Gestures

The Gesture of Telephoning

135 the Gesture of telephoning Its appearance has changed frequently in the course of its history and can serve as an illustration of the way design has developed. But despite the difference between a telephone mounted on the wall, with its iron crank, and the row of colored plastic telephones on the manager’s desk (to say nothing of the red telephone), it has undergone only one functional modification in its long history: automation. The telephone has retained an archaic, paleotechnical character in comparison to the discursive mass media. This matters to an understanding of our current state of communications . One of the possible definitions of freedom (and not necessarily the worst) describes it as having the same parameters as dialogue. In keeping with such a definition, freedom in a given country could be measured by the coverage and efficiency of the telephone network, and the relatively paleotechnical character of the telephone in all countries would permit us to conclude that no country is overly concerned about the freedom of its citizens. To describe the function of the telephone, two completely different approaches are required: one from the position of the caller, the other from that of the recipient. The apparatus presents itself as a completely different object depending on which position is taken, which is a nice example of the phenomenological thesis that any object can exist only in relation to some kind of intentionality. From the standpoint of the caller, that is, the telephone is a mute and passive tool, patiently waiting to be used; and to the person called, it is a hysterically whining child that must get its way on the spot before it will quiet down. It makes people dream, in their most secret fantasies, about owning a telephone that can make, but not receive, 136 the GestUre of teLePhoninG calls. Such a dream shows what omnipotence (divine or sexual) is about. Very powerful people in all societies (not only dictatorships) actually possess such telephones, incidentally. It’s proof of the stupidity of any utopia that attempts social contact with the omnipotent being: a telephone net consisting entirely of apparatuses that can make but not receive calls cannot function. Or, without responsibility, there is no freedom. From the caller’s point of view, the telephone presents itself as a tool from which many wires extend, at the other ends of which countless people are waiting to be called. The tool permits the user to call all of these people one at a time but never two at the same time. Such a structure permits anyone who has mastered it to demand individual answers to his call, whether this be an order, a cry of despair, or a question. From the standpoint of the receiver, then, the tool’s purpose is to produce the dialogic communication it has instigated. The wires behind the telephone, whether material or immaterial, open a parameter of choice. To be able to choose among the people one could call, the caller must have access to an index that gives a numerical sequence for these people. The index is stored in two places: in his brain and in the telephone book. That shows how archaic the telephone is: it would be more effective to have the numbers stored in the telephone itself (Minitel has, incidentally, recently attempted to do this). The numbering is a code without redundancy, that is, each of the digits that make up the number is meaningful, as is their order—dial a single digit incorrectly and you get the wrong connection. The telephone code is one of the nonredundant linear codes. Another is the banks’ checking code. Calculation codes are not of this type, for their hierarchy introduces redundancy. For example, if you calculate in francs, the thousands in the left-hand side of the row of numbers must have very close attention, while the centimes in the right-hand column can be neglected. Within the communications revolution, there is a tendency to eliminate all redundancy, that is, to make all aspects of codes informative. There is another tendency to do just the opposite. If the first tendency continues to have the upper hand, if the society of the future is made up of numbers of equal value that are not interchangeable (and that is the brotherhood and equality cybernetics must have), then the telephone code, with all its errors and disappointment, is a more significant precursor of this society than the prisons and barracks [18.188.40...