the quest for presence

from John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999)

Odysseus ultimately proved his identity to Penelope by revealing the scar on his thigh and the privileged knowledge of the bed he had once built her. As a message out of the past and arriving from distant places, he faced all the troubles of authentication. Odysseus's testimonies rested in the parts of his person most resistant to fabrication: scar, personal history, knowledge of intimate places outside circulation. He offered not tropes but trophies.

To view communication as the marriage of true minds underestimates the holiness of the body. Being there still matters, even in an age of full-body simulations. Touch, being the most archaic of all our senses and perhaps the hardest to fake, means that all things being equal, people who care for each other will seek each other's presence. The quest for presence might not give better access to the other's soul, per se, but it does to their body. And the bodies of friends and kin matter deeply. The face, voice, and skin have a contagious charisma. There is nothing so electric or unmanageable as touch: we feast our eyes on each other, kiss, shake hands, and embrace. Whether any of these gestures is a token of affection or constitutes harassment is a matter of interpretation subject to all the same problems as any other signifying act. Touch is no cure for communication trouble: it is more primal, but equally intractable. With his war on "the metaphysics of presence," Derrida is right to combat the philosophical principle that behind every word is a voice and behind every voice an intending soul that gives it meaning. But to think of the longing for the presence of other people as a kind of metaphysical mistake is nuts.

Touch and time, the two nonreproducible things we can share, are our only guarantees of sincerity. To echo Robert Merton, the only refuge we have against communication fraud is the propaganda of the deed. No profession of love is as convincing as a lifetime of fidelity.