History What Does This Mean?
posted by on February 22 at 11:38 AM
While roaming the history of the 19th century, the most important century, the area of time that separates one period of human reality (that leads up to us) from the other (that leads away from us—the separation, the break being with nature and the universalization of industrial discipline: paying close attention to clocks, and the regulation of eating and sexual habits, and so on), I came across this fascinating piece of information. Two years after Britian’s Royal Mail decided to use railways to transport mail, in 1848, the institution decided to do the most amazing thing: to make a person who sent a letter pay for it, instead of the other way around.
Until that point, 1850, the receiver paid for the letter. It was a letter meant for them, the receiver, and so he/she must pay for it. What I have not yet established, and what challenges my mind at this moment, is what does this switch mean? What has happened in the larger transition from agricultural to industrial society, from rural to urban modes, for this new understanding to happen? For the sender of a message to bare the cost of its delivery? Clearly, there was a reason for the receiver to pay for the letter: it’s his/her letter, it has his/her name on it, it is addressed to them, they own this letter. But why make the sender pay when it is not their letter? The sender did not write the letter to the sender; his/her name is not on it. What does this switch say about authorship? What does it say about the reader? The sender is one type of individual; the receiver is another type. Now what has happened in this new society—the society that will eventually become the world society—for it to see the sender, this particular type of individual, as the one who must pay for the service of mail delivery?
There was nothing philosophical about this. Poor people had worked out simple codes that they would write on the envelope. The recipient would then read these, refuse delivery, and the information would be sent for free. By forcing the sender to pay for postage, it meant that the postal service could be guaranteed payment.
um...junk mail?
Gitai has given me the rational answer:
"By forcing the sender to pay for postage, it meant that the postal service could be guaranteed payment."
Why does it matter who ownes the letter? The transaction is initiated by the sender. The receiver may not even be expecting a letter, and is only getting one because a sender wanted one to go to him/her.
Also, how can you say that a letter-writer has no ownership of his letter? His name is at the bottom. They are his thoughts, instructions, prose, or random words. When you get a letter, it's generally "her letter to me", not "my letter from her".
The payment is not for the object, it's for the delivery of the object. A letter writer pays for delivery because he wants his ideas to be read by others.
Thank you, Gitai. Your comment was logical, calm, and unpretentious, quite unlike the post that inspired it. To me, this seems like a simple instance of eventually finding the proper solution to a problem. "But why make the sender pay when it is not their letter? The sender did not write the letter to the sender..." Of course it's the sender's letter -- he or she brought it into existence. The receiver receives it whether they want to or not; why should they have to pay for it?
steve, that is precisely the mystery (the philosophical puzzle) that gitai's rational response fails to explain. why wasn't this understanding of authorship there in the first place? why did it take a concern with payment to change from one understanding to another, rather than reason alone?
Gitai might be right about his historical information, or he might be wrong, but even his comment can be deconstructed for its unconcious, philosophical elements; in other words the elements for which he is not the author.
Charles, all this business about the postal service, the sender and the receiver, the switch point, and the "facteur" is talked about in great length in one of Jacques Derrida's masterpiece, The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond.
Note that the date in which the new postal regime came into being, the sudden rupture, had indeed come about in the decade Freud was born, the 1850.
Freud was the postal service, the post man, whose interception of the letter by means of decoding its free information (the information of dreams, the unconcious, the unconscious in writing later discovered by Derrida) had made it possible to frustrate the efforts of history to communicate with the future, with the beyond, without the necessary sovereignty of man (humankind).
Here's an excerpt from the back cover of The Post Card:
"Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably. You can take it or pass it off, for example, as a message from Socrates to Freud."
And yet, having becoming the sudden recepient of the letter, he also became the addressee, and therefore it would have to be intercepted again, perhaps two more times, until the authentic post man, the messenger, can be paid for the letter and to establish his regime.
Concern with payment is a perfectly reasonable concern. The "poor people sent coded messages" bit sounds a bit too pat, a just-so story. I'd bet that far more often people refused delivery of letters they didn't expect or letters from people they didn't want to deal with: wastrel relatives, importunate suitors, debt collectors, and the like.
The key to this philosophical non-puzzle is that the Royal Mail have no interest in authorship or readership, just physical delivery: one person could, after all, send a second person a letter written by a third person. As long as the person handing the letter to the postman pays, no one cares who wrote it or who's going to read it or burn it or line a birdcage with it.
#2 had it right, at least in today's world.
I bet it all comes down to lobbyists who wanted to ensure the recipient had no choice in receiving the letter/ spam.
I also think that our philosophical puzzles have more to do with the cyclical nature of human existence, minds and the rational behind them change and the ages change.
Why do cell phone customers pay for calls they send and receive?
I think Charles means spam but he's being too obtuse even for me to grok him.
Does any of this change if the envelope is empty?
Hey, gimme $500 and I'll make sure that package gets to Thailand...
My guess is: mass media and faster transportation made it so the mail system became trustworthy enough to pay them upfront.
theirs your answer.
its spelled there's your answer
You used to have to pay for your bills to be mailed to you? No wonder the post office made the senders pay. It took until the mid-1800's to figure this out?
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