Becoming beside ourselves: the alphabet, ghosts, and distributed human being

Beco111il1,g Besid.e Ot1.rselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Hun1an Being

BRIAN ROTMAN WUH A FOREWO.RD BY TIMOTHY L!BNO!LR

Becoming Beside Ourselves

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The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

Brian Rotman FOREWORD BY TIMOTHY LENOIR

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DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS D11rham &L�ndon 2008

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ecomin,......

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Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying

Beside is an interesting preposi­

with something; neither is it regressing-progress­

tion ...because there's noth­

ing; neither i s it corresponding, establishing corre­

ing very dualistic about it; a

sponding relations; neither is it producing, pro­

munber of elements may lie

ducing a filiation or producing through filiation.

alongside each other, though

Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own;

not an infinity of them.Beside

it does not reduce to, or lead back to, "appearing:'

permits a spacious agnosticism

"being:' "equaling:' or "producing?'

about several of the linear logics

-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz.opfmmia

that enforce dualistic think ing: noncontradiction or the law of excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object .... Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, repre­ senting, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdraw­ ing, attracting, aggressing, warp­ ing, and other relations. -Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity

urse ves But who is this "self" ...and why is it at this par­ ticular juncture in the history of Western societies rl1e very identity of rl1e self becomes problematic? -Raymond Barglow, The Ct·isis of Self in the Age of

Information: Computers, Dolphins, and Dreams

© 2008 Dt•ke Un.iversity Press All rights reserved. Pri11ted in tbe Ut�ited States ofAmerica on. acid-free paper €> Desigtted by AmyR11th Bttcbatwt.

T)peset in Carter & CotJe Galliard by Tset'!] I11formation Systems Inc. Ubrary ofCot'!]ress Catalogit'!]-itt-Publicatiotl

Data appear on the last prittted page ofthis book.

Contents FOREWORD

Machinic Bodies, Ghosts,

and Para-Selves: Confronting rl1e Singularity wirl1 Brian Rotman Timothy Lenoit· xxxi

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Aura

LX

XXXV

xxxv ii

INTRODUCTION

Lettered Selves and Beyond

1

Part I

ONE

The Alphabetic Body

TWO

Gesture and Non-Alphabetic Writing

13

Interlude THREE

Technologized Marl1ematics

Part II

Parallel Selves

FOUR FIVE

Ghost Effects

NOTES

139

REFERENCES INDEX

163

151

81

107

57

33

Foreword MACHINIC BODIES, GHOSTS, AND PARA­ SELVES: CONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

Timothy Lenoir

The specter of a postbiological and posthwnan future has hawlted cul­ tural studies of technoscience and orl1er disciplines for more rl1an a de­ cade. Concern (and in some quarters endmsiasm) rl1at contemporary technoscience is on a paili leading beyond simple human biological im­ provements and prosthetic enhancements to a complete human makeover has been sustained by the exponential growili in power and capability of computer technology since ilie early 1990s. Also driving interest in such futuristic scenarios has been rl1e increasing centrality of computational media to nearly every aspect of science, technology, medicine, and rl1e arts, combined wiili the digital communications revolution of ilie mid­ 1990S spawning both ilie Internet and rl1e rapid proliferation of mobile computer-based co nmllmications that have already produced significant changes in rl1e organization and production of knowledge as well as in rl1e ftmctioning of the global economy. The deeper fear is that somehow digital code and computer-mediated coJnnllmications are getting under our skin, and in ilie process we are being transformed. While limitations to silicon-based computing might have temporarily deflated some of the more exotic predictions of futmists such as Ray Kmz­ weil or Hans Moravec, current developments connected with nanotech­ nology, quantum computing, biotechnology, and rl1e cognitive neuro­ sciences provide ample resources for sustaining and even encouraging their posthlmlan imaginary. More rl1an $4 billion in government investments worldwide in nanotechnology research and development by 2006 has pro­ duced some promising results: carbon nanotube wires have been developed

for ultra miniatmized electronics components; the first building blocks of a controllable computation in biological substrates at nanoscale have been achieved. In the next phase of the nanotech initiative, Mihail Roco, the senior advisor to the U.S. National Science Foundation and chief archi­ tect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, predicts the development of active nanostructures that change their size, shape, conductivity, and other properties dming use, enabling the production of electronic compo­ nents such as transistors and amplifiers with adaptive functions reduced to single, complex molecules.By 2010 Roco predicts that researchers will cul­ tivate expertise with systems of nanostructmes, directing large numbers of intricate components to specified ends, including the guided self-assembly of nanoelectronic components into three-dimensional circuits and whole devices. Medicine could employ such systems to improve the tissue com­ patibility of implants, or to create scaffolds for tissue regeneration, or per­ haps even to build artificial organs (Roco 2006, 39 ).In tl1e fomth stage of tl1e current nanotechnology initiative, after 2015-20, the field will expand to include molecular nanosystems: heterogeneous networks in which molecules and supramolecular structures serve as distinct devices.Among tl1e products of this phase of development Roco predicts new types of interfaces linking people directly to electronics. When considered in light of current research successes in tl1e development of brain-machine inter­ faces} tl1e sorts of scenarios envisaged by Kmzweil in recent texts such as The Singularity is Neat·: When Humans Tt·anscend Biology, in which he charts the conditions for the merger of computer-based intelligence and human biology to occur around 2045, begin to sotmd eminently plausible (Kurzweil 2005, 138). V\Thile he does not endorse Kurzweil's notions of a futuristic singularity, Rodney Brooks sees a similar merger of (nanoscale) robotic technology with biotechnology on our horizon: \iVe are on a path to changing our genome in profound ways. Not simple improvements toward ideal humans as is often feared. In reality, we will have the power to manipulate om own bodies in tl1e way we currently manipulate the design of machines. We will have the keys to our own existence.There is no need to worry about mere robots taking over from us. We will be taking over from ourselves witl1 manipulat­ able body plans and capabilities easily able to match tl1at of any robot (2002, 236). Brooks's admonition tl1at we are machines on a continuous patl1 of co­

