Email

I have been traveling for the past week, and during this week I happened to have a conversation that made me consider something that I had previously not considered. I am used to thinking that the category, “literature,” is by now too broad or impossibly narrow; that it’s part of a publishing-industry fantasy, basically (not sure on whom I blame it but nevertheless!) It’s, for example, a historical relic it is fun to poke holes in: And this relic-status simultaneously forms the lion’s share of its contemporary relevance, since we like it to illuminate, by contrast and elimination, what we should understand as the contemporary, present, or non-past.

In the conversation, a conversation that took place in the piercing white sun of L.A., I learned of an alternative approach. My interlocutor suggested a way of thinking through the problem of understanding the place of “literature” or “the literary,” now. He suggested that some genres (such as poetry) were at one time literary, but are now literary no longer. Poetry, he maintained, is simply no longer part of that category or consensus opinion that constitutes “literature.”

I did not get the full story on this transition, and I assume there is no way to (empirically) prove that this is the actual Truth, but as a kind of polemical stance I have to say that I really like it! (It is, at the very least, a good example of not excluding style from one’s argument.) And I like the idea that instead of attempting to reform what might be, let’s be honest, a baggy and somewhat impotent category, we could rather consider other identifiable written genres and forms as having, effectively, seceded from its ranks. Literary America seems intuitively to dislike the politics of schisms; still, I propose this as a speculative exercise. Perhaps we don’t simply take for granted a given sort of writing’s “literariness,” just because, for example, it happens to be, yes, artful in some way, untrue, a dissimulation possessing a kind of (this is not a word but) disingenuity.

It’s with this conversation in mind that I come back to my inbox. I mean, I hardly left it. Even as I have been typing this I’ve checked it twice—pausing once for an hour that flew by like some light 5 minutes as I dispatched, buoyed by a mysterious new energy, fifteen long-overdue messages. Someone who knows me very well says, by the way, that he’s never met anyone who loves email as much as I do.

There is probably only one hard and fast rule about email and its interpretation. Email does not support reliable tonal shading. The standard way of speaking of this is to say that email is “ambiguous.” In some narratives this means we huddle around the monitor and expend several hours picking apart a simple declarative sentence in an attempt to ascertain the beloved’s true intent, the authority’s true opinion, the true depths of the frenemy’s (delightful?) inability to assimilate news of our recent success. The other thing about email is gestural, rather than hermeneutic. There’s the functional finality (Gmail’s 5-second "Undo" notwithstanding) with which we press “send.” And this gesture very quickly becomes environmental, affective: It initiates a certain silence that is either characterized by intense anticipation or casual forgetting. I often think I know, for example, what will happen when I send an email—and though I am very frequently wrong in my predictions, still I like to think (believe) that I know exactly what will happen when I send an email. I even take as solid evidence the minority of successful (i.e., response-as-anticipated) emails. None of it is rational.

In rhetoric there is a name for this weird sort of practice of betting on the future—or afterlife, depending on your point of view—of a piece of writing, while writing. The name of this rhetorical figure is prolepsis. It’s a somewhat rare word for interested anticipation, an anticipation finding its home in the written present, in the way we write now, to return belatedly and vaguely to my first post here. Prolepsis is an agonistic figure: Even before my opponent has spoken, I anticipate his argument or rebuttal and therefore frame or form my own speech in such a way so as to refute or obviate what he (I anticipate) will say. And I do, minus some of the aggression implied, think about email in this way. I do not consider it, for example, an “epistolary” form. Since it does not really matter how many words, sentences, and so on my email contains. My email is, anyway, at least 60% gesture. And no one will divine from it anything approaching the affective tone with which I did in fact think those words and sentences, usually more words than sentences, within it.

Our time is strange because we spend the time of email-writing thinking about the time in which the addressee will write back to us. We spend the time of email-writing thinking about the response we anticipate receiving, reading. Writing email it is as if we want to lean—not into the time of signification, the time in which the meaning of words unfolds, but rather—into the amorphous and unaccountable real time of the minutes, hours, weeks, in which some other person is existing, aging, and possibly reacting to our email. Have we ever concertedly tried to limit our almost certainly completely fantastical aspirations about email? Have we ever tried not to believe that it was not in fact a form of writing at all but instead a game that we were playing with fate? Have we ever tried not to think about reading the reply to the very words we were writing, already, while writing?

Prolepsis, as a kind of vector or ressentiment, does not stand on literary ceremony. Sure it welcomes style, but it cannot concern itself too much with the words. Email is like this. It’s a strange text—to which I myself devote a percentage of time rivaling the amount of time I spend eating, if not sleeping. There’s hardly any signature upon it; its sans serif gathers in neologism, the abbreviation, the carefully deployed cliché. It is fundamentally not a letter. It's also excitingly other than literary. It is the mark and symptom of an excessively contingent world. For now I will just say that I care only about hearing back again.