True romance, like true crime, at once assumes and exposes an unremitting literacy in affairs of the heart.⁴⁷ The new reflexivities of a reading public, for example, hold steadily visible the strange materialities of writing and letters, whether scarlet letters or stolen ones.⁴⁸ They make visible, beyond that, the public media of love and intimacy and their protocols. Put simply, the link between literature and letters could not be more evident: the novel originates as private letters made public or, more exactly, as love letters designed or designated for interception. It is not merely that intimate secrets went to print (which is to say that intimacy and secrecy—and this is their open secret—circulated from the start as public discourse). Nor is it merely that, as I have noted, the two basic forms of narrative fiction—the detective story and the epistolary novel—both depend on the post: delivered, deferred, and (of course) purloined.⁴⁹

Briefly, once it becomes possible to write on sheets of paper that can be folded back on themselves (rather than, say rolled into a scroll), once it becomes possible for the handwritten and folded sheet of paper to be inserted in an envelope, sealed, and posted on schedule, the technical conditions of interiority and privacy are in place. That is, interiority and privacy are in place. At this point, it becomes possible for the writing of letters to get in the way of letters, for the technical conditions of intimacy to get in the way of intimacy. Love letters are, we know, largely self-references to the occasion, scene, and genre of their writing and sending. Love can scarcely dispense with the rules and protocols of its communication, as private letters cannot cease referring to (literary) letters and as privacy cannot cease referring to its interception. Private life, and real life, are lived reflexively, bound not least to the emotions and observations preformed and prescribed in literature and bound not least to the fiction, seen through from both sides, that we never cease not knowing that.
47.On some of the relays between true crime and true romance, with particular reference to the contemporary American scene, see Sara L. Knox, Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life (Durham, N.C., 1998), pp. 79–141.
48. See Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from "The New England Primer" to "The Scarlet Letter" (Stanford, Calif., 2000); Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, Calif., 1999); Luhmann, Social Systems, pp. 302–3; and Seltzer, "The Postal Unconscious," Henry James Review 21 (Fall 2000): 197–206.
49.See Siegert, Relays, and Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1987). There is a complicated relation between deconstructive media studies and the style of recent German media studies that Friedrich Kittler centers (and to which Siegert's work contributes). But one difference between deconstructive and Kittlerian media studies is the difference, say, between the focus on the postcard and the focus on the postal system. Another is that, in deconstructive media studies the actual existence of particular media technologies in effect makes no difference because any media technology (telephony, photography, the computer, and so on) ultimately merely instances or makes explicit a writing-in-general always already, and in the beginning, in place (before the letter—and, so, before letters, that is, the postal system). (If photo-graphy—light-writing—is there from the advent of philosophy and its white mythology, there is, in effect, nothing new under the sun, just the appearance of lots of new appliances.) But this misses the problem, in that the problem is not at all "as if language and writing had not always existed, in order to prove that truth lies." The real point is (as Kittler puts it) that "the new" in the new media should "not be searched for in the realm of opinion and belief, of voluntary or unconscious deceptions," of identity options or performatives, and so on—not least in that the postal system and the epistolary novel have promoted such liaisons dangereuses for a long time, and not least given that social protocols of opinion, deception, and belief cannot be separated from the technical reality of the mass media. Rather, for Kittler, as for Luhmann (albeit with very different emphases—very different ways of taking up the materialities of communication), the new of the new media resides exactly—from the eighteenth-century postal system to the nineteenth-century writing-down system to the twentieth-century global computer-based network operating system—in the evolution of a reflexive, self-processing supersystem that integrates all these systems. Or, as Kittler expresses it, it may be that the content of a medium is always another medium, but "the media of the past...did not also include their own meta-levels"—a working model of autopoeisis, "networking begins and ends with pure self-referentiality" (Friedrich Kittler, "What's New about the New Media?" in Mutations, ed. Rem Koolhaas et al. [Barcelona, 2000], pp. 64–65).