evolution witl1 other machines prompts reflection on what we mean by

X

FOREWORD

"posthuman?' If we are crossing to a new era of the posthuman, how have we gotten here? And how should we tmderstand the process? 'What sorts of "selves" are imagined by Brooks and others as emerging out of this postbiological "htm1an"? Cultural theorists have addressed the topic of the posthuman singu­ larity and how, if at all, humanity will cross that divide. Most scholars have focused on the rhetorical and discursive practices, the metaphors and narratives, the intermediation of scientific texts, science fiction, elec­ tronic texts, film, and other elements of the discursive field enabling the posthtmlan imaginary.W hile recognizing rl1at posdmmans, cyborgs, and other tropes are technological objects as well as discursive formations, rl1e focus has been directed less toward analyzing the material systems and pro­ cesses of the teclmologies and more toward rl1e narratives and ideological discourses that empower them. \Ve speak about machines and discourses "co-constituting" one another, but in practice, we tend to favor discursive formations as preceding, and to a certain extent brearl1ing life into, our machines. The most far-reaching and sustained analysis of rl1e problems has been offered by N. Karl1erine Hayles in H(JJV We Became Posthuman and her more recent book, My Mother Was a Computer. Hayles considers it possible that machines and humans may someday interpenetrate. But she rejects as highly problematic, and in any case not yet proven, that the tmiverse is ftmdamentally digital, the notion rl1at a Universal Computer generates reality, a claim that is important to the positions staked out by proponents of ilie posthuman singularity such as Harold Morowitz, Kurz­ weil, Stephen ·wolfram, and Moravec. For the time being, Hayles argues, human consciousness and perception are essentially analog, and indeed, she argues, currently even rl1e world of digital computation is sandwiched between analog inputs and outputs for human interpreters (Hayles 1999; 2005, especially 206-13). How we will become posthuman, Hayles ar­ gues, will be through interoperational feedback loops between our cur­ rent mixed analog-digital reality and widening areas of digital processing. Metaphors, narratives, and other interpretive linguistic modes we use for human sense making of ilie world around us do rl1e work of conditioning us to behave as if we and rl1e world were digital.Language and ideological productions dms serve as kinds of virus vectors preparing the grotmd for rl1e gradual shift in ontology. In the case of Wolfram and oiliers, Hayles argues, the appropriation of computation as a cultural metaphor assumed to be physically true constitutes a fran1ework in which new problems are constructed and judgments made. "On the global level, our narratives CONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

XI

about virtual creatures can be considered devices that suture together the analog subjects we still are, as we move in the three-dimensional spaces in which our biological ancestors evolved, with the digital subjects we are be­ coming as we interact with virtual environments and digital teclmologies" (2005, 204). The narratives of the computational universe serve then as both means and metaphor. In our current analog/digital situation Hayles proposes an analytical strategy she calls intermediation to analyze the new processual human/machine texts of the posthuman era. As an embodied art form literature registers the in1pact of information in its materiality in the ways in which its physical characteristics are mobilized as resources to create meaning.This entanglement of bodies of texts and digital subjects is one manifestation of what I call inter­ mediation, that is, complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media. Because making, storing, and transmitting imply technological ftmctions, tl1is mode of categoriza­ tion insures tl1at the different versions of the postlmman will be under­ stood, in Kittlerian fashion, as effects of media. At tl1e same tin1e in my analysis of literary texts and especially in my focus on subjectivity, I also insist that media effects, to have meaning and significance, must be located within an embodied human world (2005, 7). From tl1e media-tl1eoretic perspective Hayles adopts in JWy Mother Was a Computer-a perspective she refers to as Kittlerian-subjects are tl1e effects of media.In order to make effective use of Hayles's theory of inter­ mediation we need to tmderstand how tl1e complex transactions between bodies and our inscription practices n1ight take place and how to tmder­ stand the "entanglement" she describes of media witl1 tl1e formation of human subjects. How can we think beyond the notion of virtual creatures as rhetorical devices and explore instead how tl1e embodied hwnan subject is being shaped by a technoscientific world? Can we get at the embodied levels of the interactive feedback loops Hayles describes to exan1ine the metabolic pathways and emerging neural architectures tl1rough which tl1ese tech­ nologies are getting under om skin? Brian Rotman's latest book, Becoming Beside Ourselves, offers a solution to tl1is problem in a profotmd and ele­ gant analysis deriving from material semiotics. Rotman circumvents tl1e issue of an apocalyptic end of tl1e human and our replacement by a new form ofRobo Sapiens. Instead he draws upon tl1e work of anthropologists, philosophers, language tl1eorists, and more recently cognitive scientists XU

