The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech by Avital Ronell

Abstract

458 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the “information and communication sciences” and tests them for his­ torical relevance. His introduction refers to five disciplines: semiology, “the general science of signs”; pragmatics, by means of which one can elucidate social aspects and effects of power in the acts of language (a la M. SerresandB. Latour); the “mediology” ofR. Debray, who is especially concerned with the material conditions of production and propagation of ideas; cybernetics, by means of which “each organization can be in­ terpreted as a combination of messages”; and psychoanalysis, a means of studying the various dimensions of seduction. Bougnoux asks questions that are both obvious and too often neglected. Regarding technological determinism—the idea that an innovation can survive only if it makes sense in an economic, technological, social, and cultural context—he asks whether we are sure we always study all its dimensions. On the genealogy which leads from painting to photography, cinema, and television, he asks what is really different about these ways of representing reality. The use of semiological categories such as indice, icon, and symbol enables Bougnoux to draw distinctions that historians oftechnology perceive only intuitively. La communication par la bande may be difficult reading for people unfamiliar with recent French and American philosophy. Never­ theless, it should prove stimulating for any specialist in the history of communications technologies. Catherine Bertho Lavenir Ms. Lavenir, a specialist in the history of telecommunications, lectures in the Science, Technology, Society department at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and at the École Polytechnique. She is the author of Great Discoveries: Telecommunications (Paris, 1991) and editor of l'éta! et les télécommunications en France et à l’étranger, 1837-1987 (Geneva, 1991). The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. By Avital Ronell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Pp. xviii + 450; notes. $35.00 (paper). Long before deconstructivism or Derrida had any currency in the United States, American artists (in universities) were depicting familiar objects that had seemingly been randomly picked. We remember one artist who did scores of paintings, drawings, and sculptures of frac­ tured, inside-out rural mailboxes. These were all numbered, such as American Mail Box #63. We suppose the fracturing went back to cubism, but somewhere along the line artists also took on the new mission (having lost others) of making us rethink the everyday objects of our environment—whether we wanted to or not. That is what Avital Ronell attempts to do with the telephone in (and with) this book. One way to do that would be to examine calmly the social contract we continue to develop with this instrument. Phones ring unpredictably and demand that we answer. When disconnected they are merely TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 459 in remission; the electron flow still silently courses, waiting until we are up to our elbows in bread dough or motor oil. We fight back with answering machines (aka voice mail), but there is a trade-off as we find it harder and harder to reach out and touch someone else as well as be touched. The problem is that Ronell does not do this calmly at all; she also wants us to rethink the concept of a book. Thus the book—its language, typesetting, fonts, organization, all of its parts—is fractured and inside out in isomorphism to the schizyjangling of the telephone. The whole thing, wine and bottle, is art, not scholarship, and furthermore art as it is conceived in campus cauldrons in the late 20th century. If you like Lucas Samaras’s glue-smeared Polaroids, you might like this book; if your taste runs to Corot or early Derain you will hate it. B. Morgan and Pauletta Morse Dr. Morgan teaches electronic keyboarding and business law at Southern Illinois University. Her article, “The Electronic Learning Center,” appears in the American Technical EducationJournal, Fall 1992. Dr. Morse teaches court reporting at SIU and has a special interest in teaching the deaf, who would love to be bothered by ringing phones. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. By Andrew Ross. New York: Verso, 1991. Pp. 275; notes, index. $59.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Technology, in...