explain thefunction of interactivity in the sh aping of CMC performance. As she p uts i t, ‘the au dience’s au dibleand visible responses .… are often used by the actors to tweak their p erformance in real time[which] r eminds u s t hat t heatrical audiences ar e not s trictly ‘passive’ and may be sai d to inuencethe act ion’ (Laurel, 1993: 16). Thus, on Cybermind one is keen ly aware of writing as p erformance orwriting “for p ublication”. Moreover, it is p ossible to occupy the role of bot h audience an d actor

because one encounters one’s n aof myself to the discussion group and it arrives in my mail inbox along with posts from othermembers. I do not, however, “own” t his ver sion of s elf; other members of the g roup can intervene t o“read” m e d ifferently, to rupture an d challenge the st ability of my image.

This con trasts w ith the dialogic si tuation of ep istolary practice w here the “audience” does n otconstrain and regulate t he p erformance of identity in quite t he sam e m anner. Perhaps t his suggeststhat, in relation to the co rrespondents o f this p aper at l east, the i dentities co nstructed through theexchange o f letters are l ess co nstrained by socio-technological factors than the i dentities co nstructedthrough email systems. In a sense, this is a surprising discovery. As noted, the subject ofcybercultural discourse i s f requently viewed as m ore “ multiple”, “radical” a nd, therefore, capable o fexperiencing more “f reedom” t han the su bject constituted by earlier f orms of communication. If thesubject of em ail discussion groups exp eriences hi s/her i dentity as i n some sen se “t hreatened” orunstable, this d oes n ot l ead to a d ecrease i n intimacy and presence. Indeed, it is a t estament to thepersistence of t he desire for presence that d espite the potentially disruptive, i nteractive and

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theatrical nature o f em ail discussion lists, subjects a re ab le to express f eelings o f i ntimacy with, andwarmth and affection for, one an other.

Occupying a “mid-point” between epistolary an d email technologies i s the p ostcard. With regard tothe t ype o f performance, the p ostcard represents a t ransitional phase b etween the d ialogic si tuationof ep istolary communication and the theatricality of em ail d iscussion lists. To the extent t hatpostcards are gen erally intended as a one-to-one communication they are si milar t o letter w riting.However, the fact t hat t heir co ntents are potentially available for p ublic scrutiny qualies thisevaluation, providing a larger au dience t han is t he ca se w ith epistolary practice. This l atter p oint iswhy, of course, Internet Service P roviders an d other i nstitutions o ften use t he p ostcard’s d esign torepresent t he lack of p rivacy in email communication. As one legal ad visor puts it ‘sendingcondential or sensitive information through e-mail is like sending information on the back of apostcard’ (anon., 1999). However, as t his p aper h as ar gued, privacy is of ten an “effect” o f discourse,a cu lturally and historically contingent term. Correspondents of l etters, postcards an d email assume

a l evel of privacy (that may or m ay not be t echnologically, materially or i nstitutionally supported) inorder to ex perience p resence an d intimacy.

Conclusion: toward a h istoricised critical media p ractice

Many comparisons of electronic mail and the paper-based postal system identify the so-called“immateriality” o f the former as one o f the k ey points w here i t departs f rom the l atter. The ass umedimmateriality of email is then associated with affective qualities such as “impermanence”,“impersonality” or “t ransience”. This is a com mon rhetorical move within academic con texts an dthe p opular m edia, as t he following quotations s uggest:

There is som ething very personal about a handwritten letter or even a typed letter t hat you justdon’t get with an email and unless you print an email out you’ve g ot no rec ord o f it. Once you moveonto the next screen, that’s the end of i t. So there is som ething permanent, something personalabout a letter … . you can preserve it, you can keep it. You can’t keep the em ail, unless you print itout but it looks very uninteresting printed out. (Breen, 2002)

Every few months, I climb the ladder though a hatch into my attic. Over near a d usty beam, I see agrey shoebox of l etters. Here’s a valentine f rom when I was t en; a postcard from my best friend. Alove letter from my college sw eetheart … Network mail, even decade o ld e-mail lacks w armth. The

paper d oesn’t age, the si gnatures d on’t fade … Give me a shoebox of old letters. (Stoll, 1995: 157)

For ot her w riters, the so-called “virtuality” of em ail is a virtue rather t han a vice: because em ailcommunication involves ‘ no material mediation’, it is l ess l abour i ntensive than communicating bypost (Stratton, 1997: 33). This (relative) freedom from material constrains allows emailcorrespondents g reater f reedom, intimacy and presence t han their p ostal counterparts. According to

Jon Stratton, the intimacy t han that experienced i n epistolary com munication:

The material letter reinforces the absence of bodily contact, the virtual email, arr iving

instantaneously, emphasises a n on-bodily intimacy .… The instantaneity of email, that it arrives soquickly after i t was se nt, something which provides a sense of closeness, of an immediacy that

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suggests p resence, is heightened by the lack of t he ap paratus that goes w ith letter w riting … Themost intimate letters ar e h andwritten because t hey involve the body directly, and handwriting hasan individualised quality. Email can only use the computer key board, this d ecreases t he bodilyinvolvement, and the b odily intimacy. (1997: 33)

Stratton is r ight to assume t hat w ithin epistolary practice, handwriting, together w ith references t othe co rporeal body, can operate a s si gniers of presence. As w e n oted earlier, epistolary partners c anevoke immediacy, intimacy and presence by referring to the scene of the letter’s con struction orreception. Letter writers often draw attention to the materiality of the postal veh icle and thecorporeality of their ow n bodies in the writing process. However, as w e also discovered, themateriality of the epistolary exchange (the letter an d the postal s ervice for example) an d thecorporeality of t he ep istolary partners ar e often eclipsed by a “disembodied”, imagined sense o feach other. Indeed, one en abling condition of presence s eems to be t he p artial or complete ecl ipse ofthe m aterial conditions of c ommunication.

