The affective and aesthetic relations of epistolary presence

Within the technological imaginary, developments in communication systems are often represented as a series of decisive shifts and abrupt breaks. The new technology emerges, it seems, out of nowhere, escaping the tentacles of historical materiality. Devoid of a past and promising a future perfect, this narrative of progress helps serve global commodity relations in its uncritical celebration of the new. As a response to these socio-technological representations, this paper argues that the relation between old and new media is more complex than is often assumed by contemporary media theory. Narratives of change are dramatically complicated by the striking continuities between different communication systems. What follows teases out some of these continuities by exploring how geographically distributed postal networks produce affective and aesthetic relations of intimacy. This is not, however, to deny the problematics encountered by critical historiography. The historical approaches of poststructuralism, for example, have offered a rejoinder to a certain universalising version of history that wants to erase difference. In its effort to see difference where hitherto there had existed the smoothness and functionality of structuralism, poststructuralist media theory celebrates rupture and aporia to reveal the disjunction of history and its representation. Yet even as 'discontinuity' has been a useful conceptual framework though which to understand activist poetics and avant-gardism, it is quite remarkable that some of these rhetorical strategies can end up confirming that very methodology and ideology they wish to confound. That is, while arguing for historical rupture against the totalising view of historical seamlessness, these kinds of studies may be seen actually to rejoice in the unbroken narrative of history.