The Email May Contain Information
Eda Gunaydin on Toby Fitch
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
I love the voice you have in this, how you balance a kind of scorn and cheek
Postponed by one week
One of the key tragedies of academia—or of any other profession whose appeal rests on the idea that it in some way comprises a ‘calling’, that is, that we might be doing this kind of work (thinking, reading, writing) regardless of whether or not it was remunerated (a lucky thing, given how much of it is not)—is that the Venn diagram of the jobs we’d like to be doing and the jobs we end up doing looks like two circles, not, actually, unlike the dark ones under my eyes:
O_O
portrait of the artist experiencing the dawning realisation that they only have one good hour of work left in them before their stimulant wears off
Most of the academics I know are perpetually caught in the process of going-to-write something, something else, something real, if only they could first clear the decks. Complete my to-do list! Hit inbox zero! The goal is to produce, well, research, but instead we spend probably about a third of the day, on a good day, producing emails instead. You might say that the bulk of the textual output produced by any academic in a given year, day, or moment, was emails. I sent 28 emails yesterday. But if you were to tell them that—if you were to tell me that: Eda, the sum total of your output for the calendar year is 50,000 words of emails—I would pretend not to have heard you.
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I hope this email finds you well; I hope this email never finds me; I hope this email finds you starving hysterical naked
In an interview with Elena Gomez, the poet and creative writing academic Toby Fitch says that what we achieve via language is the ‘construction of the self’. When what we are writing is something like a book or a poem, this is probably a good thing. But what of the email, as a form of language—as a dominant form of language, even—that forms the self?
In ‘A Massage from the Vice-Chancellor’, Fitch is attentive to the email as a form. I have heard him read this poem many times on various occasions, usually through a megaphone, at rallies held by the University of Sydney Casuals Network or the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). The University of Sydney, where Fitch and I both work, has been the site of six days of industrial action this year, as the union and management enter their fifteenth month of bargaining for a new enterprise agreement. The institution’s pandemic austerity saw large numbers of course cancellations, voluntary redundancies and funding freezes that have netted it a $1 billion dollar surplus. Like other Go8s, the University has been investigated for wage theft, and casual staff in particular—not only across Australia, but across the world—are agitating. As I write this, nearly 50,000 workers across the University of California (UC) system are striking, the largest university strike in US history. ‘A Massage From the Vice Chancellor’ is a piece of protest art that seeks to re-insert the humanity back into the humanities. On Twitter recently, Fitch recalled how he once quoted from Kafka’s The Castle to the then-VC Stephen Garton during an industrial dispute, in the hopes of moving him. The manager in question may not have budged, but some of us do find ourselves moved. Sometimes it is the institution that marches through you, and sometimes it becomes your turn to march through it. Fitch writes: ‘And so thank you for managing to emerge from this timely crisis’.
Fitch is well-positioned to skewer the kinds of all-staff missives that frequently land in the inboxes of university employees: emails that adopt the affective manner of sincere communications, packaged in a register designed to pacify. These emails are deceptively smooth, with their corners rounded out; we mostly only read them to extract the key points conveyed in bold, or otherwise delete because we don’t have time to deconstruct them. These are the kinds of messages that simulate warmth as they work to conceal their fundamental coldness—they are what we might call performatively human, something that passes a cursory check if you’re not looking too closely or if you yourself are feeling less-than-human at the time. An uncanny valley. ‘A Massage’ is the opposite: it is designed for disruption, ensuring a feeling of unsettlement. Where we have been asked to please keep it together, the poem works to create jagged edges upon which we might splice something open (Fitch writes: ‘a prudent app roach might poke you in the coming days’). Where we have been asked to walk in single file, it asks us instead to trip (Fitch writes: ‘We thank you … for understumbling’). Fitch writes: ‘this no environment is an unsettling tomb’ and ‘I do know this is disappointmenting’ and I’m finally, finally paying attention. Something has cut through.
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We may not even need to meet
Thanks for your consideration. Thanks for your consideration.
Emails are a kind of anti-poetry. What is unique about email as a form, I think, is that it is a language that resists language: as I highlighted above, mostly we write emails so that we might get to stop writing emails. But the more we write, the more we tend to produce, and so consummation of this desire—really the desire for cessation, for the cessation of desire—lays perpetually out of reach, a can kicked down the road, forever. The sanctuary that we hope lays on the other side—that we may finally be able to engage with language in its purest form, by writing the books or essays or stories that we are writing the emails in order to be able to write—appearing before us as mere frustrated desire. What did Lacan say about jouissance? That it is the thing that is alienated by an object, and which only becomes more alienated the more it is elaborated upon. Fitch writes: ‘we anticipate some deferral’.
What is also unique about email as a form is that it is so very formal—it exceeds even poetry. But the difference here is that emails are anti-sonnets, anti-sestinas: they are things that work against beauty and against the self. I spend at least a few minutes every semester advising my students how to write an email correctly, not because I believe in this kind of rigid—and classist—formality, but because I was punished for the times I did not know. Emails are a discipline. I know this now even though I did not, years ago, because of the times I opened an email ‘Hello’ instead of ‘Dear’, or said ‘you two’ instead of using everyone’s names, or wrote ‘Dr’ instead of ‘Professor’, or ‘First Name’ instead of ‘Title Last Name’ or ‘First Name (if I may)’, or wrote any other sign-off than ‘Warmly’, or ‘Best’, or ‘Warm regards’, or ‘Sincerely’ or ‘Yours’. I don’t want my students to attract the same email reprimands, so I think it is better that they learn. And so, whether I believe in it or not, I become who my emails want me to be.
