Content area
Full Text
There is a lack of critical understanding of Nicholson Baker's "phone sex novel " Vox (1992). Chiefly overlooked is the exact function of Vox's complex system of outmoded telecommunications technology, which the novelist uses in order to experiment with erotic possibilities of the human voice. Viewed historically, Baker's embrace of analog technology occurs out of sync with the concurrent development of the ARPAnet into the public Internet. His strategic disruption of the Internet's potential for communication foregrounds personal voice as a more intimate mode of sexual mediation than sterile and deterministic digital models. Understanding the full nature of Baker's analog-directed perspective is essential for unpacking Baker's recurring interest in idiosyncratic sexuality.
Keywords: Nicholson Baker / Internet / media studies / sexual encounters
THE COMPROMISED MEDIUM
The work of Nicholson Baker has long been constrained by critically reductive categories of either object fetishism1 or sexual fetishism.2 Baker's tour-deforce phone-sex novel Vox (1992) has been derided for sacrificing Baker's talents, for corrupting his well-received miniaturist technique with fruitless perversion.3 Such polarized criticism has led to neglect of Vox's nuanced system of sexual mediation: an eccentric and anachronistic sex chat line marked by shifts from open-forum anonymous exchanges to secret "fiber-optical" "back room[s]," where disembodied voices seek contact (Baker, Vox 10). Vox valorizes those idiosyncratic pockets of privacy in contrast to a freshly emergent model of digital over-connection. The peculiarity of the chat line appears starkly out of synch with the mass-communication shifts occurring during Vox's composition: the transition from the ARPAnet to the increasingly public Internet at the turn of the 1990s. As media scholar Wendy Chun has noted, the new system conjured suspicions of all-seeing observation. Baker's choice of limited and repurposed technology - replete with the now retrograde quality of the human voice - is not a mark of the author's sheer eccentricity, or of his endorsement of consumer fetishism, but rather a conscious escape from the expanding network of potential surveillance.
Vox also marks a divergence from the tell-all possibilities of incipient chat room conversations or the almost bacchanalian possibilities of "virtual sex" and "teledildonics" in 1992. The bare dialogue of Vox - lacking nearly any expository prose framework - is striking in its minimalism, all the more notable given a rising posthuman...