Where Are You?

An Ontology of the Cell Phone

Maurizio Ferraris, Sarah De Sanctis

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823256167, 9780823256150
• eBook ISBN: 9780823256181
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Communication Studies

This book sheds light on the most philosophically interesting of contemporary objects: the cell phone. "Where are you?"—a question asked over cell phones myriad times each day—is arguably the most philosophical question of our age, given the transformation of presence the cell phone has wrought in contemporary social life and public space.Throughout all public spaces, cell phones are now a ubiquitous prosthesis of what Descartes and Hegel once considered the absolute tool: the hand. Their power comes in part from their ability to move about with us—they are like a computer, but we can carry them with us at all times—in part from what they attach to us (and how), as all that computational and connective power becomes both handy and hand-sized.Quite surprisingly, despite their name, one might argue, as Ferraris does, that cell phones are not really all that good for sound and speaking. Instead, the main philosophical point of this book is that mobile phones have come into their own as writing machines—they function best for text messages, e-mail, and archives of all
kinds. Their philosophical urgency lies in the manner in which they carry us from the effects of voice over into reliance upon the written traces that are, Ferraris argues, the basic stuff of human culture.Ontology is the study of what there is, and what there is in our age is a huge network of documents, papers, and texts of all kinds. Social reality is not constructed by collective intentionality; rather, it is made up of inscribed acts. As Derrida already prophesized, our world revolves around writing. Cell phones have attached writing to our fingers and dragged it into public spaces in a new way. This is why, with their power to obliterate or morph presence and replace voice with writing, the cell phone is such a philosophically interesting object.

Part I

PERÌ MAIL: THE PHARAOH’S MOBILE PHONE

On November 6, 1824, from Egypt, Champollion wrote to his brother: “I passed my hands over the names of years which History has completely lost record of, the names of Gods who have had no altar raised to them for fifteen centuries, and, hardly breathing for fear of reducing it to dust, I collected a certain tiny piece of papyrus, the last and only resting place of the memory of a King who, when alive, may have found the immense Palace of Karnak too confining for him!” Ah, if only the pharaoh had had a mobile phone! Yes, had he owned one, and had the reception been good in the pyramid, what would he have done with it? He would have spoken, of course, but mostly he would have written, recorded, constructed. To verify this claim, I will develop the following topics in Part I:

1. Speaking. “Is that you, my love?” “No, I’m her husband.” Here is the point. There is a big difference between being on the phone and being on a mobile phone. In Heideggerian terms, it would be a “being-on-the-phone” versus a very different “being-on-the-mobile-phone.” With the mobile phone, a sentence like “Hello, is this the Heideggers? Can I speak with Martin?” ceased to exist. No, the message—apart from unpleasant accidents—reaches him and not someone in his family; yet, on the other hand, he could be anywhere. Used as we are to finding someone, when we do not manage to do so it makes us feel rather anxious. The most menacing of all messages is, “The number you have called is currently unavailable.” Vice versa, a real ontological isolation takes place when we find out that there is no reception and we start looking for it, frantically. We feel lonely, yet until fairly recently that was always the case, because we were always without reception, and it is not only a matter of speaking.

2. Writing. In fact, mobile phones are not only machines for speaking, they are also writing machines. E-mails and mobile phones today are virtually identical, and they do not only convey phonetic writing but also ideograms—:) :-) :-(;-)—that is, the kind of writing furthest from speech that you can think of.

3. Recording. Why do we write? To communicate? It is not so obvious. Given that mobile phones today become Gameboy and PlayStation equivalents, agendas and address books, watches and alarm clocks, cameras and recorders, the prevailing element is that of recording, if not even capitalization—so much so that the functions of mobile phones and credit cards tend to overlap.

4. Constructing. Recording does not only build capital; in general, all social objects that once rested on a desk, as I mentioned in the introduction, will move to the mobile phone. For the moment, we can only check the transactions in our bank accounts but, sooner or later, I bet our national insurance numbers, our driving licenses, IDs, and passports—which today are all paper or plastic documents—will be incorporated into the mobile phone. We will be able to say, “this is my corpus” (my address book, my identity, my money, my archive).

