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""Becoming Beside Ourselves" is a bold, provocative, and highly original argument about the relation between medial effects and changing manifestations of subjectivity. It traces a sweeping trajectory from what Brian Rotman calls the 'lettered self, ' associated with alphabetic inscription and the codex printed book, to the subject as distributed assemblage associated with network culture. While others have made parts of this kind of argument before, Rotman's analysis is unique in placing special emphasis on gesture and revealing its traces in orality and print. In a brilliant synthesis, he mixes evolutionary theory with a Deleuzian view of agent-as-assemblage, arguing that computational media both reveal and perform distributed cognition as a crucial aspect of human being-in-the-world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the interrelations between computational media, contemporary subjectivity, and human evolution."--Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles

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Becoming Beside Ourselves

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

FOREWORD Machinic Bodies, Ghosts, and Para-Selves: Confronting the Singularity with Brian Rotman Timothy Lenoir.....................ixPREFACE...............................................................................................................................xxxiACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................................................................................................xxxvAura..................................................................................................................................xxxviiINTRODUCTION Lettered Selves and Beyond..............................................................................................1ONE The Alphabetic Body..............................................................................................................13TWO Gesture and Non-Alphabetic Writing...............................................................................................33THREE Technologized Mathematics......................................................................................................57FOUR Parallel Selves.................................................................................................................81FIVE Ghost Effects...................................................................................................................107NOTES.................................................................................................................................139REFERENCES............................................................................................................................151INDEX.................................................................................................................................163

Chapter One

The Alphabetic West

For Victor Hugo "Human society, the world, the whole of mankind is in the alphabet." (quoted in Ouaknin 1999, 9) Not quite. The Chinese system of writing speech is logographic: its characters notate morphemes, the smallest meaningful sounds, rather than the alphabet's meaningless phonemes. The Japanese use a mixture of morpheme- and phoneme-based systems. Neither of these cultures figured largely in Hugo's view of the world, but for Western civilization his trumpeting of the alphabet makes perfect sense: each of the two originating worlds, Judaic and Greek, which have respectively determined the West's religio-ethical and technorational/ artistic horizons, was indeed created out of an encounter with a system of alphabetic writing.

The encounters could not have occurred in more different social, historical, cultural, economic, religious, and intellectual milieus: 'cattle-herding semi-nomad' Israelites against slave-owning denizens of the Greek polis; agricultural exchange versus a monetized economy; scribe-priest control of writing versus a distributed citizen literacy; tribal kingdoms versus the militarized city-state; fixation on a single written corpus defining a religio-ethnic identity against an expanding ecology of literary and philosophical writings.

The Israelite encounter produced the transcendental Jewish God inhabiting a holy text, the sacred scroll of the Talmud or Five Books of Moses, a "library" of texts comprising "the verse of nomadic people, popular and religious songs of all sorts, mythical tales based on the cosmogony of the Middle East, oral traditions concerning national origins, prophecies, legislative and sacerdotal documents bearing ... liturgical pieces, annals or chronicles, collections of proverbs written down long after their first appearance, ... tales and romanticized fiction." (Martin 1994, 103-4) The Greek encounter produced theatrical mimesis, deductive logic, and an invisible, disembodied Mind which has since its inception determined the relation of 'thinking' to 'writing' embedded in and transmitted by the founding texts of Western philosophical discourse. Each of these encounters and their metaphysical import will occupy us later (chapter 5).

Different alphabets were involved. Greek (its Romanized form now worldwide) was created circa 800 BCE when the Greeks modified the Phoenician consonantal alphabet by adding letters for vowels plus some consonants; Hebrew, used by the Israelites from circa 1000 BCE, thought also to be derived from Phoenician was, like it, voweless. Whereas vowels were necessary to inscribe Greek, a language which used them to register grammatical differences, Hebrew, a tri-consonantal semitic language, could be written without them. Plainly, the two alphabets will involve different writing and reading practices and be amenable to different uses. Being entirely phonetic, the Greek alphabet allowed a word to be read outright from the text, whilst the Hebrew required interpretive work to determine it from the others within the semantic family indicated by its triple of consonants. For Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, the former "picks the sound from the page and searches for the invisible ideas in the sounds the letters command him to make," and the latter "searches with his eyes for inaudible roots in order to flesh them out with his breath." (1988, 13) They suggest the Old Testament command by God to Ezekiel to breath life (or soul, nefesh) into the dry bones "so that they may live" is a metaphor for the need to add the moistness of vowels to lifeless consonants. More extravagantly, David Porush claims that all that is intellectually significant about the accomplishments of the Jews stems from this failure to notate vowels; an "imperfection" he connects to the "central metaphysical tenet" of Judaism, the "unpronounceability, the unwritability, and the unthinkability of the name of God." (1998, 54)

For this essay, the metaphysics of alphabetic writing, both Hebrew and Greek, will be seen from a perspective which doesn't turn on the presence or absence of vowels, or on the supposed travails of reading and interpreting an 'imperfect' script, or on the unpronounceability and so on of God's name (and its supposed metaphysical consequences), though all raise interesting issues, but rather on a feature of writing that precedes such phenomena, namely its ability, in its capacity as a medium, to perform a reflexive, self-citational move-inherent in the writing of 'I'-and thereby give rise, under appropriate conditions, to a disembodied, supernatural agency.

But before disembodied agencies come embodied ones. Alphabetic writing, like all technological systems and apparatuses, operates according to what might be called a corporeal axiomatic: it engages directly and inescapably with the bodies of its users. It makes demands and has corporeal effects. As a necessary condition for its operations it produces a certain body, in the present instance an 'alphabetic body' which has relations (of exclusion and co-presence) with existing semiotic body practices. The alphabet does this by imposing it own mediological needs on the body, from the evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write to the invisible, neurological transformations which it induces in order to function. It is the latter effects, beneath the radar of the alphabet's explicit function of inscribing speech and so quite separate from its manifold inscriptional activities, that will be significant.

I shall approach the alphabetic body through...