It would seem, therefore, that the allegedly irreversible light of observation, as well as our common idea of "distance", call for a deconstruction. Deconstruction, after all, seeks to render questionable what one thinks one understands by proximity and distance, immediacy and mediation, presence and absence. But what is the potential for deconstruction online? It has been claimed that "computer writing instantiates the play that deconstruction raises only as a corrective," as Mark Poster writes for instance (The Mode of Information) - conceding immediately that the corrective is "albeit a fundamental one, against the hubris of logocentrism." On the other hand, there are those who, like Greg Ulmer, believe 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." (Applied Grammatology)
Re-reading some of my email to that strange and collective addressee I am myself part of, the internet, it strikes me that this topic, concerning our very practice, is in fact rarely discussed (t)here. If it is true what Fredric Jameson writes, namely that "no society has ever been quite so mystified in quite so many ways as our own, saturated as it is with messages and information" (The Political Unconscious), then to demystify the flood of information is a pivotal task for distance pedagogics if it is not simply to fall prey to the same mystification. Not that there haven't been attempts - Derrida's Of Grammatology foresaw that "the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing" - if, that is, one goes along with Derrida on writing. Clearly, not everybody will have done so. But let us pretend to have read Geoff Bennington's "Derridabase", which begins with a hint at the new practices of writing and their relation to Derrida's thought: "le texte qu'on va lire est la version lineaire - une version parmi d'autres possibles - d'un livre sans ordre de lecture prescrit, ecrit en Hypertexte, a paraitre ulterieurement sur disquette", only to resign at the end - one of the ends - that "nous concevions ce livre un peu sur le modle d'un logiciel en 'hypertexte', qui permettrait, du moins en principe, un acces presque instantane". - What happened? After Bennington has gone and demonstrated what his hypertext yields, he retreats into a new reserve: it is only modeled on hypertext, and even so only "a bit", and perhaps even that only in principle...
One of the potential answers to this surprising turn is contained in the assertion, only a page later, that "cette machine est déjà en place, elle est le déjà même": instant access is apparently granted, swiftly taken away, and then slyly re-marked as 'always already' there. More often than not, the modes of interaction via hypertext, internet, and the so-called "world-wide" web (only fractionally wider in its actual catchment than the "world series") especially tend to cover up, or try and forget momentarily, their own conditions of possibility. Seen from today's vantage point, it might not surprise one as unusual when the question poses itself: was there ever a world before the internet? But conversely, it is misled to see in this and related modes of writing an end to latency, or the task of reading largely exonerated. Arguably, learning about and across the distance will have had everything to do with memory, hypomnesis, with forgetting and abstraction, with cathexis and repression. These are not haptic, "bodily" functions; they are neither simply present not concealed, but share the slippery strictures and structures of what is called "general writing". And learning to read, then, has always been distance learning, inasmuch as pedagogical proximity is always implicitly upset by the uncanny effect of difference, trace, deferral and inscription, in a word, of a net.
Welcome to Foreign Body, visitor No.
This website © 1998 (foreign body)