Condensed Article

Abstract

The "Condensed Article" explores the telephone’s promise of immediate access to distant voices through the technological preservation and condensation of speech. The author calls up what spooks or haunts the structure of telephonics. By unraveling these encrypted connections the essay demonstrates and explains the relay/delay interference signal between confusion and certainty. In that sense, the essay connects telephonics to Bell. The story of Alexander Graham Bell from his early childhood to his invention of the telephone holds many clues to the repressed desires in the telephonic structure. But, rather than a biography, the author writes a "biophony," somewhere between empiricity and speculation. This speculation operates a party line between Heidegger’s "What is Called Thinking," Abraham’s and Torok’s psychoanalysis of crypts, Jacques Derrida’s desedimentation of "the death sentence" structure, and many other stations.