presence/absence/source

In signature, event, context, Derrida handily dismantles dominant conceptions of language and communication as primarily a means of transmitting meaning or content. In his treatment of communication, he touches on Condillac and Austin, both of whom seem to be (I haven't read either) concerned with notions of presence, absence, and source. Writing, for Condillac, is reducible to a speech act predicated on the absence of both the sender and the receiver of the message contained. Within this model, speech is representative of thought, and writing is representative of speech, creating a chain of direct signification between our thoughts and our writing. Elaborating on the notion of writing as defined by absence, Austin treats signature as a marker of the "presence" of a source--or writer--within a written text marked fundamentally by said writer's absence.

Addressing these two accouts, Derrida writes: "By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer."

I am particularly interested in Derrida's selection of the word "nonpresence" as opposed to the more conventional choice of "absence." What is the difference between nonpresence and absence? Is nonpresence marked by a "trace" of the once-presentness of the author, while absence is devoid of this trace? Does the written signature constitute this trace? There is no doubt in my mind that Derrida chose this word very specifically and intentionally, yet I can't establish why exactly that is.

Perhaps it has something to do with the notion of "source" as treated by Austin, specifically the idea that a signature indicates the "presence" of the source of communication in the written word. It is clear that the source of an oral utterance must be present to the utterance, but I find problematic Austin's assertion that "appending a signature" to a written utterance constitutes the "presence" of the source of the utterance.

The emergence of new media is creating huge problems for such notions of presence and source, because the rise of open source languages and remote internet discourses is turning inside-out our cultural and philosophical understandings of self, agency, and individuality. As meg mentioned in her discussion of email signatures, the validity of a signature is no longer predicated on“the pure reproducibility of a pure event.” We live in an era of automated payroll machines that print out 50000 "signed" cheques every other friday, cheques that, to a bank, are no different than a cheque signed by an individual in a discreet, purely reproducable event. We update blogs and databases such as wikipedia which, until a few years ago, never required "sources" to "sign" their contributions with a username or ip address.

In light of these technologies and new forms of discourse, it seems like we need a revision of the notion of signature as a singularly reproducable pure event. As we log onto the web and visit websites, post on blogs, and share information, we are silently and unknowingly leaving signatures of our momentary presence at each of the virtual spaces we visit. In this instance, I am reminded of the student in Alabama who hacked Sarah Palin's email account, probably assuming he would get away with it. By tracking the "signature" of his IP address and computer information, authorities pinpointed his identity and proved his guilt. How such unintended, automatically-produced virtual signatures come to bear on issues of privacy, neutrality, and surveillance will play out in the very near future on our cultural and virtual landscapes.