Theory & Event

Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they are real; perhaps they are.

Ralph Emerson, “Experience”

Maybe because I know that Paige Baty was thinking about Emerson in her work up to the time of her death (a symposium on Baty appears in Theory&Event, 1.4); maybe because of her own observation early on in this book — “Perhaps I am not so much unlike Emerson at all” (36); maybe because my only really sustained contact with her was a long, strange telephone call she made to me late in 1994 while she was preparing to review a book I had written that, among other things, explores Emerson as a resource of American self-understandings; maybe because the review, published sometime later in Political Theory, turned out to be both weirder and more insightful than any I other received for that particular work; and maybe because, when I learned from one of her friends and former colleagues at Williams College of her death as a consequence of a misadventure in the realm of consciousness, my first thought was that such a death is an Emersonian in character; for whatever reason, I know that I will always think of Emerson when I think of her, especially the Emerson who asks us, passionately and consistently, to be encouraged by ourselves. Baty was by most accounts a charismatic and brilliant person, who burned too bright for her own health and well-being. Her death is sad, and is prefigured in this book. Then again, it may not be only her death that we find prefigured in e-mail trouble: death is in the air these days, as it is on all days. The question is whether we are in the frame of mind to notice.

e-mail trouble is billed as a postmodern autobiography, and if there is such a genre, perhaps this is what it is — though it seems more to be a modernist memoir of a particular phase of young academic’s struggle to cope with the demons of self-doubt, the first isolation that comes with departure from the womb of grad school coziness, and the horrible uncertainty that concerns the existential dilemmas that are rarely directly confronted in the culture at large in the United States these days. In our time like all times, one of constricting tolerance for free and transgressive expression and a deepening anxiety about a center that seems to hold all to firmly, our more daring young academics seem to have become our cultural canaries in the coal mine, sensates destined to harm, serving to warn the rest of us of the befouling stench of old pieties and ever-young hypocrisies. Baty does not shirk from confronting those demons in this book. In e-mail trouble the author is relentlessly present, as subject, as object, and sometimes as annoying e-mail message. But even though the question might arise as to what would inspire a young scholar with one book to her credit to compose such a memoir it would be a mistake to dismiss this book as an exercise in narcissism. Simultaneously a commentary on the matrix and its relationship to femininity (the title simultaneously parodies “female trouble” — Baty notes that the matrix’s first meaning is “womb” (6–7) — and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble — she emulates Butler’s pressing insistence on the complexity of representation and uncertainty in matters of identity) — the paradoxes and contradictions associated with iteration and the constitution of virtual identity is a theme rendered with power and consistency throughout e-mail trouble.

But Baty’s story is also one that is reproduced through the transcribing of and commentary on a series of e-mail messages. What is taken as its postmodernism may better be comprehended as an attempt, in a realist narrative, to describe the dissolution of the letter — both the written communication and the printed word — as cultural artifact and product, and the way the lack of inscription becomes a simulation of death. Baty describes in detail and anecdote how...