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Dear Eda Gunyadin,
A couple of questions for you
What might it mean to acknowledge that this is the substance of the labour performed by many of us, those of us who aspire to do anything but? At the heart of most modern-day knowledge work is the reduction of the entire varied universe of labour, of thoughts, of passions, of toil, down to the unit of information, which we simply move around like checkers on a board. In Capital is Dead (2019), McKenzie Wark writes astutely on this shift to the information economy, observing that:
The dominant ruling class of our time no longer maintains its rule through the ownership of the means of production as capitalists do. Nor through the ownership of land as landlords do. The dominant ruling class of our time owns and controls information.
Wark suggests that the sites where profit and value are generated is now seen in the ability to control the infrastructure and platforms that store, manage and move information: even the online retail giant Amazon generates its profit by maintaining an enormous information network which records where items are in space at any given time, moving the information about the object at the same speed it moves the object itself. As Wark explains, this isn’t a new phenomenon arising from the prevalence of Big Tech. Citing the brick-and-mortar retailer Walmart, noting that its success has lain in the way it has operated as a logistics company, Wark observes that it uses ‘information to organise the flows of goods and labour through its distribution system’.
When I write emails, I am struck, constantly, by the way that what I am doing is a small-scale operation of the above, as I shift a piece of information from one place to another. Someone moves information about times and locations of classes; I move information about hours worked. Other times I am sorting out appraisals of the thoughts inside my students’ brains; lists of names and identification numbers and course names and grades. By contrast, Fitch writes: ‘I am writing to you with some key information disruption’. What Fitch captures is not only the voice and aesthetic—what I have called the performatively human, located in the absurd dissimulation of the neoliberal email—but also the political stakes of this moment, this living ‘dream of the internet’ from which there is no reprieve.
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My remarks for you to see:
Warmly,
Can you get more Vitamin D?
Who might the persona in my poem be? Whoever she is, she probably wants to fight the persona in my emails: a snivelling, cringey-joke making, sycophantic bullshit artist. If I’m a bullshit artist, then my outbox is my bullshit oeuvre: sometimes, at the end of the day, I go through my Sent folder and reminisce about particularly good emails I’ve sent, and for some reason it actually produces serotonin. This kind of highly scripted babble is something most of us do indeed have perfected to an art. If my job is emails, then I’ll never not work another day in my not-life!
The smash hit TV series Severance (2021) depicts this nightmare aptly: turning the office comedy on its head, it tells the story of a group of white-collar drudges whose psyches have been split, their consciousness divided between their working and personal lives. Mark S, Dylan G, Helly R and Irving B sit without end in a windowless open-plan cubicle, punching numbers whose meanings they don’t know into a computer that doesn’t allow them to do anything else, or be anything else. Before Severance, there was the Facebook group ‘Generic Office Roleplay’, whose popularity reached its zenith in 2014. Sweeping the white-collar world by storm, ‘Generic Office Roleplay’ saw thousands of individuals across different sectors of the global economy all partake in an extended, several-year-long role-play, all posing as employees of the hyper-real fictional company ‘Stackwell Enterprises’, whose only goal is to—true to life—‘shift units’. Through a series of affected postings that simulate office-babble, workers push towards synergy growth partnerships, they are agile and flexible, they please note and they follow up and they touch base and if we all agree that we don’t mean any of these things we say when we say them at our actual jobs and that it’s all just stuff you’re meant to write, then what is the actual difference between BLARPing and sitting at my computer and vibing for ten hours, which is the actual thing that I actually do? Today, BLARPing is modelled for us by ‘workfluencers’, TikTok content creators who produce content about how to communicate in the workplace: for example, they help brainstorm ways to draft emails, to find professional ways to say fuck you and that’s not my job. They are versions of Rodin if Rodin’s job was not to chisel tits but to send emails.
In 2018, Fitch published ‘Feel Like I’m Somehow Related to Everyone on the Internet’, which begins: ‘I am outraged / have been as long as I can remember’. It is a paean to the feeling of entrapment, the feedback loop that gives us nowhere else to go. The poem ends as such: ‘in both ironic & non-ironic ways on all platforms / Feel like I’m somehow everywhere / relegated to the internet now’.
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The rest of this week isn’t good for me, unfortunately
A few colleagues and I are part of a book club, a bright spot in my academic career. We gather regularly, sometimes over dinner, and read closely. One of my favourite texts we have read is Gavin Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (2021). The book tracks through the history of machine-breaking as a form of organised resistance against technologies that replace, surveil and discipline labour. These workers are not just the weavers who destroyed textile machinery in eighteenth-century England, but live musicians who fought the advent of recording, as well as hackers who sabotaged and continue to sabotage the software that rules over forms of technology that used to be more tangible, but have since been replaced with their computer simulation. We can now drive a train sitting in the confines of a computer room, while staring at the screen, or, for users of Tesla’s traffic visualisation feature, we can use the computerised representation of the cars and the pedestrians on the road as a proxy for looking up from our screen and seeing the actual cars and pedestrians on the road. In my reading group, we discuss which technology we as academics would have to disrupt in order to reclaim our autonomy, and conclude that we would have to find a way to get Outlook to stop working. But then someone comments that it already doesn’t work. We all chuckle knowingly. Fitch again: ‘Intending to automate replies to those who / Drowned in the waves of a zeitgeist’. Feels like we’re somehow related to everyone on the internet.
Nice to e-meet you
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Eda Gunaydin is a Turkish-Australian essayist whose writing explores class, race, diaspora and Western Sydney. She has been a finalist for a Queensland Literary Award and the Scribe Non-Fiction Prize. Her debut essay collection Root & Branch is out now with NewSouth Publishing.