While t he “i mmateriality” of email is for some com mentators evidence of its impersonality and lackof l ife, and for o thers the same quality intensies t he experience of i ntimacy and presence, it i sstriking that bo th sides align email w ith the immaterial an d letters with the material. Thesecorrelations and the contrasts they enable are not self-evidently true. As I have argued,correspondents in the nineteenth century used letters and the postal system to construct animaginary, spiritual bo dy while eliding or “l ooking through” its m aterial i nfrastructure. Similarly,the Fullers’ postcard communication revealed that the material exigencies of wartimecorrespondence w ere of ten eclipsed to produce an incorporeal sense of intimacy an d presence. Why,then, should the older communication technology be routinely cast as m ore material when

compared with newer t echnologies? One of t he answers to this q uestion is t hat in modernity thepast is of ten construed as a m aterial impediment from which the p resent struggles t o be liberated.In this instance, the unfettered bodies an d selves of em ail have been freed from the materialconditions imposed by an older t echnology. This discursive logic parallels that at w ork in thenarrative of disembodiment, as i t applies t o the individual s ubject. That i s, just as su bjects st ruggleto escape t he co nnes of c orporeality in order t o express t heir “r eal” b ut “immaterial” essen ce, sotoo digital t echnologies re lease human communication from the material conditions that hadpreviously impeded it. Par adoxically, the desire to free information from its material an dtechnological bases – what R ichard Grusin calls ‘ the recurrent trope of dematerialisation’ (1996: 51)– h as very real , material, consequences (see B rook and Boal, 1995).

While a ttempting not t o underestimate the transformative powers of t echnology, this p aper ar guesfor the remarkable persistence of the ideology of p resence. Analysing a range of soci o-materialpractices it d emonstrates the complex interrelation between technological m odalities, culturalassumptions an d symbolic cap ital in the p erformance of p resence. In so d oing, it attempts t o avoidthe binary that has captured much of t he research on digital media; namely, either t echnologicalmaterialities eff ect decisive, irreversible changes in the systems o f communication (technologicaldeterminism) or the socio-cultural articulation that is under investigation transcends theparticularities o f the m aterial infrastructure ( cultural determinism). Rather t han view these foci asstrict binaries, then, I argue that t hey are i nvolved in a symbiotic and dynamic rel ation. That i s,fantasies o f p resence a re embedded within material infrastructures an d practices. These dynamicrelations u nderwrite t he use by postcard correspondents, for exam ple, of p ublic com munications

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systems t o convey private em otions s uch as d esire, fear an d intimacy. Similarly, the p ublic n ature o fan email discussion list often enhances t he sense o f presence an d intimacy generated for an d by itsparticipants. This paradox – a public signifying system used as the site for t he articulation ofintimacy – r eminds us of one of the fundamental paradoxes of cultural communication, namely thatshared material signiers and public communication systems can be used to conjure a sense o fintimacy and mutual understanding between individuals, and even of t he incorporeal presence o fone cor respondent to t he ot her.

Author’s Biography

Esther Milne lectures in Media & Communications at Swinburne University an d is currentlycompleting h er PhD in English an d Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her thesistraces f antasies of presence, disembodiment, intimacy and affect through postal and emailtechnologies.Esther i s a f acilitator f or Fi breculture. She a lso enjoys sp eaking of hersel f in the th ird

person in the rel entlessly reexive voice o f the b io.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Peter Otto an d Andrew Kenyon for t heir invaluable d iscussions concerningcritical themes ex plored in this p aper.

Notes

[1] The em phasis ap pears in the o riginal. For the rem ainder of this p aper I note o nly those i nstances where t heemphasis has b een added by me. It may b e ass umed, therefore, that if there i s no notation, the em phasisappears i n the o riginal quotation.

[2] A ll the l etters r eferred to in the t ext are f rom Kelley, Philip and Hudson, Ronald (eds) (1984). The i n-textcitations p rovide d etails of the d ate o f letter, volume n umber and page n umber. For t he p urpose of the i n-textcitation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning is abb reviated to “EBB” an d Mary R ussell Mitford is abb reviated to“MRM”.

[3] Eschatological and apocalyptic t ropes are, of course, common narrative e xpressions for t he i nterpretationof cyberculture an d the m ovement of global capital. See, for example, Baudrillard (1990; 2000) and Virilio(2000).

[4] Biographical and historical notes about the Fuller f amily are ob tained from two sources: Papers of WilliamRobert Fuller, Accession Number MS 9701, La Trob e Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library ofVictoria, Melbourne and Australian War Memorial database: .

[5] This cal culation includes on ly the card s t hat bear m essages. Fuller al so sen t Elsie card s w ithout message sand counting these t he f ull collection of postcards n umbers abo ut 170. Since W illiam and Elsie sh are a l astname, they will be ref erred to in the t ext by their rs t names.

[6] For a com prehensive et hnographic h istory of C ybermind, see M arshall (2000).

[7] The arc hives of Cybermind have m oved through at least two servers eac h with quite d ifferent storagepolicies. During 2000, without warning AOL deleted two years of l ist email. Despite r equests f rom Cybermindmembers, the m issing d ata w ere not retrieved. However, the au thor h olds copies of all emails cited.

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