FOREWORD

shaping the results of their researches into a powerful new argument for the co-evolution of humans and technics, specifically the technics of lan­ guage and the material media of inscription practices. The general thrust of tllis line of tllinking may best be captured in Andy Clark's phrase, "We have always been cyborgs" (2003). From the first "htm1an singularity" to our present incarnation, human being has been shaped tl1rottgh a com­ plicated co-evolutionary entanglement with language, techtlics, and commwlicational media. Drawing upon empirical findings from recent cognitive neuroscience, studies of sign language, gesture, and tl1e in1pact of new imaging and computational sciences on contemporary habits of tl1inking, Rotman teases out the significance of Clark's apt phrase i n a powetful framework of material senliotics.The materiality of media rather tl1an tl1eir content is what matters.Commw1icational media are macllines operating at the heart of subject formation. Like Gilles Deleuze and FelLx Guattari, Rotman views macllinic operations at the basis of consciousness and mind as an emergent phenomenon; and while wliike Wolfran1 (2002) and Edward Fredkin (2001), he is less certain about embracing cellular automata as tl1e ftmdamental ontology of the w1iverse, Rotman sketches out a position sympatl1etic toward Deleuze's and Guattari's notions of tl1e human body being tmderstood as an assemblage of mutating ma­ chines-a Body without Organs-rather than as a teleologically orches­ trated organism with consciousness as tl1e core of coherent subjectivity. Consistent with tl1e flattening of differences between biological and in­ orgatlic machines central to contemporary nanotechnology and cogtli­ tive neuroscience, Deleuze and Guattari argued tl1at, as bodies witl10ut organs, human assemblages are capable of absorbing a variety of entities, including otl1er machines and organic matter. In Rotman's elaboration of this perspective, media machines are not just prostl1etic extensions of the body, they are evolving assemblages capable of being absorbed into tl1e body and reconfiguring the subject. Every medium, whether it be speech, alphabetic writing, or digital code, a11d each media ecology, such as tl1e configmation of gramophone, film, and typewriter discussed by Friedrich Kittler (1992, 1999), projects a virtual user specific to it. This projected virtual user is a ghost effect: an abstract agency distinct from any particulru· embodied user, a variable capable of accommodating any pru·ticular user witl1in the medium. Materialist semiotics of tl1e sort Rotmat1 proposes in concert with recent work in cognitive neuroscience, studies of gesture and language from psychology and evolutionru·y ethology, and a variety of recent deCONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

Xlll

velopments in the computational sciences may point the way.2 The path Rotman pursues in addressing the questions of the subject, embodin1ent, and agency was suggestively if inadequately marked out by Deleuze and Guattari in their emphasis on the human as machinic assemblage and in Guattari's suggestive notion that techno-machines operate invisibly at tl1e core of hwnan subjectification, particularly what Guattari referred to as "a-signifying semiological dimensions (of subjectification) tl1at trigger in­ formational sign machines, and that ftmction in parallel or independently of the fact that tl1ey produce and convey significations and denotations, and tlms escape from strictly linguistic axiomatics" (1995, 4). For media philosophers tl1e question is whether Deleuze's and Guattari's cryptic and sketchily developed theses about ''a-signifYing semiological din1ensions" of subjectification can be put on a solid fotmdation of what might be called "corporeal axiomatics" in contrast to Guattari's reference to "linguistic axiomatics?' Several key ideas from Rotman's earlier books, Signifyin g Nothing: The Semiotics ofZero, andAd Infinitum . . . The Ghost in Tttring)sMachin e : Tailing God out ofMathematics and Putting the Body Bacle In. An Essay in Corpo�·eal Semiotics, help us appreciate tl1e power of the new work, which in many ways forms a trilogy extending and completing tl1e critical framework offered in those earlier projects. In order to appreciate Rotman's newest contribution, I fn i d it in1portant to have in mind his tl1eses about the role of signifying systems in tl1e constitution of subject positions and agency, powerful ideas that form the core of those two earlier books. The new work has enriched tl1ese frameworks from semiotics with consideration of tl1e importance of "bottom-up" architectures and distributed modes of agency/subjectivity deriving from Rotman's considerations of recent work in the computational sciences, distributed cognition, and cognitive neuroscience. In Signifying Nothing, Ad Infinitum ... , and several related essays, Rot­ man engages in a deeply critical dialogue witl1 recent work in tl1e philoso­ phy of mathematics, language, and philosophy of mind. He has crafted a semiotic approach to mathematics which builds on some suggestive fragments of Charles Sanders Peirce in discussing the relation of signs (in Rotman's case, matl1ematical signs), interpreting subjects, writing, and agency. He folds all this brilliantly with the work of Foucault and Derrida in fashioning an original semiotic approach to the principal questions of postmodern philosophy by examining as isomorphic signifying moves tl1e near-simultaneous introduction into Western culture of zero in matl1e­ XIV

