...a first look into *The Telephone Book*...
One proof for the existence of G-d--the unitary, singular, totally self-aware subject who writes the Book of Life--depends on a warranting belief in the topos cause-and-effect and an assumed fixity between subject and object: In this description, the world constitutes a carefully and perfectly designed mechanism, a timepiece. Where you have a watch, there will always be a watchmaker. The universe is a visible and unitary effect (or object) which suggests the presence of a visible and unitary cause (or subject).
The individual that perceives the world and herself as the sign of a metaphysical presence necessarily inverts this relation. She is the subject that sees the world and herself in her epistemological mirror and goes looking for a cause for what she sees, for her creator. But, here, she is the creator, the cause, the subject, that brings the metaphysical creation, effect, object into being. As the saying goes, G-d is made in man's image. Or perhaps in this case, woman's image, but probably not, her given discursive alienation, the regulation that forbids her from power, makes her make G-d in the image of her sexual Other. But this regulation is SELF-regulation. She could rebel.
You are totally passive, with no power to influence the final judgement of the Lord.
You are totally responsible, being your own lord, picking up the debris of the temple and arranging them bricoleur-style into whatever metaphysical structure you desire.
You are a third possibility, which is.......##click## ##dial tone##
Is the Heideggerian relationship to thinking and technology (discussed by Avital Ronell in *The Telephone Book*) a search for a middle voice?.....a search for that third possibility?
Ronell uses the telephone as a synechdoche for technology....
uses telephone communication as a synechdoche for communication in general....
uses the telephone call as a metaphor (or metonomy, depending on your mood) for the call of philosophy, humanism, culture, the state, langue, the beyond, whatever is "there" not "here", the Other....
Telephonic speech links us to the disappearing, retreating, fleeting, hidden, supplanted, metaphysical suggestion. It inscribes us as a responding (responsible?) or at least listening (an ear is different than an I) subject........active AND passive or neither.
Consider the child (u/eye) at the end (in the midst?!) of the tele-ambilical cord:
"A certain oedipedagogy is taking shape here-- the restoration of contact is in the making, initiated by a mother whose navel, in Joycean terms, would emit signals. The navel is the third eye, closed, knotted, the eye of blindness. Whatever the lesson of the mother, which turns into a desemanticized Nietzschean scream, telephonic logic means here, as everywhere, that contact with the Other has been disrupted; but it also means that the break is never absolute. Being on the telephone will come to mean, therefore, that contact is never constant nor is the break clean" (*The Telephone Book*, p. 20).
The telephone, then, doesn't represent the new possibility of "Reaching out and touch[ing] someone"--a new access to the material or physical real--so much as an absence or lack. The telephone does not make the (significant) Other present so much as represent its(/his/her) absence. You supposedly reconnect "through the wire," but it doesn't really work that way, does it?
The bodily reference, to the mother's navel, is ironic in all sorts of ways. This third I is a nonvisual organ of connection, undoing the phallo- ocular-centrism (Jay) of the visual metaphor/medium/massage and suggesting a different kind of anatomical destiny. Yet mediated knowledge suggests a disappearing anatomy. The telephone line suggests an ambilical cord, maybe, but the receiver presents no womb. We will have to wait a few years for wetware, a complex enough virtual reality suit to really simulate the total warmth and safety of the original home. But in adults, this experience may involve techno-claustrophobia.
CAUSE:EFFECT
SUBJECT:OBJECT
INSIDE:OUTSIDE
There is no return to these comfortable metaphysical-epistemological oppositions. The telephone (and, by 'extension', all technology) reasserts our position in the traditionally difficult middle place between G-d and animal, made all the more difficult by the realization that this opposition has been lost with the rest, G-d being, as far as we can tell (not very far), a phantom of animal ideology, for which there is no origin in turn (biology=more ideology).
We have no response for telephone's ring, except: "Hello?"
Our growing technological power only suggests our inability to control anything (because there is more than one of us? because there is NO ONE of us?). Even more frightening, we have no power to relinquish that (Will to) Power and that uncontrol, as Ike wanted to in Faulkner's *Go Down Moses*.
We have, and can't resist, the telephone.... and our fascination with it.
The binary of technology is that of presence and absence. The voice we hear on the end of the line draws our fascination because of what it conceals or because of its suggestion of something absent: there is something more: the sublime.
Follow this link to a SECOND
look into *The Telephone Book*.
