Reading Ronell

Diane Davis, Diane Davis

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252090950
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action.

In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works.

Elisabeth Weber

“Vectorizing Our Thoughts Toward ‘Current Events’”: For Avital Ronell

I.

In Ingo Schulze’s 1999 text “Handy,” published in English as “Cell Phone,” the narrator, who will remain nameless throughout the story, and his wife Constanze have rented a bungalow near Berlin, in the village of Prieros, for their summer vacation. The same day that Constanze has been unexpectedly called back to her work in Berlin, five or six strangers arrive in the middle of the night and demolish the front portion of the wooden fence that surrounds the property. The narrator reports: “the fact was that not even a symbolic barrier protected the bungalow now. Given the situation, it was some comfort to have a cell phone. I’d got more familiar with it over the last few days, because I’d brought the envelope that included all the instructions—which Constanze had guarded so jealously—along with me to Prieros and had finally learned how to store numbers and activate my answering machine.”¹ The next morning, while surveying the damage, the narrator is approached by a neighbor, Neumann, who, after helping him clean up the destroyed fence, asks for his cell phone number. The narrator never wanted a cell phone, “until Constanze came up with the idea of a one-way phone. To make calls, yes—to be called no, with the exception of her of course.” As a consequence, he does not know the number, but sits down to find it in the envelope. A day later, he too returns to Berlin. After several weeks, in late September, again in the middle of the night, the cell phone rings. Neumann is calling to report on the return of the vandals. This is the occasion on which Constanze learns that her husband has given the cell phone number to someone else. In her profound disappointment, she offers a glimpse into the telephonic structure of contemporary life: “‘Think of all those people who could call now. . . . All those neighbors.’” Her husband replies: “‘Our number’s in the book, a perfectly normal number. Anybody can call us.’ ‘That’s not what I mean. A building is on fire or gets bombed and somebody runs out with nothing but his cell phone, because it happens to be in his jacket or his pants pocket. You can talk with somebody like that now.’ I plugged the recharger into the wall socket beside the bed. ‘It can very well happen,’ Constanze said. Her voice now had that ‘teacher’ tone of hers. ‘Somebody calls you up from Kosovo or Afghanistan or from wherever that tsunami was. Or one of those guys that froze up on Mount Everest. You can talk with him to the bitter end. No one can help him, but you hear his last words.’ . . . ‘Just imagine who all you’ll be dealing with now. Nobody has to be alone anymore.’”²

Of course, Constanze is mistaken that all this can happen only because her husband has given his cell phone number away. Her husband is right to say that anyone could call them anytime at home. The destruction of the fence that symbolizes the breaking-into the sphere of intimacy via telephone is in itself nothing new, but defines the telephone. But Constanze points out something else that marks the difference between the telephone and the cell phone. The latter no longer needs an identifiable, permanent location: a building or phone booth. It can be carried anywhere, and is therefore the channel of transmission of disaster par excellence. “No one can help him, but you hear his last words”—this was, as is well known, lived hundreds of times during the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines flight 93. The cell phone accomplishes what is often claimed of television but rarely truly the case: a transmission in real time.

What Avital Ronell calls “the dark side of the telephonic structure,” “the call as decisive, as verdict, the call as death sentence,”³ is here strangely reversed: It is the condemned who places the call. According to Ronell, “one need only consult the literatures trying to contain the telephone in order to recognize the persistent trigger of the apocalyptic call. It turns on you: it’s the gun pointed at your head.”⁴ The “more luminous sides—for there are many—of grace and reprieve”⁵ are found by Ronell, for example in Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit, where the telephone is associated with “calling back from exile, suspending solitude, and postponing the suicide mission with the ‘light of the last hope.’”⁶ Luminous sides find no mention in Schulze’s text after the cell phone number has been given to the vacation neighbor. From that moment on, those who are on the brink of dying violent deaths invade the most intimate sphere. They are, as far away as they might be, “all those neighbors.” The cell phone is defined here as the channel of communication that indissociably connects witnessing with utter paralysis.

The cell phone, one of the media or technical devices that produce “discrete images of space and time,”⁷ turns out to be the producer of a medium. Schulze’s text shows how the device that gives its name to the short story produces a medium in the material sense, namely, as Wolf Kittler put it in an illuminating commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” “a space of translucence and permeability.” A medium, then, is “a space in the strict sense of the term, namely not just a limited extension within an unlimited extensity, but a space, to which there is no outside.”⁸ This space without outside produced by the cell phone determines our being, through and through, our being within this space and, decisively, our “being-with-others,” our “Mitsein.”⁹ As Constanze says: “Somebody calls you up from Kosovo or Afghanistan or from wherever that tsunami was.” “Just imagine who all you’ll be dealing with now.” What Samuel Weber writes of the effects of GPS, the Global Positioning System, is valid for the cell phone too: “We are in a world overseen, in its planetary totality, by GPS. . . . As mobile as we may be, or become, we are even more localizable. We are, as it were, on call—and from this call it is difficult to imagine any escape.”¹⁰ In Schulze’s text, the medium from which it is impossible to escape is one that exposes the subject to paralyzed witnessing, or a mutism of a particular kind: the impossibility to respond. Far from being just the accidental result of a mistakenly placed phone call, such paralysis and mutism reveal themselves as determining the cell-phonic structure of today’s Mitsein.

