The Telephone: A Double Existence, The Disembodied Voice tugging at a Web of Treacherous Intimacy

“A disembodied voice travelling through a wire was as spooky as a ghost” - Alexis Madrigal

The ‘lover’s phone’ — a fitting name for an intimate mechanical acoustic device (invented in the early 17th Century) in which two tin cans are connected by a taut string, and sound is transmitted from one can to another through mechanical vibrations. The electromagnetic telephone, when it was first introduced in the late 19th Century, was once thought to be magical. And with the celebration of new advancements in technical communication came also a wave of societal anxiety and fear of what this advancement entailed. MacDougall links the paranoia of technology during the Gilded Age with the rapid growth of corporations and the net works that they used, often being depicted as encroaching tentacles of an octopus or a spider spinning a web, which evokes the image of telephone lines spanning large distances beneath our feet.[1] In ‘The Telephone book’, Avital Ronell suggests that the telephone has a doubled existence, perpetrated by the existence of another telephone or an entity at ‘the other end’, or rather, ‘the Other’.[2] This telephonic decentralisation and disembodiment threatens personal identity as well as responsibility, teetering on the border of the familiar and supernatural, bringing forth a level of untrustworthiness and fickleness that may entail the loss of control over oneself, and even, the weakening of individual subjectivity. The telephone is shrouded with an unnerving ambivalence in its separation of the material and immaterial, seen in the disconnection of the voice and the body (and, oftentimes in literature and different forms of media, telephone components and human body parts are made explicitly interchangeable); the listener from the visual space that the speaker inhabits, the real and the spiritual. The telephone, in its certainty, gives birth to uncertainty.

In an era of still-growing multinational corporations and international commerce, it is difficult to comprehend just how unnatural or alien these companies and the large networks of communication technologies that they used once seemed. These corporations, during the Gilded Age, were often compared to beings such as the octopus, the spider, or even, the hydra.[3] Tentacles and webs — these sinister images and metaphors were used to represent these large-spanning networks. For example, railroad tracks, oil pipelines, and telephone lines. And implicitly, corporate power in its wide reach over the population. From the image below, we can see that the creature is part-communication device and part-spider, preying on frightened workers, and on its spindly legs words like ‘extortion, ‘bribery’, and ‘trickery’ are imprinted. (Fig. 1) These images were popularised in media, giving rise to societal anxieties regarding the rapid advancements of communication technologies. The thought of being trapped in an inescapable cage was fuelled by the reality that they are ‘nightmares of reach.’ — monstrous in their large sphere of influence, their familiarity and unfamiliarity, slinking and permeating through cracks in both the private and public spheres. The business of telephony was also deemed a ‘thrilling demimonde of crime and derring-do’.[4] In Stringer’s The Wire Tappers, he writes that telephone lines ‘ran like turgid sewers under the asphalted tranquillity of the open city.’, further highlighting the frightening elusiveness and disembodied nature of the telephone, and its looming threat over humanity.[5]

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New technologies brought forth new widespread anxieties mainly due to their ‘apparent ability to ‘alter spatial categories and boundaries’.[7] In Phantom Wires, Stringer writes that the telephone is ‘the shuttle that's woven all civilization into one compact fabric!’[8] This reordering of space is explored by MacDougall who states that the telephone affects the spatial boundaries within both social and physical spaces. Namely, in the home, where borders between male public and female private spheres were threatened and were no longer clear-cut.[9] The telephone, through this reordering, also formed ‘virtual spaces’ and structures of gender, class, and race.[10] Haskell even suggests that ‘the very constitution of the social universe had changed.’[11] This reordering of space, by disrupting the well-established order of things, quickly contributed to a more sinister ploy. Through shifting the space between the world of crime with ‘the more honest world’, the telephone, in fact, brought them closer. A notable example is the rise of contact-free gambling circuits. According to Flynt, telephone companies were ‘allies of the criminal pool-rooms’, and often enticed people of the ‘honest world’ into the world of gambling.[12] This is due to the telephone’s ability to help one disappear from the place of crime, and make one, essentially, anonymous and invisible. These people never had to enter the pool-room, gambling away ‘your money, your employers money, your husband s money’.[13] The social order created for gender, class depends on the space and boundaries that the telephone seemed to have broken down, shining light onto questions of morality. With such pervasive technologies and massive telephonic networks that trickle beneath them as well as within their homes changed how relationships work. The telephone, in its elusiveness, one cannot help but feel like individuals are no longer masters of their fates.

