The Haunted (Online) University

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Cate Thomas is the next presenter here at ICE 3. She begins by describing the online world as an uncanny space where there is a ghost in the machine; the academy as it moves further online then also becomes a haunted university where radical uncertainty persists. How are academic staff constituted in this digital university, then?

Cate suggests that academics are already in crisis today; their traditional authority has been undermined, much as the crisis of the author in the postmodern environment has also undermined authorship. Additionally, there is a tendency towards disembodiment of the academic subject, which means that their electronic self increasingly begins to constitute the day-to-day presence of the contemporary academic. Their real-life presence, in turn, comes to be reconstituted by the electronic persona; the online world rewrites real life in that sense.

Additionally, such electronic selves are also subject to archiving of content; there is a digital double in the archive of emails and other electronic content which is out of control of the originator. Such subjects essentially live forever, but this immortal self is not identical to the subject itself, but is rather its digital spectre. Derrida suggests that it is the death instinct - the fear of deletion - which creates the archive. This is also associated with a loss anxiety - to lose one's inbox is to lose part of one's life; at the same time, however, the trend to archiving which is created by this anxiety also creates an anxiety that the archive thus created will move out of control of the originator of the emails being archived. The academic subject is partially constituted by the totality of all the emails they have ever written and received, yet which for a large part are outside their control; indeed, there is a sense in which all emails are addressed to the archive as the subject is conscious of creating their public presence through the content they create.

Further, there is a collapse of the distinction between public and private as a result of emails. Who does an email belong to - the author, the recipient, the system which transmits it, the university on whose time the email is sent or received, the archive? Ultimately, any complex exchange of utterances has no owner, and emails are always characterised by a radical uncertainty about addressee and ownership. In accessing email, on the other hand, there is a strong sense of being alone and secure; emails are written as if they are private, but instead actually are messages addressed to the world. Thereby, emails transform the entire public/private spaces of humanity.

Further, receivers of emails are forced to know their contents through the technological features of the email system; by extension they are also forced to speak, as receipt of emails can be traced, and lack of response is increasingly seen as a non-option. In unversity environments, people often email those whom they would not choose to contact through other modes of communication; this exerts a kind of force on a very random selection of people, and in turn creates a kind of panoptic form of policing by which relatively random senders (but especially those with a relatively large amount of time on their hands - students and administrative staff) can force a response out of previously independent actors. This changes and in some cases reverses previous power relations (those between students and teachers are particularly notable here).

Emails create chains of signification, too. They create a compound text (which is written by a range of unreliable narrators), and meaning here is created predominantly by the movement of emails between participants; emails re-read and re-write one another. Particularly important here is the location of emails (the recipients they reach) - or perhaps, the email is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere (partially through its location in the archive, and the possibility for it to be forwarded on).

Further, the gaze of the reader of an email must also be considered. There is a dynamic of seeing and mis-seeing; email is a hall of mirrors enabling us to see parts of ourselves and miss others, as well as see others' views of ourselves, and such views and glances are in part open, in part covert, there are aspects of masquerading and hiding when we are writing and responding to emails. The receiver, too, is not in a neutral position, due to the way email functions; through cc'ing, for example, receivers are positioned into a conversation in a way which makes it impossible to refute their positioning.

The emailing subject, then, has little control over representations of themselves, and they cannot die; they are conscious of the existence of their spectral double, and at the same time are their double. This could be seen as a ghostly position, but perhaps also something else, something even more conflicted - vampiric, demonic, impish?

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