Brandon Joyce writes:
I have long hungered after a Philosophical Research Group on Cellphones… and for obvious reasons: that topic is dripping rich; almost too rich for a single session. But, finally— whew— we made the attempt in my new Brooklyn homebase, with hot chocolate and some deliciously effective Nescafé Clásico; stoking our fires literally and metaphorically. What I’ll try to do, as far as a wrap-up, is offer a dense little introduction; then the minutes massaged into a somewhat readable form that runs from the science-fictional to the slightly more humanistic. I warn you though: it’s a doozy.
I began the group with some more traditionally-philosophical fodder, throwing out some allusions to a classic essay by the Marxist critic E.P. Thompson entitled Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism— but not in order to steer the ship into any particularly Marxist waters. In that finely-dialed essay, Thompson describes how time-pieces and time-reckoning technics, from sundials to church bells to pocket watches, have done far more than simply and dutifully mark time. These devices have, instead, structured and radically transformed our entire conception of Time itself. Deeply and apriori-ly. Longer ago, Time was something measured in natural rhythms and human events. We rose with the Sun and retired at dawn. We measured its passage in “pissing times” or by humming Ave Maria or boiling an egg, or by the completion of some human-sized task like the harvest or… I don’t know, like fashioning a shield or something equivalently medieval. But it wasn’t until the popular institution of centralized time-pieces like churchclocks and townclocks— which Thompson notes could be found in the majority of English parishes by the 17th century— that the entire idea of a Common Time was fully and crisply conceivable, and availably systematized into the smooth and even, totally metric and normalized, thing known as Newtonian time.
Thompson goes on to argue that these developments in technics, this new Time-sense, and all the new possibilities for human coordination were quickly consolidated by Capital. Shiny new things, like pocket watches and punch-clocks, laid down the distinctions necessary for us to slice Time up into work and leisure hours, and also— get this— underpinned Ricardo’s idea of the “labour hour” that Marx later adapted into his theory of value…
Save that for another day, though, because directly political implications aside, I was interested in some more Kantianish questions here. What I mean by that is that Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, gives us a picture of Time and Space— what he calls the “Transcendental Aesthetic“— as things which are not simply out there in the world; things that can be sensed or measured, per se. Time and Space are, rather, precisely the ways in which we structure our world. They are apriorities that we impose on the world to give it form and coordination.
This is why it’s a little awkward to say that time-pieces measure Time, as we might when harping on the Thompson essay, as if Time were some substance that can be poured out in buckets and teaspoons. The reason being that— hold onto your seats, Star Trek fans— Time is itself a form of reckoning. The reckoning of Change; a way of grasping the roaring cascade of diverse rates around us. The ancient world chitted off days by celestial movements or by the cock’s crow, and now we are locked into the relentless accuracy of the radium clock, beamed the world over, straight into our brains, as a kind of Absolute Coordination. Lucky us. So as we change our forms of Time-reckoning, our time-pieces, we are also restructuring our apriori conception of Time; that is, if you buy into the idea of historicizing apriorities— which I certainly do.
What has this got to do with cellphones, I hear you asking. Well, my suspicion here is that cellphones, as technics, have or will have a similar effect on our ideas of Space. Maybe not right away, but slowly, and down the road, once its specific form of causality and space have sunk into our common sense reckoning and body of metaphor. For instance, one of the ideas we have of space is the “locality of consequence”— the notion that things can only effect things in their adjacent area. Causes can then ripple out in ever-expanding circles, but always in a stepping-stone manner of adjacency. Telephony violates this, at least to our senses. It seems as though causation can jump through the phone. One prank phonecall, to the right person, can clear out an elementary school in minutes flat, from the other side of the country. Now that is causation. Cellphones go further than landlines in remoulding our sense-making of Space. At least, with landlines, the points on the other end still represented a static topography. Causation could jump; it wasn’t squiggling around and tying itself into knots.
Even with cellphones, however, there’s still a kind of adjacency, some kind of well-defined space. Though it’s not adjacency in terms of physical locality, but one of intimacy. That is, in a causal chain defined by a telephone game, the area of consequences is roughly defined by linking circles of friends and acquaintances. And intimacy will come up, over and over and over again, as we discuss cellphones. And I think this is how I kicked out the conversation, while chopping firewood in my living room.
