Where are you? Mobile ontology Maurizio Ferraris ‘The client you have called cannot be reached at the moment’ Recorded message for Vodafone ‘Where has he gone? Where is he now?’ L.N. Tolstoy, War and Peace A writing instrument Had I been wholly immodest, I would have like to give this paper a title akin to those of Aristotle’s treatises, Perì mail or ‘On the Post’, ‘Concerning the Post’ or ‘The Post’, just like the Perì hermeneias or the Perì psuches. And it is precisely a question of the post, and not for instance ‘On the Telephone’, that I mean to talk about. For, despite appearance, the cell phone is a writing instrument, like a typewriter. To support this claim, I set out in the first section of this discussion some of the more obvious changes that the cell phone has brought about to the idea of being present. In the second section I try to show that these changes follow from the fact that the cell phone is a writing instrument. In the third I argue that writing is a matter not so much of communication as of registration. In this, I follow the line of thought proposed by Jacques Derrida in 1967, that is to say at a time where there were neither computers nor mobile phones, as we can see from the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey where they use normal typewriters and the role of Hal 9000 is to think. In the last section, I try to bring out the role that registration has in making up what John Searle has called the ‘huge invisible ontology’ that is the essence of social reality. 1. Talking 1.1 ‘Where are you?’ I’m on the train; I digit a number and the ‘client I have called’ replies. He greets me without asking ‘hello, who is it?’, because my name has already popped up on his cell phone which has it registered in his address book. But the first thing I ask is ‘where are you?’. Until just a few years ago, the question would have seemed absurd: ‘where do you think I am? I’m here, just where you called me’. The cell phone has changed all that. Messages can reach us anywhere and we can be anywhere to receive them. This is the most far-reaching change as between the landline and the mobile phone, and it brings in its wake a range of other modifications that it is worth our while to scrutinise. If both the fixed phone and the mobile ring, which do you answer first? One person might say the mobile, because the call is surely for you, while on the fixed phone it might be for anyone. Another might object that you should answer the fixed phone, because it is more institutional, like the telegrams of yesteryear. Thus there arises a clash of two worldviews. The obsolenscence of answering machines for someone with a mobile follows from a simple dilemma: either they reach you on your cell phone or they leave you a text message on it. ‘I’ll pass you to him’ was once a common enough phrase. The house phone rang and someone answered, but it wasn’t the person the call was for. I say ‘I’ll pass you to him’, then I shout for him and he arrives at the phone. Hardly a trace of this little scene remains in the memory of young people today. While in the past there was some dislocation in the fact of being present, now on the contrary it is ubiquitous. It is not so much a matter of ‘everything around you’ as the slogan of one mobile phone company puts it, as of ‘everyone around you’, ready to pounce. ‘Hello, is that the Smith home? Could I speak to Barry please?’. Here we have another turn of phrase that is going ot of currency, and not just because of the increasing number of people living alone. It would be odd to calla cell phone and make such requests. The mobile is not in a home, but in someone’s pocket. At most, one might call John’s phone in the hope of speaking to Barry, who just happens to be with him but has his phone off or has no signal. Two people are walking and talking in the street. At a certan point the cell phone rings and one of the two starts talking to a third person with all her gestures directed at the absent third party and not at the person next to her. It is a nice question to ask where, precisely, is the person who is replying to the cell phone. Even the narrative imagination has to come to terms with this development. Whole films would have