“Received but Not Intelligible”

Abstract

This chapter explores the promises and failures of communication through an analysis of what was sent on the Atlantic Telegraph Cable of 1858. It is a strange sort of content analysis, however, since most of the communication on the cable consisted of mere signals before the cable was capable of transmitting code, and even much of the code the cable could transmit consisted of a single letter. The V—a Beethovenian dot-dot-dot-dash in Morse code—became the primary way to reestablish connection after failure. These transmissions read more like babble than meaning, more like a stutter than speech. As such, they help to illustrate the constitutive disconnections that make communication possible and, in particular, highlight the telegraph’s inauguration of a new form of language that neither represented things in the world nor referenced a system of meaning: the signal. With particular attention to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, and James Carey, this chapter turns to infrastructure as a supplement to structural and poststructural theories of communication and argues that the creative, affective force of religion made these essentially meaningless signals matter. Even before the Atlantic Telegraph Cable could transmit speech, it carried the hefty imaginary of a divinely sanctioned global unity.