Avital Ronell: The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)

“The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a “telephonic logic,” fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in.

The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, “an open accomplice to lies.” Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of “the call.” In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy.

Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell’s famous first call: “Watson, come here!” Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.”

Publisher University of Nebraska Press, 1989
ISBN 0803289383, 9780803289383
466 pages

Publisher

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Norbert Wiener: God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964–) [EN, RU, ES, RO]

“In this book, Norbert Wiener concerns himself with major points in cybernetics which are relevant to religious issues.

The first point he considers is that of the machine which learns. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to the self-conscious living system, a computer now exists which not only can be programmed to play a game of checkers, but one which can “learn” from its past experience and improve on its own game. For a time, the machine was able to beat its inventor at checkers. “It did win,” writes the author, “and it did learn to win; and the method of its learning was no different in principle from that of the human being who learns to play checkers.

A second point concerns machines which have the capacity to reproduce themselves. It is our commonly held belief that God made man in his own image. The propagation of the race may also be interpreted as a function in which one living being makes another in its own image. But the author demonstrates that man has made machines which are “very well able to make other machines in their own image,” and these machine images are not merely pictorial representations but operative images. Can we then say: God is to Golem as man is to Machines? in Jewish legend, golem is an embryo Adam, shapeless and not fully created, hence a monster, an automation.

The third point considered is that of the relation between man and machine. The concern here is ethical. “render unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s,” warns the author. In this section of the book, Dr. Wiener considers systems involving elements of man and machine.

The book is written for the intellectually alert public and does not involve any highly technical knowledge. It is based on lectures given at Yale, at the Société Philosophique de Royaumont, and elsewhere.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1964
ISBN 0262730111, 9780262730112
ix+95 pages

Publisher

God and Golem (English, 1964, updated on 2021-4-8)
Tvorets i robot (Russian, trans. M.N. Aronz and R.A. Fesenko, 1966, DJVU, added on 2021-4-8)
Dios y Golem (Spanish, trans. Javier Alejo, 1967, EPUB, added on 2021-4-8)
Dumnezeu şi Golem (Romanian, trans. Edmond Nicolau and Lucia Nasta, 1969, added on 2021-4-8)

Manuel DeLanda: War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991)

“In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology have become chillingly apparent. For Manuel De Landa, however, this new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications: he shows how it represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to machines and to information. The recent emergence of “intelligent” and autonomous bombs and missiles equipped with artificial perception and decision-making capabilities is, for De Landa, part of a much larger transfer of cognitive structures from humans to machines in the late twentieth century.

In this remarkable book, De Landa provides a rich panorama of these astonishing developments. He details the mutating history of information analysis and machinic organization from the mobile siege artillery of the Renaissance, the clockwork armies of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic campaigns, and the Nazi blitzkrieg up to present-day cybernetic battle-management systems and satellite reconnaissance networks. Much more than a history of warfare, De Landa provides an unprecedented philosophical and historical reflection on the changing forms through which human bodies and materials are combined, organized, deployed, and made effective.”

Publisher Zone Books, 1991
ISBN 0942299752
271 pages

Publisher

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