Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
216
Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
216eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389118 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/16/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 529 KB |
About the Author
Brian Rotman is Distinguished Humanities Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting; Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In; and Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero. Rotman has a doctorate in mathematics. Timothy Lenoir is the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair of New Technologies and Society at Duke University.
Read an Excerpt
Becoming Beside Ourselves
The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human BeingBy Brian Rotman
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4200-7
Chapter One
THE ALPHABETIC BODY
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 the topic of gesture. The particular motive for proceeding thus will emerge in due course, but in relation to the general question of embodiment, communication, and human subjectivity the idea is not unnatural: there are deep-lying lines of force between gesture and becoming human. As an affective medium of the body and its semiotic envelope, gesture reaches deep into human sociality through its vital role in hominization (the proffered breast, the use of facial expressions, pointing, cuddling, the phenomenon of turn taking, the induction via visual capture and motherese into speech), and through its linkage to the embodied wordless empathy, the psychic mirroring of each other necessary for meaningful utterance and without which what sociologist Michel Maffesoli (1994) calls puissance, the 'will to live,' would not be possible. For Giorgio Agamben gesture constitutes a key category in relation to political ontology, a third term between means (pure action) and ends (pure production) whose essential mode of action is that within it something is "being endured and supported"-activities which, he claims, allow the "emergence of being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus opens up the ethical dimension for them." (2000, 57-58)
Human Gesture
Notwithstanding its role in empathy, hominization, and its relation to the ethical, making gesture the point of entry into the alphabetic body might seem puzzling. After all, the alphabet inscribes speech, and compared to the latter gesture is widely held to be crude and pantomimic, an atavistic, semantically impoverished mode of sense making overtaken by the development of language. And though evidently important in ceremonies and rituals, prayer, and sacrifices to gods, and crucial to all forms of dance, music, and theatrical performance, gesture would seem to offer little to any contemporary discourse on language, the nature of thought, and the technology of writing.
Such a diminished status is no longer the case. Nor was it always so. In the middle of the seventeenth century John Bulwer, pursuing Francis Bacon's dream of discovering mankind's original language that disappeared in the Biblical catastrophe of Babel, turned to gestures, "transient hieroglyphs" Bacon had called them, as the key to the search. Bulwer, a physician, was interested in gesture's physiological character. He looked to the fact and manner of gesture's evident embodiment to provide clues to the original but now lost universal language. Bulwer, inventor of the first finger-spelling alphabet, opens his book Chirologia with an extraordinary tribute to the hands' abilities to convey meaning and incite affect: "With these hands," he says, "we sue, entreat, beseech, solicit, call, allure, entice, dismiss, grant, deny, reprove, are suppliant, fear, threaten, abhor, repent, pray, instruct, witness, accuse, declare our silence ...," (1664, 8) and so on, for some two hundred manual signs-revealing a gestural microcosm of mid-seventeenth-century English social, religious, and legal encounters. In an earlier essay, Panthomyotomia, Bulwer attempts a metaphorical dissection of the muscles of the face and head in an attempt to relate their movements to the motions of thought taking place so near them. Bulwer's writings inaugurate a (yet to be consummated) gesturology and make him the first theoretician of the semiotic body. In the next century others followed, most famously Condillac with his attempt to lay out the gestural roots of language, Charles de Brosses's project on the gesturo-physiological origins of language, and the Abbé de l'Épée's championing of a language for the deaf composed of gestures.
But by the mid- to late-nineteenth century gesture had fallen victim to a scientific psychology which subordinated an emotionalized (implicitly feminine), gesturing body to a rational, speaking mind. A cruel consequence of this was the banning in 1880 at a conference of deaf educators in Milan of all use of Sign (gestural language) from European and American schools in favor of enforced voicing and lip reading by the deaf: "Gesture," the organizers insisted, "is not the true language of man.... Gesture, instead of addressing the mind, addresses the imagination and the senses. Thus for us, it is an absolute necessity to prohibit that language and to replace it with living speech, the only instrument of human thought." (quoted in Lane 1984, 391) Some eighty years later this phonocentric dismissal of Sign started to collapse when the gestural systems used throughout the world by the deaf to commune with each other were recognized as full-blown languages, on a grammatical, morphological, and semantic par with and in some respects superior to human speech. One consequence of this reevaluation of Sign was a reemergence of theories proclaiming the gestural affiliations and origin of human language. (Nevertheless, some thirty years after Sign's linguistic recognition, traces of the phonocentric and textocentric derogation of gesture remain: several universities in the United States refuse Sign as a fulfillment of graduate language requirements on the kettle-logic grounds that American Sign Language [ASL] is not a 'real' language; ASL is not a 'foreign' language; and, in any case, ASL lacks a written form.) But its ability to replace the tongue as the vehicle and physical means of language is not the deepest nor, for our purposes, the most significant aspect of the relation between gesture and speech.