The telephone is a contradictory apparatus, although it is able to connect people who are spatially separated, it also, at the same time, works to maintain that distance — To Ronell, it “maintain[s] and join[s], the telephone line holds together what it separates.”[14] The prerequisite to telephonic projection is the structural separation of the voice and the body (mouth).[15] On top of that, the telephone maintains the distance between the listener and the speaker. Without being in the general proximity of the speaker, the telephone breaks apart this visual-audio link, as it is solely auditory. The splitting of the body and subject, the paradoxical maintenance of proximity and distance, as Ronell puts it, ‘destabilises the identity of self and other, subject and thing [...]’[16] This state of uneasiness and ambivalence that arises from this disembodiment is highlighted within Kafka’s short story ‘My Neighbour’, in which the title itself suggests a layer of intimacy. However, readers soon realise, through the protagonist’s rapid descent into paranoia, that their relationship is anything but. It is interesting to note that losing sight of his potential enemy makes the narrator even more anxious and wary. The presence of the telephone installed between their walls only exacerbates this feeling and seems to threaten the protagonist with its apparent ability to betray him, paralleling the fact that his neighbour is literally next door, unreachable, yet reachable at the same time. The telephone seeks to ‘betray the honourable and capable man, but shield the dishonest’.[17] Just as the telephone may be said to ‘disconnect people by connecting them at a distance, it is also a machine that both assists communication and compromises, restricts, even denies it.’, giving birth to untrustworthiness in its double existence. [18]

Therefore, the telephone is something that is exploitable in its duality or its double existence. The 1940s American thriller film noir, Sorry, Wrong Number, layered with elements of telephonic horror, begins with: ‘the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives. It is the servant of our common needs - the confidante of our inmost secrets.’[19] Again, the terrifying reach of the telephone is emphasised, but what increases this horror is the fact that the telephone is able to connect to millions, but also to one. It has the capability of holding everyone’s darkest secrets, producing a doubled singularity which, in turn, creates a false sense of security. The blurring between public and private spheres, along with the exposing of the private to the public — the telephone line ‘takes it into the streets, keeping itself radically open to the outside’ in which forms a ‘deadly flower of unity’ that grows ‘under the sun of constant surveillance.’[20] It decentralises every operation. Ronell, in Telephone Book, questions whether the telephone is truly a servant to our needs. At the beginning of ‘My Neighbour’, the protagonist is prideful of his workroom, deeming it to be ‘so simple to control, so easy to direct.’[21] However, he is, later on, seen to be controlled, even emotional manipulated, by this space that he once thought was his. He is afraid that he may, through the telephone, ‘involuntarily’ leak valuable information to his neighbour.[22] In Stringer’s The Wire Tappers, one character points to the ‘wire behind the house’ and says ‘I can capture and tame and control that power [...] I can make it my slave."[23] However, their characters always often ‘betrayed’ by the technologies that they once thought were under their control. The telephone entails a massive net of connectedness that is decentralised. A ‘synecdoche for technology’ that instils a false sense of security, and may betray you at any moment without remorse.[24] It is, much like the definition of sound itself, a ‘literal invasion of borders, a transgressive penetration of an individuals’ boundedness.’[25] The telephone, as a tangible household object, emphasises this violent and near-tangible elusiveness, echoing Ronell’s sentiment that ‘it is itself unsure of its identity as object.’[26]

This brings into light the threat that the telephone introduces to human identity as well as human voluntariness. The telephone and its ability to quickly roam the streets without being seen, its double existence, introduces a new kind of human vulnerability, which, to Ronell, turns it into a tool of domination. Ronell begins Telephone Book with the buzzing of a phone call: ‘And yet, you're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly’, chiding the reader for picking up the phone, shining a light on how the telephone is capable of being a technology of compulsion.[27] Ronell goes as far as to say that ‘you’re its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt.’[28] Its concept has far preceded its technical installation. In ‘My Neighbour’, during the narrator’s descent into paranoia, he confesses that he oftentimes ‘dances with apprehension around the telephone’, terrified of his inevitable loss of control, anxious that he ‘can’t help divulging secrets.’[29] Aside from the immediacy of telephonic transmission (the fact that his neighbour can immediately make use of the stolen information before he even has time to hang up his receiver), it is the fact that his conversation is, effectively doubled, (his words are being heard by two ‘Others’, one being right next door) which frightens him. The fear of being overheard is referred to by Freud as a ‘hieroglyphic cap’ — an ‘acoustic sensitivity’ of ‘overhead words’ in which the superego which comprehends ‘our thoughts and watches us is not only an observation post’ but also an institution of broadcasting.’[30] Psychotic breakdown, similar to the narrator’s, is accordingly represented, in Civilization and Its Discontents, as a telephone that asserts itself like some public address system that ‘cannot be turned off.’[31] Ronell states that the telephone ‘turns on you: it’s the gun pointed at your head.’[32] It is the gun, rather than an entity holding the gun. It is an exploitable tool, a ‘hidden agency of suppression: the call as decisive, as verdict, the call as death sentence.’[33] The telephone gives rise to unprecedented tension and new kinds of human vulnerability, and to Ronell, even the weakening of individual subjectivity. In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Harrison’s secret lover Connie answers the phone habitually, in which ‘Her hand would have reached its mark before her eyes opened; before her brain stirred her ear would be ready […] This mechanical reflex of hers to a mechanical thing.’, highlighting the destabilising of the self, subject and thing.

