One particular unassurance has (perhaps it is always, already fitting to say "could-come-to-have-had") particular impact on how digital environments open the possibility of re-articulating the ethical implications of delivery: the author / researcher / archivist / subject's experience of time. One of Derrida's primary challenges is to traditional scholarship's linear and progressive treatment of time, what he refers to as "the time of scientific progress" (1998, p. 52), in which the present interprets the past and predicts / influences the future. The teleological characterization of the future in traditional scholarship is the primary target of Derrida's critique. Scholarship frames the future as inevitably decidable: the future "will-come-to-be." Although the nature of this final judgment remains indeterminate, scholarship confidently presupposes the eventuality of judgment. Although we cannot predict how an audience will behave, we imagine a future time in which the audience will decidedly BEhave. "Order" will come to be assured, "terminable in a future itself determinable as future present" (p. 51).
In opposition to this scholarly "progressive" time, Derrida explores a spectral conception of time: one that is inherently conditional, interminable, and radically undecidable in regards to the future (consequently destabilizing the causal interrelationships between the future, present, and past). For Derrida, future decidability should not be considered inevitable; we must leave ourselves open to the possibility of doubt, what Derrida refers to as the "essential modality of the perhaps" (p. 49). We leave ourselves open to the possibility that order will never be assured, that no True Judge will ever have come to authorize, approve, or invalidate pasts or presents. He writes:
The condition on which the future remains to come is not only that it not be known, but that it not be knowable as such. Its determination should no longer come under the order of knowledge or of a horizon of preknowledge but rather a coming or an event which one allows or incites to come (without seeing anything come) in an experience which is heterogeneous to all taking to note, as to any horizon of waiting as such: that is to say, to all stabilizable theorems as such. (p. 72)
Archive fever, then, manifests itself as a desire for a decidable future- one in which our archives will come to be validated. It is not only a discomfort with the incorporeality of the specter (we will never see her come —why singular? we will never have come to see them come?), but with our own consequential incorporeality (we become as undecidable as the future: perhaps I think, perhaps I am). The future might be undecidable, and our writing (our archives, personal and public) always, already appears (appeared, will appeared, will have appeared, and will have come to have appeared), or better said, might appear (might have appeared, might come to appear, might have had come to have appeared) before an utterly unknowable Other.
I apologize for the parenthetical play of tenses and the irritating discomfort they may cause (they cause me plenty), but their irritation should not be dismissed (to do so would submit to the fever to repressing its existence, to exorcise the possibility of specters, to unconditionally deny conditionality).