ringxiety, or, the abject voice revisited

Music: Roxy Music: Stranded As I continue to think about the book project on "voices as ghosts," friends and colleagues continue to forward websites and stories to me about haunting voices: from NPR stories on hurricane Katrina emergency phone calls to personal stories about harrowing answering machine messages, it really does seem that the recorded voice is the ghost of our time.The most recent story sent along by my friend Lisa is about "faxucellarmism" or "ringxiety," the phenomenon that refers to folks hearing phantom telephone and cell phone rings. So you are going about your daily routine, fixing breakfast, and suddenly you hear your cell phone ring; you answer your cell phone (after you find it buried in the laundry), and lo, no one has called.

Apparently some folks have been studying this phenomenon, and it has a lot to do with how easy it is to "trick" the mind into hearing phantom rings as a consequence of two things: first, the frequency of telephone rings is right up there with alarm clocks and baby cries, and we're hardwired in some respect to respond to that frequency; second, humans are not terribly good at locating the source of sound at that telephone frequency (e.g., a cell phone ring sounds like it is coming from everywhere and nowhere).

To these rationales I would conjecture a third: the human voice in pain, sorrow, or orgasmic pleasure (viz., jouissance) also registers in this frequency, and consequently, the cell phone ring is a surrogate voice (at least the one that is not, for example, a ringtone of Depeche Mode's latest, but rather, the more familiar high-pitched annoying sound heard in classrooms and restaurants everywhere). The reason you wake immediately in the night to the ring of the phone as something to do with that ring registering, in some way, that in voice that is beyond voice (objet a). Perhaps one might even say the telephone ring is the "mundane uncanny" of our time?

I'm simply fascinated by everyday, mundane "hauntings" like the phantom phone ring. That may bore some, but really, I think it's intriguing to think about the ghosts of our everyday lives that escape notice.