The moral of the story is easy to find. Wearing ourselves out analyzing the culture of television and images, we failed to see the boom in writing over the past thirty years that has culminated in the mobile phone. Maybe we were blind to it because it was too obvious—to the Pharaoh, to Champollion, to Kafka (if you want to find out how it ends, skip to the epilogue of this book)—and too ancient. What is at stake here is more than just a technological evolution; it concerns our way of being in the world—both physically and philosophically—because here we are no longer dealing with just a “mass communication system” but a “mass recording system.” The sooner we realize this the better.

1

SPEAKING

The Italian word for mobile phone is telefonino, literally “little phone”: a strange diminutive for such a powerful device. What is it about a mobile phone? Does it simply increase our ability to speak, to carry sounds to a distance, that is, literally, to phone? It seems that way, at least if we look at its name, designing its function in a univocal way—and not the inventor’s name, unlike the case of the guillotine (what did Victor Hugo say? “Christopher Columbus couldn’t get his name attached to his discovery. Guillotin couldn’t detach his from his invention.”) Yet, things are not so simple.

I am on a train. The person I call answers. He says “hi” without asking “Hello, who is this?” He doesn’t have to, because my name, which is stored in his address book, appears on his mobile phone. Also, most of the time I dial the right number, since it is listed in my address book: what used to be the phone equivalent to print errors vanishes, and yet they were so common with the old rotary phones, and only a little less so with the later keyboard phones. We no longer dial the wrong number; the worst that can happen is to be told that the number dialed “is not in service,” but that is another story.

These are some effects of writing that inaugurate our perì mail: the mobile phone is also an address book, an alarm clock, a stopwatch, a notebook, a camera, a recorder. For the patient ones, it also encompasses an agenda, as well as images, videos, films, music, a lot of stuff—and in a fairly small space. It is a complete transformation, which I will elaborate on later—not to the point of boredom, I hope. Yet the most “abyssal” or “inaugurational” transformation—as someone fond of big words would put it—is this: As soon as the other party answers, one feels compelled to ask, “Where are you?” Here is the starting point from which I will begin to disentangle an immense invisible ontology.

“WHERE-ARE-YOU?–MAIL”

Mothers and children. Until a few years ago the question would have seemed absurd, almost idiotic: Where do you expect me to be? I am here, I mean there, where you are calling me. The home phone even allowed for topographic verifications: during the Battle of Berlin in April 1945, you could easily find out how far the Soviets had advanced; all you had to do was call a phone number in the suburbs and if someone answered in Russian, then the Soviets were already there. With the mobile phone it is completely different. The message can reach us anywhere, and, in turn, we could be anywhere ourselves. This is why what was superfluous with the home phone becomes essential with the mobile phone, and I am far from exaggerating given that, with the spread of mobile phones and texting, even the “where-are-you?-mails”1 were born: messages, mostly sent from mothers to their children, whose only content is, indeed, the question, “Where are you?”

The mother (an unstoppable social figure, unlike partners or bosses) has absolutely nothing to say to her child; in a way there is nothing that matters to her apart from knowing where the child is. The child, though, always has a response—namely to answer, “I’m at Gino’s,” and then hang up, leaving her mom with an unanswered follow-up question: “And where is Gino?” The mother might as well get a satellite navigation system, like those installed in taxis or used by the electronic sensors in intelligent missiles.2

“I’m right behind you!” Yet, beyond maternal worries—proving how mobile phones create not only independence but also new forms of dependence, on both sides—this “where are you” issue lies at the basis of infinite requests, precisely because, given the difficulty of locating the interlocutor, finding out where he is becomes an informational good of primary importance: “Where are you?” “On the train, I’m arriving.” “Where are you?” “Platform 4.” “Where are you?” “At a meeting, I’ll call you later.” Note that meeting points in airports and train stations are disappearing: In the age of location-based mobile phones they are no longer needed.

In Japan, a country that is particularly sensitive to mobile phones, the question “where are you?” turned into a game. There is a small community whose members, throughout the day, update one another on where they are. A contented mind is a perpetual feast, but the game, even outside Japan, still holds some surprises. In fact, a variation of the Grundfrage, the fundamental question—“why something instead of nothing?”—for instance, is offered by the much more crucial one expressed in conversations like, “Where are you?” “I’m right behind you.” In this situation we thought we were communicating at a distance, but we were in fact like the children of the past, talking (or rather trying, in vain, to talk) through empty cans tied by a thread. In fact, at times, the voice comes from two sources: the mobile phone and the space behind us, where our interlocutor is.