FOREWORD

matics, the vanishing point in painting, and imaginary money in economic exchange. Rotman shows that in the shifts from Roman to Hindu numer­ als, from iconic to perspectival art, and from gold money to imaginary bank money a common meta-sign indicating the absence of other signs emerges from what Rotman calls a new set of semiotic capacities-pub­ lic, culturally constituted, historically identifiable forms of utterance and reception which codes make available to individuals. Tllis new meta-sign requires the formulation of a new sign-using agency, a secondary subjec­ tivity, in order to be recognized: in mathematics the invention of algebra by Vieta; in painting rl1e self-conscious image created by Vermeer and Ve­ lazquez; in rl1e text, the invention of the autobiograpllical written self by Montaigne; in economics, the creation of paper money by gold merchants in London. Rotman followed the astonishing Signifying Nothing with rl1e equally brilliant Ad Infinitum. . . . Not for the fainthearted, the book pursues one of rl1e defining ideologies of Western mathematics: namely, its charac­ terization as pure and abstract disembodied reason. In many ways, rl1is book can be read as rl1e analog in rl1e pllilosophy of marl1ematics and sci­ ence studies to Derrida's attack in Of Grammatology on logocentrism and real presence as central to ·western metaphysics. Building on the senli­ otic model he had developed in Signifying Nothing and an earlier article, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics:' Rotman exanlines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century developments in senliotics, particularly rl1e senli­ otics of Peirce and Saussure. He uses dlis framework to analyze the de­ velopment of Hilbert's abstract marl1ematics and the problems relating to infinity in marl1ematical reasoning that were central to the creation of modern marl1ematical set rl1eory by Frege, Godel, Hilbert, and orl1ers. Sin1ilar to the argument in Signifying Nothin g, Rotman shows rl1at opera­ tions wirl1 mathematical signs, and particularly ftmctions such as counting, differentiating, etc., cannot be undertaken without an in1plicit but never­ acknowledged "mathematical agent"-rl1e one who cow1ts. This move, to acknowledge reason as always embodied, leads to a consideration of Tur­ ing's and Church's work on computability, which also depended heavily on assumptions drawn from rl1e marl1ematics of infinite sets. For Rot­ man, "information" is not somehow inunaterial, but deeply physical, so that computers no more rl1an mathematicians can disregard the embodied character of reasoning. Rotman's work on semiotics, embodied reason, and agency in rl1ese earlier texts provides a basic set of concepts and strategies for his analysis CONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

XV

of gesture and the machinic body in Becoming Beside Ourselves. The revo­ lutions in the computational sciences, the rise of cognitive science, and the explosive developments in recent neuroscience, particularly work on distributed cognition, the embodied mind, and emergence that have taken off since the 1990s, provide empirical sources for Rotman's discussion of ghostly subjects and machinic bodies. This incorporation of results and implications of empirical science is what really distinguishes Rotman's Be­ comin g Bes ide Ourselves and allows him to elevate the discussion to an ex­ citing new plane. Drawing upon a framework he originally set out in the 1988 essay, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics;' Rotman elaborates in chapter 3, "Technologized Mathematics;' one of his key theses about tl1e ways in which computational devices anastomose witl1 and reshape tl1e human. In tl1e intervening years since Rotman wrote Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum . . . , a revolution in tl1e computational sciences took place, particularly tl1rough tl1e developments of parallel computing-not even contemplated as relevant by Turing-and the emergence of techno­ scientific fields (by which I mean fields in which tl1e science is inextri­ cably botmd to the machines tl1at enable it) of modeling, near to real-time simulation, visualization, and computer-generated virtual environments. Rotman discusses the impact of tl1ese developments in transforming con­ ditions of proof in mathematics to a near-experimental discipline. He ex­ atnines the role of images, diagratns, and other forms of mathematical representation, issues particulat·ly releva11t to recent discussions concern­ ing tl1e role of graphic methods, "imaging;' a11d visualization in compu­ tational sciences. In tl1is chapter Rotma11 analyzes i n terms of his own distinctive brat1d of material semiotics the tra11sformation being effected in our experience of bodies a11d of agency by computer-mediated com­ munication a11d especially technologies of visualization, emerging virtual reality, and even haptic feedback in new digital systems for motion capture. He argues tl1at these forms of representation are not just supplements to a linear, alphabetic text that carries the "real" mea!ling of an uttera11ce, but constitute lat1guages all their own. Rotman's tl1eory of signification ain1s at showing that each media regime a11d each system of signification projects a specific configuration of the subject and a horizon of agency as a consequence of its normal opera­ tion. Moreover, in Rotma11's view tl1ese semiotic systems evolve with tl1e media machines tl1at embed tl1em. They are techno-cultural artifacts that co-evolve with their huma11 host-pat·asites. Conceived in this fashion la11­

