a retrieval of the magical power of names

A colleague in another field just accidentally sent me a couple of scolding messages about not having turned in a paper on time. I had no idea what she was talking about, until the apology message arrived explaining that she also has a student named “Graham” and the scolding was meant for him.

We’ve all done that a few times, hopefully never in an especially embarrassing case. Pre e-mail, it would have been very unlikely to happen. You might call the wrong person in the telephone era, but would never give them a full-fledged misdirected scold, because you’d hear their voice and realize it was the wrong number. Perhaps you might put a snail mail letter in the wrong envelope (in Hegel’s correspondence there’s a very embarrassing early case in which he did so), but that would be just a run-of-the-mill Freudian parapraxis.

What the auto-addressing feature on email does is make this problem much more common. What do I really have in common with this other Graham? Not much, except that we have the same name and are both in the address book of my colleague. But the fact that gmail can confuse us so easily has the McLuhanian effect of a retrieval of the formerly obsolete magical power of names. As if all Grahams were linked by some shared formal cause or occult quality that made us all worthy or blameworthy for the actions of the others. It’s actually pretty amusing, as long as you don’t say anything too embarrassing in the messages in question.