Interestingly, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone observes that the "skeptical assessments of sign languages, not to say their derision" are tied to the fact that in all forms of Sign the gestural articulations of thought are perceived rather than, as they are in verbal languages, apperceived. This fact makes mind-body dualists for whom thought is invisible and mental-inside the head-uncomfortable and reluctant to grant Sign the status of a language. (2002, 157) In relation to the body and alphabetic writing of spoken language gesture operates in the interior of speech itself as the presence of the body within utterance and the affective, intra-verbal dimension of the voice itself. But before this, a necessary clarification of the speech/gesture nexus by way of distinguishing two kinds of gesture: emblems and gesticulations-each with its own relation to language.
Emblem Gestures
Like spoken words, ASL gestures are coded entirely by a linguistic system. Distinct from these, not captured by a code, forming at most only a "partial code" situated between the two linguistic systems, is the field of so-called emblems. Emblems are what we ordinarily mean by 'gestures': holding up the palm, jerking the thumb, kissing one's fingertips, pointing, snorting, smacking one's forehead, squeezing a shoulder, bowing, slapping someone on the back, giving the shoulder, biting a knuckle, flourishing a fist, tapping the nose, shrugging, chuckling, beating one's breast, giving the finger, winking, and innumerable other visible, haptic, auditory, and tactile disciplined mobilities of the semiotic body.
According to studies initiated by David Efron (1941/1972) and Adam Kendon (1972), and subsequently developed by David McNeill and others, emblems are gestures whose principal function is to carry out certain social activities. "Emblems," McNeill writes, "are complete speech acts in themselves, but the speech acts they perform are restricted to a certain range of functions. They regulate and comment on the behavior of others, reveal one's own emotional states, make promises, swear oaths [and are] used to salute, command, request, reply to some challenge, insult, threaten, seek protection, express contempt or fear." (1992, 64) This list (that could easily be describing a portion of Bulwer's enumeration of the expressions of the hand) makes it clear that emblems are social, experiential, and interpersonal, deployed to make something happen, to impinge on the behavior of the self and others; emblems are not really interested in making statements, analyzing matters, or conveying facts and propositions.
Unlike speech they do not combine via a syntax as part of a language or an elaborated code. And they differ from words in that their meanings are neither explicitly defined nor (outside of instruction in rhetoric or acting) are they intentionally learned or studied, but rather they are picked up, absorbed and inculcated, taken in directly by the body, as it were, and (perhaps for this reason) remain stable in form and import over long periods of time despite linguistic changes in the communities of their users. These features indicate that emblem gestures might operate according to a different dynamic and logic, and might accomplish different ends, from those of speech. Calling them 'speech' acts, suggests they are within the horizons of speech and assumes they operate, as a mode of meaning or affect creation in the same ways and for the same purposes as speech. But is this so? Are emblems in any sense translatable into spoken language? Can they be transposed into words? What, for example, is the speech equivalent of a wink? Or, for that matter, a shrug? a slap on the back? folding one's arms? hands clasped in prayer? And do their mode of operation and outcomes resemble those of speech? If so, why as speaking beings do we bother with them?
The cultural range, robustness, and persistent use of emblems, their way of refusing and displacing speech, calls for an explanation. McNeill offers one in terms of 'word magic.' "Spoken words are special and carry with them the responsibility for being articulated. However, conveying the same meaning in gesture form avoids the articulatory act and, thanks to word magic, this lessened responsibility for speaking transfers to the speech act itself." (1992, 65) Doubtless, there is truth in the idea that gesturing rather than talking removes one from the net of justifications, arguments, questions, deceptions, interpretive qualifications, and recriminations that speech immediately introduces. But how many emblem gestures admit of the same meaning as a word or spoken phrase? Indeed, what does "having the 'same' meaning" mean? How convincingly can speech render an emblem? Giving the finger, for example, carries a different charge, has a different meaning, enables a different affect, initiates a different confrontation from saying "up yours" or "fuck you" or "go screw yourself," and so on. (That there are inequivalent verbalizations suggests emblems generate meanings by their very exclusion of speech.) But in any event, assuming that 'sameness' of meaning makes sense, is the difference between gesturing and voicing the 'same' meanings reducible to "lessened responsibility"?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Becoming Beside Ourselves by Brian Rotman Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Machine Bodies, Ghosts, and Para-Selves: Confronting the Singularity with Brian Rotman / Timothy Lenoir ixPreface xxxi
Acknowledgments xxxv
Aura xxxvii
Introduction: Lettered Selves and Beyond 1
Part I
1. The Alphabetic Body 13
2. Gesture and Non-Alphabetic Writing 33
Interlude
3. Technological Mathematics 57
Part II
4. Parallel Selves 81
5. Ghost Effects 107
Notes 139
References 151
Index 163