[D66] The Telephone Book

[René Oudeweg]

[Een van de mafste deconstructieboeken in mijn filosofiecollectie.. ]


The Telephone Book: Technology — Schizophrenia — Electric Speech (1989)

Ronell questions the operations that such ordinary objects as the 
telephone and book dictate. She signs the text as the operator of the 
switchboard alongside Richard Eckersley, operator of design, and Michael 
Jensen, operator of compositor. Eckersley's design departs from his 
"typographic subtlety and restraint" towards a computer design, marked 
by new page-making software programs to interpret the text 
typographically.[43] Eckersley dislodges the text from presumed 
conventional settings and shifts the focus of reading with inexplicable 
gaps, displacements between sentences and paragraphs, mirror imaging of 
pages facing one another, words blurred to the point of 
indecipherability, and a regular exaggeration of negative line spacing, 
spilling sentences over into each other. Pushing the limits of an 
ordinary "Table of Contents" or "Footnotes," the operators set up a 
"Directory Assistance," in which chapters appear as reference indexes, 
and a yellow pages entitled "Classified," in which footnotes appear as 
soliciting advertisements.

Following "A User's Manual," the text begins as if the reader answers a 
call: "And yet, you're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, 
sometimes irreversibly."[44] Ronell makes clear that The Telephone Book 
is a philosophical project on questions concerning the telephone, the 
call, and the answering machines: "always incomplete, always 
unreachable, forever promising at once its essence and its existence, 
philosophy identifies itself finally with this promise, which is to say, 
with its own unreachability."[45]

R.O.

Ref:


https://monoskop.org/images/1/10/Ronell_Avital_The_Telephone_Book_Technology_Schizophrenia_Electric_Speech.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avital_Ronell