Human body parts and technological components oftentimes, in literature, films and media, are made explicitly interchangeable — a stark contrast that is rife with horror due to its familiar unfamiliarity. As Marshall McLuhan argues, the telephone produces or allows for a ‘kind of extra-sensory perception’.[34] And is often said to be ‘as near as any human invention to being an extension of the human body’.[35] This disturbing yet strangely intimate comparison creates a new ‘otherness’ of telephonic communication, and, conversely, emphasises its monstrosity and alienness. The phone receiver comes in physical contact with your ear, touching, but not quite. Scott suggests: ‘gone is the polite distance of personal space maintained when conversing in the physical presence of another [...] replaced by the device directly touching a bodily orifice.’[36] From this, the telephone, again, borders between the familiar and unfamiliar. This eerie double existence, in some instances, produces a sense of betrayal as well as pure helplessness. According to Ronell, science is always an operation on horror, opening the ‘theatre of its repression’.[37] Be it wire thrillers, horror films, or even horror games, the telephone is used to explore a physical intimacy that is often treacherous, making the telephone a weapon of subjugation. There is a disturbing yet iconic scene in Nightmare on Elm Street, when the phone receiver morphs into a human tongue, instilling a gruesome image of an unwanted intimacy. It is interesting to note that the killer begins as a disembodied, supernatural, almost illusionary figure whose horrifying reach relies on dreams (and the telephone), creating a space where dream and reality becomes indistinguishable. Similarly, In Outlast II, a survival horror game, we control the player who is trapped within a school campus, having to navigate through seemingly never-ending corridors while being hunted by a horrific tentacled monster. During its moment of reprieve, the protagonist hears the phone ring, they answer it (without hesitation) to a friendly voice telling them that everything will be alright and that they will be rescued soon, however, the voice quickly turns from friendly to sinister, and a tongue materialises from the receiver and attempts to strangle the player. The telephone not only becomes a weapon of subjugation but also increases one’s sense of isolation, and in its horrifying connection with the human body, brings into light a new kind of disembodiment that lies in its monstrosity, only deepening the sense of betrayal. In Carl Jung’s The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, a psychotic patient has retained a coherently critical agency in which she calls the telephone.[38] The telephone's ‘speech tubes’ are plugged right into her every organ and orifice, which, conversely, restricts her ability to communicate, even making it difficult for her to breath properly.[39] Technological media invades and grow into one’s organs. Wires, tentacles, tongues that stretch and strangle and invade — becoming a communication technology that restricts communication, ripping away layers of familiarity, exposing one to the horrors of a monstrous yet human unknown while playing with the intimacy that the telephone seems to provide.

What is perhaps most unsettling about the telephone, is its marked relationship with the occult — and death. Photographs, taken with camera shutters, seemed to communicate or reproduce ghosts or spirits in their ‘black-and-white fuzziness’.[40] The invention of Morse code in 1887 was followed by the ‘tapping spectres of spiritistic seances sending their messages from the realm of the dead.’[41] In Stringer’s Phantom Wires, the human voice, through the telephone, ‘creeps as silent as death through a thousand miles of sea.’[42] When the telephone was first introduced in Stockholm (which in 1885 had the ‘greatest telephone penetration in the world’) people were very sceptical. Aside from believing that telephone poles brought thunder and lightning, the ‘magical’ humming that came from the wires and the telephone’s elusive relationship with electricity seemed to have, to them, attracted and lured evil spirits.[43] Telephone lines were pulled down and destroyed, and the telephone was claimed to be, in churches, an ‘instrument of the devil.’[44] Bowen writes that telephones “allow ghosts new modes of ‘self-expression.’” In a moment that explores the ‘authenticity’ of one’s identity in Eva Trout: Eva calls her teacher, who, upon hearing a voice that ‘had not rung true’, begins to question whether Miss Smith is, in fact, dead or alive.[45] This led to the questioning of the device of communication itself, and whether it might be this very instrument that produces the ghostly ‘distortedness’, a ‘trick played by the wire’. [46] Perhaps this ghostliness is due to the fact that ‘one never knows, never can fully know, know with full certainty who, if anyone, is on the other end of the line.’[47] This notion of not knowing who is on the other side and not having full control over your fate is often likened to the time between dialling the number and the receiver picking up, it is as though you are suspended in time, dangling in a realm of the unknown, anticipating, anxious. Rickels calls this empty space ‘free association’, an ‘unrepresentability of one’s own death, to some dead ringer […]’ Through disengaging the person from their identity: ‘the telephone can make of one a ‘phone poltergeist’.[48]

