The Salvation of Europe

[Dave Monroe]

"'The salvation of Europe,' Konrad says, 'depends on communication, right?  
We face this anarchy of jealous German princes, hundreds of them scheming, 
infighting, dissipating all of the Empire's strength in their useless 
bickering.  But whoever could control the lines of communication, among all 
these princes, would control them.  That network could someday unify the 
Continent.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 164)

>From Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, 
trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), Ch. 1 "An Epoch of the 
Postal System," pp. 4-19 ...

   "Postal systems are instrumenta regni.  Until well into the early modern 
period, that was blatantly obvious.  Thus, the famous edict of Louis XI by 
which the French state postal system replaced the courier system of the 
Unviersity of Paris decreed all those who dared to submit private letters to 
the postal system were sent to Hades, just as they had been in the last 
phase of the western Roman Empire.  Initially--between 1490 and 1516--the 
Taxis Post did not consist of permanent routes, but of varying connections 
between the emperor's current location and his court chancery, since, as 
Maximillian I let it be known, the postal system had been established 'for 
our well-being and honor.'  For this reason, the postal services established 
according to a 1516 treat that Franz and Baptissa de Tassis concluded with 
Charles I (after 1519, Emperor Charles V), were 'not to be sent out at all, 
except for the letters of the king.'  Postal routes were to onnect the 
cvornerstones of the Habsburg Empire in Spain, the Netherlands, Rome, 
Naples, and Germany in order to arrange the marriage politics and diplonatic 
allainces in which the empire manifested itself.  In an imperial postal 
system such as this one, a 'message' did not mean 'communicating with one 
another,' but was instead a notification to 'act in accordance,' 
Danachricten in the Middle High German meaning of the word.  In 1496, 
Maximillian also set up the first field post on German soil--obviously not 
for reasons of psychological warfare, since his mercenaries were illiterate, 
but instead, for the purpose of transferring orders to 'act in accordnace' 
to the army command.
   "Like the styate postal systems, the courier services came into being 
during the Middle Ages formed cvlosed systems: they posted only their opwn 
respective institutions.  The university post circulated students and 
scholars, along with knowledge, teh communal courier systems circulated the 
business of the magsitrate, the butcher post that of businessman, the 
princely couriers that of the princes.  The couriers of the monasteries, in 
fact, transferred only a single message: the death of brothers in their 
order.
   "In the seventeenth century--in the context of the so-called postal 
reformation at the end of the sixteenth--the situation changed.  Exactly in 
1600, Cardinal Duke Albrecht VII, viceroy of the Netherlands, granted the 
Taxis formal permission to charge postage for private letters, thus 
legitimizing the abuse of the postal system they long had been practicing.  
Supported by an imperial communications technology that was misused for the 
general communication of 'people' and that thereby had lost the definition 
applied to it since the sixth century B.C., the absolutist state invented 
the uniformly ruled space, the territory.  Within this space, the people 
were subjects, pure and simple, and therefore vassals of the monarch, 
insofar as a general postal system provided the opportunity for words to 
circulate beneath all the discursive barriers of guild and estate.  The only 
prerequisite for this was a redefinition of the postal raison d'etre: postal 
systems no longer existed for the well-being and the honor of the emperor or 
the king, but for the well-being of a population of subjects.
   "Insofar as the existence of subjects is bound to reason's delivery to 
cognition, the power of teh state grounded itself in the establishment and 
monopolization of that delivery.  The state produced 'subjects' in both 
senses of the word by inventing the general post, the postal monopoly, and 
the usefulness of the postal system.... every subject gained access to a 
discursive authority in the posttal realm that allowed him to determine his 
own affairs and at the same time forced him, with each determination 
(destination), to register his affairs with teh state.  The ubiquity and 
invisibility of the state were thus to be found in the representation of the 
postal system as a medium for private correspondence between cognitive 
subjects.  Between objects and the modern subject with true cognition, the 
commands of royal, electoral, or ducal postmasters reigned supreme....  
Absolutism made words available to the people, and a medium available to the 
owrds, in order to make people speak about themselves, to control their 
speech, and to finance the state's expenditures for such control with the 
postage charged for that speech.  If the basic element of the imperial 
postal system had been the route, for the teritorial state postal system it 
became the realy--a site where the people became entangeld in the discourse. 
  As postal systems became a technology of the government with the invention 
of postage and the monopolization of service ....  Institutionally, this 
meant that the postal system fell under police jurisdiction.
   "'What empowers the principle of reason' was the postal system.  Once the 
principe postale provided for the delivery of cognition, the objects' mode 
of being was a monopoly of the state...." (pp. 7-9)

Originally published in German as ...

Siegert, Bernhard.  Relais: Geschicke der Literatur
   als Epoche der Post, 1751-1913.  Berlin: Brinkmann
   und Bose, 1999.

http://141.20.150.7/aesthetic/bsiegert.htm

And see as well, e.g., ...

Beyrer, Klaus.  Die Postkutschenreise.
   Tubingen, 1985.

John, Richard R.  Spreading the News:
   The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and
   the Fantasy of Empire.  New York: Verso, 1993.

Von Creveld, Martin L.  Command in War
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985.

http://www.ctheory.com/global/ga114.html

And from Siegert's "Introduction," pp. 1-3 ...

"Someone who knew that America is a legacy, something to be pased along, has 
written all this down much better than the writer of these pages might have 
done; hence, The Crying of Lot 49 could not possibly become the object of 
this study.  Literay scholarship conducted as the analysis of media and 
discourse must come to a halt before the researches of Oedipa Maas bcause 
those researches are its own.  The empire is a postal system, and that 
empire is war....  The mepire of posted objects, the world that is 
everything that is the case, is distorted, inetrrupted, irreducibly 
nonactual: it is metaphorical.   The name of the 'metaphoric catastrophe' is 
Tristero...." (pp. 2-3)

Citing p. 65 of ...

Derrida, Jacques.  The Post Card: From Socrates
   to Freud and Beyond.  Trans. Alan Bass.  Chicago:
   U of Chicago P, 1987.

And here Siegert continues to discuss briefly the passage cited at the 
beginning of this post ...

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