Here are the minutes, for you to skim and peruse. We spoke about:
—The Culture of Accessibility fostered by our little cellfriends. About the ineluctability of this accessibility, which some of us disputed, citing the simple fact that we, ourselves, answer the call. “The device does not create it. We already wanted it and it only enables.” (AB, 5:58). Some insisted that, nevertheless, a certain sense of invasiveness lingers (NP), manifesting in the guilt of the unanswered call. We may not be accessible but we are accountable.
—Accessibility is, when not ambiguous, at the least, a two-way operation. We gain access— to things, to people, to systems— only by giving access. Access, which mostly rings positive within political discourse, as overcoming the digital divide between well-to-do smartphone squawkers and droves of Philadelphian poor internetting in fifteen minute chunks at the public library. But how Faustian is the promise of access? Is it the same fatal ambiguity as any empowerment by technics; as slippery in the same old master-and-slave ways? We see the parallel between the introduction of cellphones and pocketwatches, as laid out in Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. As a symbol of wealth while being simultaneously a form of coordination; which can be exploited by lords and bosses. Is there a way to measure, or see, or feel, the difference between the better or worse uses of technics; a way to stay on top of things?
—“There is only one place. That person that I relate to for forty hours a week, also exists outside of that time.”(MaF,13:18) That universalization of power— powerforms in one space, like work or school— can expand into other spheres of life. “You’re not my boss while I’m not at the cafe.” Rejoinder: very much also about personal shaping of limitations (AB,14:12); internal limits over systemic limitations. We spoke about the etiquette of text messages versus phonecalls, as less of an imposition, less imposing in the direct causality of your space, or my space, or our space. Texts being softer demands.
— We spoke about the difficulty of finding splendid isolation in the age of cellphones, noting strangely enough, that when we do discover it, it induces panic, anxiety, and terror. (DS, 15:00). Not just in Africa, but here, even in New York, there are Dead Zones and Dark Spaces. Interstices. Where, once again, we can be stripped bare, have some respite, some anonymity. Perhaps this should be a positive strategy, to pursue these spaces, to find a subway or a casino, in order to “ghost-out” (MaF)— a strange term, considering that, here, a return to the physical world implies becoming spectral or irreal. This strategy can be used openly to regain the integrity of everyday experience. Uninterrupted conversations, real plans, a single fucking moment of serenity for its own sake. We imagined maps of these Dead Zones; digital catacombs. A romantic rendez-vous in lead-lined rooms (DS,17:26) in restaurants to dignify a private space shared only by two. A space of only two: isn’t this the true rapport that cellphones serrate? Potato chip packets can act as portable, pocket Dead Zones, blocking your accessibility by System: “So you can basically double bag UTZ Salt and Vinegar, flip one of them inside out, so you don’t get salt and vinegar on your phone, and you’re off the map. You may as well have gone on the subway… You can make on your body a space that is not on the network” (MF, 17:56). An invisibility cloak. A moment of concentration, which can even be advertised in café windows, like the Ashbox: internet-free zones, sip your espresso in a Faraday cage, to momentary reconnect with your old conception of Space— and your Mother.
—We spoke about how cellphones rewrite our conceptions of Space, by making constant conjunctions, in the Humean sense, in new ways (DS, 23:05); with new causal habits. Cellphones offer a new body of metaphor to grasp previously “counter-intuitive” models of Time and Space; and both the physical and social Time and Space— here, they are interwoven with the same experiences. Cellphones offer a new intuition of space and causality that works, that we use; that, in the final tally, makes sense.
— We spoke about the tiny-yet-mighty differences among brands. Blackberries seemed more isolating (DS), more worky (AB). As the cellphone greatly expanded beyond telephony, the smartphone introduced not only a different sense of Space, but another, second Space altogether. Smartphones, “magical phones,” were as much pocket-sized portals onto a strange new realm. (DS, 28:47). A realm obeying distinct laws and physics, having different quirks and curvatures. However, it was still, in some ways, an everyday space because the internet belonged on our person— almost as part of our bodies— rather than as some fixed and glowing oracle. Blackberries and Trios, it was contended, still mingled too much with telephony alone. The iphone was the first to announce itself as “a functionality, a subset” of some greater sphere (MaF, 30:47). Apps became then “conceptual spaces,” subdivisions of this new space, or “colonies” (MaF, 31:19). What’s more these apps, by their organization create a prioritization of spaces, a hierarchy of priorities, made plain to the user… ah, the User! We can ask what our cellphone praxes do on a larger scale; what earth-size shapes they are catallactically making through our localized squiggles and noises. And what it shapes, here— our bodies and brains— as we become more capable Users (MeF, II 6:00). This is a question of our second Nature, and new forms of bodily power: the piccolo app, the compass, the ability to summon the train schedule with the wave of our wands.