This is where Avital Ronell’s work sees one of its unrelenting responsibilities. Ronell has pointed out that in spite of the multiplication of communication systems via television, phone, cell phone, and the Internet, “there are no clear transmission systems that would allow us to be heard here”—“here,” in the United States. She continues: “The disappearance of the public sphere is a catastrophe of historical dimension. The public sphere—the polis—is where we once located politics. What we have to come to terms with is the vanishing of politics. One of the things that the Gulf War has shown us is our own mutism. It is from this place of silence that I am trying to speak today.”¹¹ This diagnosis, made in a paper delivered on May 17, 1991, is not out of date. The cell phone in Schulze’s text exemplifies the paralyzed witnessing and mutism that Ronell identifies as perhaps the biggest challenge for today’s scholar. Ronell’s work responds to this challenge with a relentless urgency to analyze the conditions of the “transmission systems” that threaten to reduce the scholar’s work to mutism (and often succeed). In doing this, Ronell, moreover, detects the subversive potential of certain “transmission systems.” When she analyzes, in a close reading of the effects George Holliday’s videotape of the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers had on commercial television during the officers’ 1991 trial, and on several Californian cities, where it produced “insurrection on the streets” after the not-guilty verdict, Ronell uncovers “nomadic or testimonial video” as installed in television “as bug or parasite” and producing the “Ethical Scream which television has massively interrupted. This ethical scream that interrupts a discourse of effacement (even if that effacement should indeed thematize crime and its legal, moral, or police resolutions), this ethical scream—and video means for us ‘I saw it’—perforates television from an inner periphery, instituting a break in the compulsive effacement to which television is in fact seriously committed. . . . When testimonial video breaks out of concealment and into the television programming that it occasionally supersedes, it is acting as the call of conscience of television.”¹²

The cell phone, perhaps especially the newest versions that include stilland video-cameras, may have the potential of transmitting the “Ethical Scream” as well. However, in an age in which, as Samuel Weber has formulated it, “the technology and media that were supposed to bring about the ‘global village’ have contributed to the revival of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and religious fundamentalism,”¹³ the paralyzed witnessing and resistance manifested in Constanze’s reaction call for further reflection, because they are closely related to the “mutism” that Ronell has the courage to acknowledge, to analyze, and to challenge.

Ronell has shown in The Telephone Book that the “call” and the “caller” in Heidegger’s Being and Time have a fundamentally telephonic structure. Schulze’s text amplifies this structure for the cell phone caller: “Prior to borrowing a status of metaphysical subject or subject of a police interrogation (name, purpose, etc.), the caller, uncontained and un-at home, is Dasein in its uncanniness: ‘Er ist das Dasein in seiner Unheimlichkeit, das ursprüngliche geworfene In-der-Welt-sein als Un-zuhause, das nackte ‘Dass’ im Nichts der Welt’ (compare BT 276–77), ringing primordially as Being-in-the-world that is ‘not at home.’ . . . The caller is Dasein in its not-at-homeness.”¹⁴

The cell phone call, with its penetration of the intimate sphere (up to the couple’s lovemaking toward the end of the story), reveals a condition that might not be new, but that has been considerably aggravated with the advent of new media. In the words of Jacques Derrida:

the global and dominant effect of television, the telephone, the fax machine, satellites, the accelerated circulation of images, discourse, etc., is that the here-and-now becomes uncertain, without guarantee: anchoredness, rootedness, the at-home [le chez-soi] are radically contested. Dislodged. This is nothing new. It has always been this way. The at-home has always been marked [travaillé] by the other, by the guest, by the threat of expropriation. It is constituted only in this threat. But today, we are witnessing such a radical expropriation, deterritorialization, delocalization, dissociation of the political and the local, of the national, of the nation-state and the local, that the response, or rather the reaction, becomes: “I want to be at home,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Addressee: Avital
• Ronell as Gay Scientist
• The Courage of the Critic: Avital Ronell and the Idea of Emergence
• Conference Call: Ronell, Heidegger, Oppen
• Take Me to Your Reader
• Uncalled: A Commentary on Kafka’s “The Test”
• Avital Ronell’s Body Politics
• Serial
• War Bodies
• The Indefinite Article or the Love of a Phrase
• Learning Impossibility: Pedagogy, Aporia, Ethics
• Testing Existence, Exacting Thought: Reading Ronell with Deleuze
• The Problems of a Generation or Thinking and Thanking Zwang AND Drang
• Roaming (Dis)Charges: “Catastrophe of the Liquid Oozing”
• “Vectorizing Our Thoughts Toward ‘Current Events’”: For Avital Ronell
• Contributors
• Index