XVI

FOREWORD

guage, media, and possibly the new generations of intelligent machines we imagine just over the horizon might be considered companion species dependent on, but also powerfully shaping, us through a co-evolutionary spiral. Indeed, offered as a replacement for what she regards as her now outdated earlier notion of the cyborg, Donna Haraway advocated a simi­ lar line of inquiry in her "Companion Species Manifesto": "Earth's beings are prehensile, opportunistic, ready to yoke tmlikely partners into some­ thing new, something symbiogenetic;' Haraway writes (2003, 32). Co­ constitutive companion species and co-evolution are the rule, not the ex­ ception.3 Is there any fow1dation for relating this approach to the biological evo­ lution of human cognition to the theory of signification and the notions of media machines discussed by Rotman, Kittler, Hayles, Hansen, and others? Rotman pursues this question deep into the structure of symbolic conmllmication and its embodiment in the neural architecture of evolving human brains. He draws especially upon the works of Terrence Deacon and Merlin Donald on the evolution of language for considering the for­ mative power of media technologies in shaping the htm1an and some of the critical issues in current debates about posthumanity. For Deacon and for Donald what truly distinguishes humans from other anthropoids is the ability to make symbolic reference. Tllis is their version of the Singularity; Homo symbolicus, the human singularity. Although language evolution in humans could not have happened without the tightly coupled evolution of physiological, anatomical, and nemological structures supporting speech, tl1e crucial driver of tl1ese processes, according to Deacon, was outside tl1e brain; namely, human cultmal evolution. The first step across the symbolic tlueshold was most likely taken by an australopithecine with roughly tl1e cognitive capabilities of a modern cllimpanzee. Symbolic conununication did not spontaneously emerge as a result of steady evolution in size and complexity of hominid brains. Rather, symbolic commtmication emerged as a solution to a cultural problem. To be sure the evolution of language could not have arisen witl10ut a prinlitive prerequisite level of organiza­ tion and development of the neurological substrates tl1at support it. But in Deacon's view those biological developments were more directly driven by the social and cultural pressmes to regulate reproductive behavior in order to take advantage of htmting-provisioning strategies available to early stone-tool-using honlinids. Deacon argues tllis required the estab­ lishment of alliances, promises and obligations linking reproductive pairs

CONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

XVll

to social (kin) groups of which they were a part. Such relationships could not be handled by systems of animal calls, postmes, and display behaviors available to apes and other animals but could only be regulated by sym­ bolic means. A contract of this sort has no location in space, no physical form of any kind. It exists only as an idea shared among those conunitted to honoring and enforcing it. Without symbols, no matter how crude in their early incarnation, that referred publicly and tmambiguously to cer­ tain abstract social relationships and their future extensions, including reciprocal obligations and prohibitions, hominids could not have taken advantage of the critical resomces available to them as habitual hunters (1997, 401). In short, symbolic cultme was a response to a reproductive problem that only symbols could solve: the in1perative of representing a social contract. What was at stake here was not the creation of social behavior by the social contract as described by Rousseau, but rather the translation of social behavior into symbolic form. Once the threshold to symbolic conununication had been crossed natu­ ral selection shifted in dranutic ways. Deacon bases his model on James Mark Baldwin's original proposals for treating behavioral adaptation and modification as a co-evolutionary force that can affect regular Darwinian selection (Baldwin 1895, 219-23; 1902).4 Baldwinian evolution treats learning and behavioral flexibility as a force amplifying and biasing natmal selection by enabling individuals to modify the context of natural selec­ tion that affects their future offspring. Behavioral adaptations tend to pre­ cede and condition major biological changes in human evolution because they are more responsive than genetic changes. As Robert Richards points out, this is not a form of Lamarckism, since changes acquired dming an organism's own lifetime are not passed on directly to offspring. Rather, Baldwin's model proposes that by adjusting behavior or physiological re­ sponses to novel conditions during the lifespan of the organism, an animal could produce irreversible changes in the adaptive context of futme gen­ erations (Deacon 1997, 322-23). Deacon uses Baldwinian evolution in a provocative way to address tl1e question of tl1e co-evolution of language and tl1e brain. Though not itself alive and capable of reproduction, language, Deacon argues, should be regarded as an independent life form that colonizes and parasitizes human brains, using them to reproduce (1997, 436).5 Although this is at best an analogy-the parasitic model being too extreme-it is useful to note that, while tl1e information tl1at constitutes a language is not an organized ani-

XVll!