— We spoke more about our habits. “Will human life becomes suburbanized? Will we not have to congregate in a common space do do a mutual task?” (AB, II 8:00). Here, the cellphone, the smartphone will then not just just fuck with our conception of Space, but with actual human geography— why see your ugly face every Monday if I don’t have to? Why live in DC? Perhaps there is a reason though, in that what we consider essential and inessential in our communications badly misconstrues the ways of Meaning. In attenuated forms of communication, like texts and telephony, there is always some degree of meaning loss. Context, contact, body language, mood, tone, and so, so much more gets clipped and falls to the floor as inessential (See also: Hubert Dreyfus). But even in hard-nosed work environments, these inessentials make or break. Watercooler talk can save enterprises. And for this very reason, many features which seems like shitty bells-and-whistles are, underneath, highly symptomatic responses to this meaning loss; complements trying to restore the meaning-thin text message to a richer, fuller communicative power. Think of emoticons which literally present mood and face where lacking in an attenuated medium.
An excellent, if not indispensable, touchstone here would be Jakobson’s graph of the Communication Functions:
This device is explained pretty thoroughly elsewhere; I spare the reader.
—Communication, in order to communicate fully, richly, and meaningfully, must perform all these functions, and perform them as well as possible. As we move into a weirder, and decidedly more truncated medium, like telephones and text-messages, there is inevitably, at least initially, going to be some real Meaning Loss. We lose context, for one— especially in cellphones in their floating locality, with far less certainty about the wheres and nears. We lose some of the emotive, with no body language in telephony, and little or no face or tone in text-messaging. And, if you’re a New Yorker with an iphone, chances are even the phatic function is in pretty shaky condition. “Hello can you hear me?… Ofcourse not.” Additionally, where else can we find the conditions for misunderstanding? Sarcasm (Mef, II17:20). The forced terseness of 140 characters. The absence of meaningful silence and pauses, in texts. The wide varieties of writing ability (DS, II, 17:25). The failure to represent the writer or speaker “People use a different voice for every medium” (NP, II 18:00). Not to mention the countless little restraints of the technics: the rush, the layouts, and buttons and battery life— all working in concert to generate strife and snafus. The grounds of miscommunication. Not just on a personal level, but as a giant telephone game spread the globe over— a sort of systematic distortion arising from the chintziness of the medium.
—There is also, we noticed, a degree of disingenuousness made easier; of lolling and exclamation marks when untrue. A situation in which, like Zizek said of canned laughter, the computer “laughs for you.” But we were also introduced to Emojicons (LVHS, II, 1;01:48), and realized, all at once, that what is needed is merely subtler emoticons; cues as nuanced as real body language and tone. Pictures, for instance, or more interestingly, the pictographic. Which brings us to a interesting reversal: for years the Western alphabetic has been seen as more compatible with technics— Kanji and other ideograms were a real bitch to hack out on typewriters. However, now there is the revenge of the pictographic, not only in metalinguistic uses, like emoticons, but also for its condensation: the limit is 140 characters in any language.
—Distinctions can be made between texts and email, texts being interpreted as more out-and-about, ephemeral, and more casual (Mef, II21:02); for the flippant, flirty, and disengaged. Email is permanent and penned, with a trace that comes from the history of the Letter (Mef, II22:22); from the home rather than the field. It is kept, stored forever in white, and arouses a sense of record (Maf, II, 24:55). Text is closer to the speech act, the performative; to the spontaneous and even the purely phatic— “Hi!” However, texts are also more presumptuous, demanding more intimacy. So for every form of telecommunications, there are weird, unstated lines of force, that can be blundered and stepped over: the etiquette has yet to be fully formulated (LVHS, II, 28:53); our various boundaries. We are in a state of anomy, but stranger is the question is whether our technics can change at such a pace that etiquette does not have time to catch up (or whether the catch-up time is always proportional to the technics, through which our boundaries and normative expectations are communicated).
