The Telephone Book: Technology-Schizophrenia-Electric Speech

Abstract

The telephone marks place of absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about constitution of self and other, stability of location, systems of transfer, and destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To extent that it always relates us to absent other, telephone, and massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a telephonic logic, fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming codes of disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider impact of telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. The book begins by calling close attention to importance of telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In Third Reich telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, an open accomplice to lies. Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on significance of the call. In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes history and terminology of telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy. Ronell also speaks of appearance of telephone in literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis-Freud said that unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell's famous first call: come here! Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of American and European addiction to technology in which telephone emerges as crucial figure of this age.