All our communications, like everything else, are subject to the interruptions of contingency. In 1825 the United States Postal Service started a Dead Letter Office for sorting and collecting mail with address problems, though the practice of opening undelivered letters had been authorized by Congress during the Revolutionary War. A recent estimate has fifty-seven million items annually ending up in this office. With the poststructuralists and pragmatists, I find the vision of communication as private correspondence proposed by Augustine, Locke, and Mesmer ill conceived. Signs are always open to eavesdropping and what Socrates in the Phaedrus called kulindeisthai, tumbling abroad.
Signs are fundamentally public, that is, capable of multiple junctions of meaning.
But not all meaning is by the same token equally public. The source of the privacy of meaning lies not in the interior sovereignty of the mind to arrange meanings at will, but in the mortality of the sender. The pathos of dead letters is not that minds fail to share the meaning of signs but that mortal beings miss getting in touch. The problem of communication is not rupture between spirits but letters that never arrive. With lost letters, the disposal of the dead becomes critical.