Signatures and Emails

Derrida’s “Signature, Event, Context” is a crucial text for any discussion on communication. My interest with the text was in the end section on signatures because of what it means for signatures in the most prevalent form of written communication today - email. What is the state of the online email signature?

Derrida writes that for a signature to be effective its must be iterable: “the pure reproducibility of a pure event” (20). This iterability allows a signature to denote the person not present at the time of reception. An email signature is by nature reproducible with cut and paste options. Also one is not held to keeping a continuous signature as with the signed, written signature. I have noticed the trend of turning signatures into signs for personal emails – a simple M or shortened version of ones name becomes the signature. While professional emails require a long list of signatures, each line denoting another layer of important information. For example for my radio station I sign my emails:

Meg Goetsch

Publicity Director

Brown Student and Community Radio

Bsrlive.com

88.1 fm

There is yet another layer to email that connects to Derrida’s discussion on context. He writes about context as the rupture of a written sign. This open system of writing “one can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains. No context can entirely enclose it. Nor any code, the code here being both the possibility and impossibility of writing, of its essential iterability” (9). An article I read this weekend pointed to email’s “asynchronous” communication, the fact that exchanges do not happen between people in real time. The “delay” between sending and receiving is nearly erased by the marking of the time it was sent. Also with the increase of iphones and blackberries constantly on and connected there is no delay. One begins to assume that when an email is sent it is immediately viewed. With these points in mind what does this mean for the signatures relation to the present - what has happened to the signature-event? What happens to presence when signatures are by nature multiple online? Can there be signatures online?