Or take the following hyperbolic case: If two people have signed up with two telecommunications companies from different countries, the answer, “I’m right behind you,” has to travel half the world to reach the interlocutor’s ear.3 A French advertisement, a few years ago, redacted the full list of these weird situations, including the embarrassing one I mentioned above: “Is that you my love?” “No, it’s her husband.” “La donna è mobile” is a possible situation, in theory, thanks to a strictly private device like the mobile phone—unlike the semi-public home phone.

How do I look? There is also the variant of videophones. In a commercial that was popular some time ago, a girl sent her picture and asked, “How do I look?” [In Italian, literally, “How am I?”—Trans.] In fact, here we also have the overturning of normal conversational rules (we usually ask, “How are you?,” although often we do not really care much). Between the two situations, though, the first is the really decisive one: “Where are you?” The second, as funny as it may be, is based on a pun. The girl asks, “How am I?”; but she is not alluding to her mood—which is instead what we talk about when, in phone conversations or in public, we ask someone, “How are you?” She asks, “How am I?”—meaning, “How do I look?”—in the same way in which, in a typical matrimonial scene, one asks one’s partner before going out if he or she is well dressed and looking decent.4 In the case of “Where are you?,” on the contrary, the question is unequivocal. We want to know precisely where our interlocutor is. In a way, we generalize the call-in television quiz question, “Where are you calling from?,” with the crucial exception that here we ask not the caller, but the person we are calling.

Transformations of presence. If we compare the question “where are you?” with the situation of two speakers being face-to-face and physically in the same place, it is hard not to notice how many things change. Obviously, ever since it became possible to send letters—or better yet, letters addressed to a general delivery—this presence has started to vacillate, but some things stayed the same. Also it is quite unlikely that the two would ask each other, from one general delivery to the other more than once a day, “Where are you?”—“On the stairs.” … “At the supermarket.” … “At the post office picking up your damn letter.” … “Look, I don’t mean to criticize, but with this ‘where are you’ thing we’ll end up doing nothing all day.” And so on.

It is well-known that our modern and postmodern times have brought about a proliferation of “non-places” (Augé 1992): shopping centers, freeways, waiting areas in airports; places that are all the same in terms of how they look and what they have to offer and yet are dislocated all over the world. Well, one has to admit that the objective non-place, the utopian place (literally, utopia means “in no place”) of the postmodern age pales in comparison to the subjective non-place: namely the difficulty in locating our interlocutor and the apprehension deriving from it. It is almost a universalized version of the angst described by Proust: a phone call in the middle of the night from Albertine, and the Narrator does not have a clue of where she might be—at the theater? With her aunt? With another man? Albertine is a liar, and the Narrator has no way to check.

At least as a start, these transformations should be taken seriously, in this mobile ontology—in its two meanings of “mobile ontology” and “ontology of the mobile phone.” I will try to expose them briefly before drawing some philosophical conclusions, going through four major points summed up in four words: objects, subjects, knowledge, and possibilities.

MOBILE ONTOLOGY

Objects. The transformation from the home phone to the mobile phone might simply look like a matter of shrinking and losing wires. It is not so simple, though: cutting loose from an immobile support and becoming smaller while, at the same time, getting more powerful, the mobile phone emancipates itself: it loses its proverbial shackles—just like books that are no longer tied to monastic libraries—becomes pocket-size, and travels around the world. It makes things possible that were never seen or done before and that, with the old home phone, were not even imaginable.

First, a little history, reminiscent of Nietzsche who, in Twilight of the Idols, narrates how and why the real world ended up becoming a fairy tale. Here we could tell how the home phone ended up becoming the most mobile device in the world. The story of this mobilization is interesting in itself, because in theory phones should allow communication without moving, whereas airplanes, for instance, allow communication (provided that it is only about communication) by moving. This principle was proved wrong by the famous dialectic for which, when the phone was invented, it was believed that people would have no longer traveled, while the almost contemporary invention of the airplane led people to travel even more. And now we travel round and round, taking our phones with us, switching them off only during takeoffs and landings (if we are on a plane, that is; it does not happen if we are in a car, train, or ship). Story time:

1. It begins with a home phone—fixed, black, nailed to the wall (you talk into i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Note
• Half Title
• Introduction: Where Are You?
• I: Perì Mail: The Pharaoh’s Mobile Phone
• The Bottle Imp
• II: Social Objects: Realism and Textualism
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Series Page