The general public perception of the telephone has gone through many stages. However, what remains the same is the feeling of unease, even trepidation, when one hears the ringing of a phone. The person on the receiving end (or the caller themselves) is immediately reduced to a state of expectance, left wondering who is on the other line, suspended in a realm of the known and unknown. The telephone entails a decentralisation that not only separates the voice from the body, introducing a sense of uneasiness and distrust, but also, conversely, separates people from other people, introducing a new threat that questions human identity and voluntariness. It is a technology of compulsion, leading to a forced loss of control, which may explain why the telephone is such a pertinent horror trope in films — ‘Telephone is an unseen link between a million lives […] Life and happiness wait upon its ring - and horror - and loneliness - and death.’

[1] MacDougall, Robert. “The Wire Devils: Pulp Thrillers, the Telephone, and Action at a Distance in the Wiring of a Nation.” American Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, 2006, p. 716 [2] Ronell, Avital, “The Telephone Book: Technology-Schizophrenia-Electric Speech,” Lincoln: University , 20 (1989), 1–10 <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3684894> [3] MacDougall, p. 715 [4] MacDougall, p. 721 [5] Stringer, Arthur. The Wire Tappers. Musson, 1906. P. 263 [6] ‘In the Clutch of a Grasping Monopoly’, Judge, 1888, 16 [7] MacDougall, p. 718 [8] Stringer, Arthur. Phantom Wires . KRILL PRESS, 2016. [9] Martin, Michele. “‘Hello, Central?" Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems.” Technology and Culture, vol. 33, no. 3, 1992, p. 597., doi:10.2307/3106650. [10] Haskell, Thomas L. “The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority.” The American Historical Review, vol. 83, no. 2, 1978, p. 534., doi:10.2307/1862501. [11] Haskell, p. 534 [12] Flynt, Josiah. “The Telegraph and Telephone Companies as Allies of the Criminal Pool-Room.” Cosmopolitan, 1907, pp. 52 [13] Flynt, p. 53 [14] Ronell, p. 9 [15] Ronell, p. 9 [16] Ronell, p. 10 [17] Ronell, p. 10 [18] Bennett, Andrew. “Elizabeth Bowen on the Telephone.” Elizabeth Bowen, 2019, p. 193 [19] Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948) [20] Ronell, p. 5 [21] Kafka, Franz, “My Neighbour,” in The Complete Stories, The Schocken Kafka Library (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1995) p. 424 [22] Kafka, p. 425 [23] Stringer, p. 112 [24] Ronell, p. 6 [25] Hand, Richard J. “Are You Sitting (Un)Comfortably? Sound, Horror and Radio.” Listen in Terror, 2014, pp. 8–49., doi:10.7228/manchester/9780719081484.003.0002. [26] Ronell, p. 9 [27] Ronell, p. 2 [28] Ronell, p. 2 [29] Kafka, p. 425 [30] Freud, Sigmund. Studienausgabe. Edited by Alexander Mitscherlich et al., vol. 7, Frankfurt Am Main: S Fischer, 1969. [31] Freud, Sigmund, and Joan Riviere. Civilization and Its Discontents. Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1930. [32] Ronell, p. 6 [33] Ronell, p. 9 [34] McLuhan, Marshall. “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” American Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, 1964, p. 265 [35] Bennett, p. 192 [36] Scott, D. Travers. “Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927–1962.” American Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 3, 2011, p. 491 [37] Ronell, p. 366 [38] Rickels, Laurence A. “Kafka and Freud on the Telephone.” Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 22, no. Special Turn-Of-The-Century Issue, 1989, p. 212 [39] Jung, C. G. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. Princeton University Press, 1974. [40] Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 12 [41] Kittler, p. 12 [42] Stringer, p. 291 [43] Ehrenkrona, Marika. “‘The Telephone Is the Instrument of the Devil’ .” Ericsson, www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/communication/how-the-telephone-changed-the-world/the-telephone-is-the-instrument-of-the-devil. [44] Ehrenkrona, p. 1 [45] Bowen, p. 193 [46] Bowen, p. 193 [47] Bennett, p. 192 [48] Bennett, p. 190