To become haunted by the archive is to welcome a conditional and undecidable sense of future, to expose one's self to future judges (plural and heterogeneous). Past and present are no longer assured, for one cannot begin to guarantee how future Others might decide the past—or even if the past might be decided. Under a spectral gaze, writing involves exposure to this undecidability of the future and the anxiety it can cause. My hope, and it is a risky one, is that sure exposure might help students more ethically engage the work of other students—to temper the violence of consignation with future vulnerability. To realize this hope, I attempt to expose students to their own spectrality by designing assignments that encourage them to deliver work to audiences with response ability: to expose themselves before an unknowable future judge. As I explain below, I condition this exposure by first placing students in the role of judge (to walk miles in a potential future Other's shoes). Through their ability to archive and deliver student work, digital environments facilitate this kind of exposure.
I have spent several years constructing such an environment, archiving student work in a Drupal installation I call the Visual CoOperative. The site houses visual essay projects from my first-year composition class. In addition to visual essays, students post 700-1000 word papers documenting their visual's purpose and intended audience in addition to the rhetorical choices made during the visual's composition. Each semester, students have the option of contributing two projects to the CoOperative: first, a revision project and, second, an original contribution. I emphasize to students (and to anyone considering implementing such a project) that participation is optional: although students must complete the assignments, they are in no way obligated to do so. As the number of works in my image galleries attest to, I am always pleasantly surprised by the number of students who choose to contribute their work.
It is the “revision” phase of the project that I consider most in line with conjuring the Derridian specter. Before students compose an original work, they first revise an existing project from the CoOperative's image galleries. I urge them to avoid confronting a project in favor of collaborating with one: de-emphasizing critique in favor of cooperative production.