Photo: Florence Downes.
In the book “Hello? A requiem for the telephone”, the writer Martín Kohan analyzes the implications that the rise and fall of the landline telephone had on social life and subjective perception, an essay that goes from Chekhov to Walter Benjamingoing by Tangalanga to “0,3 0,3, 4,5,6” by Raffaella Carrá, and from there to “Hello Susana”, one of the most watched programs on Argentine television, which opens the field for review the relationship between technology, experience, language and social relationships.
From the creation of Alexander Graham Bell in the mid-19th century, through the mediation of telephone operators to the instance in which the telephone became part of the family furniture. From when for the first time two people experienced the possibility of movement in that synchronous chat that changed the notions of distance and presence, to the first possibilities of controlling the flow of calls with an answering machine, the first instance of what later became the identifier of calls, Kohan reviews, in these transformations of telephone technology, the social transformations, paradigms and idiosyncrasies of different times.
The essay published by Ediciones Godot deals with the idea that “the appearance of the landline telephone rearranges the scene of the place of the body and the word, an unprecedented possibility of dialogue is established and, with this, an unprecedented form of link with the other”, explains Kohan in dialogue with Telam. And although the essay tries to capture the sensation of expectation and openness towards the new -this is “new technologies bar new experiences bar new forms of relationship with others”- gains a kind of anticipated melancholy for what has not yet completely gone but already It is being lost.
“That which Benjamin defines as ‘in the process of disappearing’, indicates the writer: “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but what we called talking on the phone -synchronous remote conversation- is in the process of disappearing and with it an entire genre of saying is being lost”.
The relationship with telephones would be expressing something more comprehensive, he points out, and that is that, in general terms, “The different things in life are beginning to be framed in such a way that everything has prior notice and that nothing unexpected happens, which implies most of the situations that one lives. There is a pressure for everything to stayframed in protocols and previous agreements repress any appearance of the unexpected and at the same time that they force us to decide what we want and what we don’t want before we know it”.
Photo: Florence Downes.
Among those epochal issues that point to transformations between technologies, bodies and forms of social relationship are thethe fantasy of control, surveillance, a “state of imminence of offense”, an “exponential growth of offenses”, and with “the demand to know what we want even before experiencing it” is, or is also required, “renouncing the unexpected” and with it to “very happy startles”describes the author.
“Of course there are a huge number of situations in which we know perfectly well what we don’t want, and it is clear that there are a number of unforeseen events or surprises in life that are unfortunate and that it might be better not to have them, but, given that caveat, the idea that The very circumstance of something unexpected happening, the idea that everything unforeseen must always be avoided, seems today a sign of these times..
Born in Buenos Aires in 1967, Kohan is a writer and university professor. He received the Herralde Novel Award for “Ciencias Morales”, made into a film as “La mirada invisible. Among the books she wrote are “Bahía blanca”, “Twice June”, “Ojos brujos” and “Out of place”.
Photo: Florence Downes.
-Télam: Today permission to speak is requested. Everything on the cell phone seems to respond to a fantasy of control, a fiction of totality. Everything would be there -missed calls, messages- as in the network, a reassuring idea of support, that nothing is lost, a new religiosity where the unexpected, as a concept, is expelled, labeled rude.
-Martin Kohan: On the one hand, it produces a protective effect: if everything is programmed, if everything is agreed upon and predetermined, nothing will startle me and although there are very unpleasant surprises, there are others that are very happy, but we are giving up all of them at the same time. There is a requirement that one anticipate what he is going to do and what is going to happen to him, nothing of the order of the impulsive or spontaneous is allowed. In this year that Putin invades the Ukraine, some are experiencing a phone call as an invasion of that nature. It is a phone call, they are not invading your sovereign territory and, if necessary, if the call comes at a bad time, if you don’t feel like talking, don’t answer.
-T: This is not without a bit of a police bias, a reading key that appears in the essay.
-M.K: The possibility of putting a caller ID on the old landline phone had a bit of a police bias, something that now either lost that bias or we all incorporated it without much problem, to the extent that every cell phone has a caller ID in itself. calls. That of being connected all the time, being located and moving at the same time, had referred me to that necessary separation that existed in the war between artillery and infantry -either you placed the cannon and fired or had troops on the move- and that the tank came to settle. It is not strange then, on the other hand, that the police have incorporated all this repertoire of fingerprints, evidence, surveillance and control. The worrying thing is that the surveillance and control system has been transferred to our whole lives.
-T: You said that the telephone can be read as “the sign of something more comprehensive of the time”.
-M.K: It is a time when everyone thinks of themselves as encapsulated, vacuum packed, as if they were entering the operating room without a surgeon: alone and with a series of admission procedures for someone to enter their space. And since the telephone per se alters the social distribution of the inside and the outside -something from the outside begins to be in that supposedly pressurized inside, it introduces a fissure- new protocols appear: ‘I’m letting you know I’m going to call you so you won’t be offended ‘ but ‘if I call you and you don’t answer I’m offended’. There is a state of imminence of offense along with an exponential growth of offenses. I don’t know if there was, now outside of the telephone, new technologies through, a volume of verbal insults circulating publicly at as high a level as there is now. All you have to do is look at the networks to witness a generalized regime of offenses.
-T: Do you say it from the possibility of anonymity that the networks give?
-M.K: Much is due to anonymity and pseudonym but sometimes it is with a name and sometimes it is our representatives who offend citizens on Twitter, for example, because they do not agree with them. They do not argue or argue or question. So, how to understand this combination by which we have become accustomed to the exponential growth of the mean tone of offense in the circulation of speeches and that a friend is offended if you call him without warning? On the one hand, a very high degree of offense is naturalized, and on the other, there is a state of hypersensitivity to offense, whereby something as insignificant as a phone call, which can be resolved without answering, is experienced as violence or intrusion. And now you have a matter on your hands when someone else wants to talk to you and suddenly you are in the position of managing a call. If I want to call you, it’s my business to find you until you answer me. It is probably the state of permanent availability and connectivity of the mobile that probably irritates us: the demand can become overwhelming because you are never not on the phone.
-T: The essay questions the proliferation of protocols.
-M.K: The telephone is an instance to think about what happens to us with the protocols, with a life that was filled with instructions. I notice it with the laburos, when you finish it comes an instruction on what you have to do to collect. I don’t want to read instructions, because there are also many jobs we have because they are all poorly paid. Is each job going to come with instructions that you have to sit down and read to see if we can get paid?
-T: Depending on the technological transformations that we are going through, there is a general dislocation of the distribution inside out, public private, work leisure, you say in this book.
-M.K: When the telephone appears, a unique way of conversation appears, non-existent until then, an unprecedented combination of proximity and distance and presence and absence – the voice is closer than speaking in person and the body is far away, the other is not there and at the same time At the same time, another number of experiences opened up: another way of waiting and another relationship with the outside, when there was no answering machine, there was not even a trace left, you did not even know if they had called you. Now you have to have a state of total control: not only know everything that happens but also anticipate everything that is going to happen. Something exhausting, I find it much more painful and laborious that you send me a message to see when you can call me, which would supposedly be a form of consideration and courtesy, than that you call me when you think of it. If I take care of you well and if not, call me at another time. It’s not serious when the phone rings.