—But we have snag: facebook can be seen as a more totalizing form of communication, a hot mess of contexts, faces, stories, images, intimacy, and language, but few would say facebook is communication in a richer, fuller, Jakobsonian sense, or would they? It implies intimacy, certainly— “You know that I know your mom, right?”(Maf, II35:45)— but does it deliver or distance us? We see this totalization becoming totalitarian, even among friend groups, an “oppressive convenience” (Mef, II38:00).
—How do we connote intimacy? There is that certain compression of Time (Maf, II 41:19), where the sender takes longer to craft the communication than the receiver takes to read it, like all novels or belles lettres— and the opposite would prove true for mass-texts or spam. But is Time compression enough to convey that sense of Care. Seems not: if we slowly, meticulously pen a cover letter, it still does not seem like an act of Love. A better distinction, rather than Time, might be the spirit of the delivery, whether it comes as a gift or a demand (DS).
—What has it done to normal language, to the kind of shapes it comes in? Many of us had a resistance to text acronyms— lol, wtf, nbd, rofl, and so on— but is there a possible, pithier poetics to this?(NP, II 49:27) If I remember correctly, Vygotsky tells a story in which Tolstoy proposed to his wife in a secret conversation with her written out only in acronyms, so deep was their understanding— again, if memory serves. So acronymics can presume a certain understanding. Telegraphics of the Heart. And these acronyms become their own words; to the degree that foreigners can learn and use them, as interjections, without knowing the constituent words. Are they a part of a universal argot, like ciao, cool, and okay?
— We spoke about how cellphones have fundamentally altered the Rendez-Vous, not only reducing the anxiety-spirals of missing the other person, but making meeting people a distinct kind of activity (cruising apps, four square, and so on).
—What has this Culture of Accessibility wrought, in terms of once privileged realms. The Famous have lost some of their magisterial distance. Melissa mentioned the contemptuous familiarity fans felt for a tweeting Trent Reznor confessing his love (MeF, II, 1:08:00). We can see accessibility as a part of a large historical trend, from Transcendence to Immanence, in philosophical jargon. Once transcendent realms— the Divine, the Heroic, centers of Power, and now the previously opaque world of the Rich and Famous, as privileged realms— have become visible, accessible. Can a culture of accessibility sustain a privileged realm, in any sense, much less in the older sense?
The Cellphone as Object, which unfortunately we ran short on time exploring:
We imagined hand-warming apps (MeF, II, 1:21:35). Oh, these Universal Machines. Swiss-Army Computers. This thing, our cellphone, ate the level (MaF,II, 1:52:30), and took its powers. It ate books, watches, bird callers, calendars— nearly everything. The Bird-Calling App as revealing the true bird-nature of the cellphone. Something that chirps, must be fed, and perches on the body and signals to other birds; crosses continents. We relate to cellphones like small pets. I mentioned my Cellphone Snugglies and Phone Anenomes (See Below). For some reason, cellphone personalization, and stylization, has fallen far behind what I would expect, even from the Japanese. There are trinkets and glitter, sure, but where are the real radical forms and cases; why have cellphone, as something that is kept on the body, like purses and hats, not undergone the same degree of stylization? Perhaps it is because, as a trend, cellphones are constantly moving away from Objecthood. Phones become ever more universal and dematerialized. A Pure Screen, and ever less of an Object.
—It is exactly this dematerialization that companies use to rob us. An Object we can own. Buy and possess forever. The Dematerialized can more easily seen as a service that we get billed, and bilked, for.
Here is another example— a fleshier phone, that tries to provide for the sense of Touch: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-japan-mobile-human.html. Max also floated me this: http://flyosity.com/apple/every-phone-looks-like-the-iphone.php
Cellphones have, officially, replaced the cigarette as the focus of our random and ambient nervous energy, as implements of savoir-faire or social avoidance. We look over their predecessors: Ziggy from Quantum Leap, Communicators, Videophones. Compare and Contrast…. Okay. No more. Finished for now. Feel free to comment and extend.