FOREWORD

mate being, it is nonetheless capable of being an integrated adaptive entity evolving with respect to htm1an hosts. This point becomes more salient when we think of language as a conm1tmication system and examine the effects of media, including electronic media, more broadly. For Deacon, the most important feature of the adaptation of lan­ guage to its host is that languages are social and cultural entities that have evolved with respect to the forces of selection in1posed by human users. Probably rl1e primary selective force on language evolution is the pressure to produce linguistic operations that children can learn quickly and easily. Just like computer interfaces, languages evolve around user-friendliness, and languages that do not adapt to their user-niche disappear. In rl1is Baldwinian co-evolution of physical and cultural processes, neurological structure and language ability-brain and speech-interact: changes in the newborn's brain, manifest in its cognitive abilities, exert a selective pres­ sure on which features of language are learnable and which are not; rl1is in turn feeds back, influencing the brain to change in certain ways, which furrl1er in1pacts the gr an1matical structures and semantic possibilities of spoken language available to the infant. And so it goes. The outcome, over thousands of generations, is rl1e emergence of htunan language in which symbolic reference emerges from and i s distributed among a web of evolutionarily older forms of reference. While apes, chimpanzees, and orl1er animals are able to operate with symbols in certain carefully con­ structed contexts, everyday human cognition demands ilie construction of novel symbolic relationships. A considerable an1otmt of normal, everyday problem solving involves symbolic analysis or efforts to figure out some obscure symbolic association. Deacon argues rl1at rl1e greater computa­ tional demands of symbol use launched selection pressure on increased prefrontalization, more efficient articulatory and auditory capacities, and a suite of ancillary capacities and predispositions which eased the new tools of communication and d10ught. Each assimilated change added to rl1e selection pressures that led to the restructuring of hominid brains. More than any other group of species, hominids' behavioral adapta­ tions have determined the course of rl1eir physical evolution, rather rl1an vice versa. Stone and symbolic tools, which were initially acquired wirl1 the aid of flexible ape-learning abilities, ultimately turned rl1e tables on their users and forced rl1em to adapt to a new niche opened by rl1ese technologies. Ramer than being just useful tricks, these behav­ ioral prosilieses for obtaining food and organizing social behaviors beCONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

XL'(

came indispensable elements in a new adaptive complex. The origin of "humanness" can be defined as tl1at point in our evolution where tl1ese tools became the principal source of selection on our bodies and brains. It is tl1e diagnostic trait of Homo symbolicus (Deacon 1997, 345).6 In Deacon's ilieory evolutionary selection on tl1e prefrontal cortex was crucial in bringing about ilie construction of ilie distributed mnemonic architecture iliat supports learning and analysis of higher-order associa­ tive relationships constitutive of symbolic reference. The marked increase in brain size over apes and ilie beginnings of a stone tool record are tl1e fossil remnant effects of ilie beginnings of symbol use. Stone tools and symbols were tl1e architects of ilie Attstralupithecus-HO-mo transition and not its consequences. Symbolic reference is not only the source of human singularity. It is also tl1e source of subject formation in all its varied manifestations. Di­ rectly relevant to Rotman's discussion of modem subject formation in distributed computer networks is tl1e hierarchical structure of reference central to Deacon's and Donald's work. Like Rotman, Deacon bases his tl1eory of reference on Peirce's semiotics. Peirce made the distinction be­ tween iconic, indexical, and symbolic forms of reference; where icons are mediated by sin1ilarity between sign and object, indices are mediated by some physical or temporal connection between sign and object, and sym­ bols are composed of relations between indices and mediated by formal or conventional links rather than by more direct neurological connection between sign and object. For both Rotman and Deacon symbolic reference is virtual, tmreal, and tarries witl1 ilie ghostly. Symbolic reference rests on the powetful combi­ natorial, associative logics of forming relationships between signs, and its mnemonic supports need only be cashed in and reconstructed in terms of their lower level indexical and iconic supports when needed. Symbolic reference is so powerful because it allows us to ignore most of the vast web of word-object, word-word, and object-object indexical associations and make rapid calculations using the mnemonic shortcut of symbol­ symbol relationships instead. It is tl1is virtual character of symbolic ref­ erence that is ilie source of its power and of its interest for our concerns witl1 subject formation. The ignored indexical relationships are still tl1e implicit grounding of word reference, but these interpretive steps can be put off until it can be determined exactly which are relevant and which are not. For Deacon symbols are neurological tokens. Like buoys indicating XX

FOREWORD

an otherwise invisible best course, they mark a specific associative path, by following which we reconstruct the implicit symbolic reference. The symbolic reference emerges from a pattern of virtual links between such tokens, which constitute a sort of parallel realm of associations to those that link these tokens to real sensorimotor experiences and possibilities. Thus it does not make sense to think of rl1e symbols as located anywhere wirl1in the brain, because they are relationships between tokens, not the tokens themselves; and even rl1ough specific neural cotmections may w1derlie these relationships, rl1e symbolic function is not even constituted by a specific association but by the virtual set of associations rl1at are par­ tially san1pled in any one instance. Widely distributed neural systems must contribute in a coordinated fashion to create and interpret symbolic rela­ tionships. It is this virtual aspect of symbolic reference rl1at leads to some interesting possibilities and peculiarities of subject formation. As Lao Tsu wrote, "Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub, but it is rl1e hole in the center that provides its usefulness" (1ew Te Ching, quoted in Deacon 1997, 433). All of this has important consequences for consciousness and subject formation. Three points are especially relevant to Rotman's discussion. The power of symbolic reference is due to its virtual character; its shared deployment; and its exteriority, the fact iliat it is largely external to ilie indi­ vidual mind, being located in cultural systems and artifacts. From an evo­ lutionary perspective, consciousness is always consciousness ofsomething, and hence involves some form of representation. Animal minds, even of minin1al complexity, construct and process internally generated indices wirl1 respect to an external world to which rl1ey are partially adapted. All nervous systems irrespective of their size and complexity support iconic and indexical representational processes. These are ilie basic ingredients of adaptation. Human brains share a design logic wirl1 other vertebrate brains, and so we share those aspects of consciousness that are mediated by iconic and indexical representations rl1at those orl1er species experience. But minds capable of symbolic representation operate on a radically different playing field. Symbolic representation is not just a furrl1er com­ plex addition to rl1e capabilities of animal brains. Rather it has com­ pletely made over the human brain to aid language processing. As a result humans, capable of symbolic reference, are able to form an independent mental representation of another. Being confined to indexical representa­ tions animal brains can represent associations between stimuli, including the behaviors of oiliers, and iliese relationships can be complex extending

CONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

X.Xl

to a familiarity with the predispositions of others. But the step of form­ ing an independent mental representation of the subjective experience of another requires an abstraction only possible with symbolic reference. In­ deed, our ability to inhabit the different personas constructed by writers is only made possible by the structure of symbolic representation. Sym­ bolic representation maintains reference irrespective of indexical attach­ ment to any particular experiences, so that when a narrative of someone's experience is reconstructed by another, it can be regrOLmded in terms of the reader's or listener's own experience by interpreting it in terms of rl1e iconic and indexical representations rl1at constitute the listener's memory. Symbolic reference is interpreter-independent; it strips away any necessary link to the personal experiences and musings that ultimately support it. Although all readers of a novel share a conunon symbolic lmderstanding of the events narrated, each individual's experience in response to them is distinct. Unlike the interpretation of icons and indices (a process lmiquely per­ sonal and insular within each brain), symbolic representations are in part externally interpreted. They are shared. Symbolic reference is at once a fw1ction of rl1e whole web of referential relationships and of the whole network of users extended in space and time. It is as rl1ough the symbolic power of words is only on loan to its users. If symbols ultimately derive their representational power, not from rl1e individual, but from a particu­ lar society at a particular time, then a person's symbolic experience of con­ sciousness is to some extent society-dependent-it is borrowed. Its origin is not within the head. Consciousness of self in this way implicitly includes consciousness of other selves, and orl1er consciousnesses can only be represented through the virtual reference created by symbols. The self that is the source of one's experience and intentionality, rl1e self that is judged by itself as well as by others for its moral choices, the self that worries about its impending departure from the world, dlis self is a symbolic self. It is a final irony that it is the virtual not actual reference rl1at symbols pro­ vide, which gives rise to tllis experience of self. Tllis most lmdeniably real experience is a virtual reality (Deacon 1997, 452). The theories of cognitive evolution upon which Rotman draws all point to the extraordinary flexibility of rl1e neurological architecture of human cognition. Humans as a species have plastic, highly conscious ner­

XXl1

FOREWORD

vous systems, the capacities of which allow us to adapt to intricate chal­ lenges of a changing cognitive environment. Rather than being rigidly hard-wired to structures inside the brain, symbolic communication cre­ ated a mode of extrabiological inheritance with a powerful and complex character, and witl1 an autonomous life of its own. The individual mind is a hybrid product, partly biological and partly ecological in origin, shaped by a distributed external network ilie properties of which are constantly changing. The work we have discussed by evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists has dealt primarily with the origins of language, particu­ larly with speech and to a limited extent witl1 writing. Tllis work has em­ phasized that the leap to ilie symbolizing mind did not depend on a built­ in hard-wired tendency to symbolize reality. The direction of flow wasfrom culture to the individual mind, from outside-to-inside? Rotman is inter­ ested in expanding this analysis to include media otl1er ilian speech and writing, especially technologically mediated and computer-based forms of commtmication. He locates rich suggestions for tl1e path to pursue in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It is in chapter 2 on gesture tl1at Rotman's "Deleuzian turn" takes flight most dramatically. A number of"new humanists" are interested in drawing upon work in the natural sciences, particularly recent work in cognitive science and fields such as fw1ctional MRI, to shed new light on traditional humanistic questions, such as tl1e role of emotion and affect in processes of reasoning, previously treated as ilie territory of abstract, disembodied mind. Otl1er areas in which the findings of empirical science are imping­ ing on recent work in ilie humanities are analyses of neuroaesilietic bases for artists' constmction and viewers' appreciation of images and analysis of tl1e role of narrative and metaphor in normal reasoning processes. But Rotman's use of tl1ese recent scientific fields is the most in1pressive-in fact, tl1e only-attempt wiili which I an1 familiar of a n analysis aimed at resolving key issues in postmodern philosophy. In chapter 3 on computing and mathematics and in chapter r on the "Alphabetic Body" Rotman draws on the work of recent cognitive neuroscience to advance his "Deleuzian" tl1eses on ilie machirlic body as an assemblage of relatively independent and autonomous units. For instance, recent work in ilie neurosciences supports a reevaluation oftl1e human innate sense of number. Radler ilian being associated with a singular "faculty:' particular organ, or region of tl1e brain, cow1ting, according to the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas

CONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

XXW

Dehaene, is not even an evolved skill, but a capacity assembled from dif­

ferent and independent brain activities each on their own having nothing

to do with number. What Rotman offers in Becoming Beside Ourselves is an extension and revitalization of Derrida's grammatological project, updating it for the computationally intensive environments that increasingly constitute us as posthtm1an. In his critique of Western metaphysics Derrida pointed to the logic of rl1e supplement as a way of deconstructing rl1e power of logocen­ trism. 'Whereas speech is normally treated as primary, ilie site of presence to oneself, and writing is treated as secondary, a supplement rl1at comes after speech as a technique for notating it, Den·ida argued rl1at writing comes before speech. Writing, Derrida argued, is really a form of graphism, a general mode of signifying operating in all cultural production. Writing and speech are both dependent on rl1is higher form of writing, what Der­ rida called arche writing, a writing before the letter. But Derrida did not successfully extend rl1is provocative analysis to other signifying systems such as in1ages. As Rotman points out, Den·ida's commentary on Husserl's The Origins of Geometry, for instance, never mentions the complete absence of diagrams or reference to rl1em through­ out the text. While critiquing rl1e Western metaphysical system, Den·ida's deconstruction remained bound to ilie world of print it called into ques­ tion. Rotman's project on corporeal writing introduces the exploration of graphism in ilie wider sense as a synthesis of semiotics, computation, and experimental science. Rotman's brilliant treatment of gesture, speech, and rl1eir relations to other signifying systems moves consideration of ilie posiliuman sub­ ject onto a new page of clarity and rigor. Some of the resources Rotman draws upon are neurological studies that argue for a form of internal touching, a virtual auto-hapticity iliat appears to be the condition for self­ consciousness. He draws on empirical investigations of verbal narration in cognitive psychology iliat demonstrate rl1at gesticulation-previously believed to be an tumecessary supplement to speech and iliought-is a deep component of utterance, having to do with rl1e semantics, pragmat­ ics, and discursive aspects of speech. These studies call into question the causal or conceptual priority of speech by demonstrating a tight temporal binding, accurate to fractions of a second, discovered to operate between gesticulation and speech. Drawing on these sorts of empirical studies, Rotman argues rl1at iliinking that eventuates in speech has its origins

XXIV

FOREWORD

i n pre-verbal visuo-kinetic images which then become gesticulated and verbalized to form utterance. Spoken thought starts as a yet-to-be real­ ized gesture. Thought, including abstract thought such as mathematical reasoning, rests on metaphors and diagrams derived from repeated and deeply layered patterns of body movement. Moreover, he draws upon other work on phonetics and speech synthesis which demonstrates that it is precisely as a gestural system that speech is best apprehended and per­ ceived by a listener.Drawing on the work of the evolutionary neurobiolo­ gist Terrence Deacon once again, Rotman argues that auditory processing of speech soLmds does not appear to be based on extracting basic acoustic parameters of the signal before mapping them onto speech sounds. Speech sounds appear designed instead to predict which oral-vocal movements produced them and ignore the rest. We listen, Rotman concludes, not to speech sOLmds as such but to what rl1ey signal about the movements of rl1e body causing them.We listen to speech as symptoms of gestures. In two very engaging chapters, "The Alphabetic Body" referred to above and "Gesture and Non-Alphabetic Writing;' which introduces rl1e notion of rl1e body without organs of speech, Rotman e-xplores recent work on American Sign and argues for gesture and orl1er non-alphabetic systems of expression as languages in rl1eir own right. In these chapters, Rotman points to the importance of the materiality of media i n "wiring" thought, and in the chapter on alphabetism, even draws upon work from ethology and neurobiology to bolster his claim rl1at in the historical pro­ cess of establishing non-pictorial alphabetism as rl1e basis for thought, rl1e alphabet dismpted "the integrated complementarity of upper and lower, tongue and larynx, articulation and breath, consonant and vowel; it effects a pulling apart and deactivating of rl1e circuits between neocortex and the midbrain?' (Rotman 2002, 97) The powerful result of this disjLmction, he argues, was the hierarchical subordination of the midbrain to rl1e neocor­ tex, and attendant to that rl1e cutting loose of words from voice. Going one step furrl1er, Rotman argues rl1at the result of this vertical neurologi­ cal separation was rl1e institution of a prin1ary dualism of mind over body, the ultimate expression of which is rl1e notion of the pure, disembodied mind, rl1at constant rl1eme threaded rl1rough all Rotman's work. \Vhat rl1en about the posthuman? Are we transitioning to some new form of self adapted to our environment of ubiquitous computing tech­ nology, and if so, how is rl1is self assembled and transformed by rl1e machinic processes of our technoscientific milieu? Since the rise of Hmno

CONFRONTING THE SINGULARITY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

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sapiens between wo,ooo and 2oo,ooo years ago, there has been little change in brain size or, as far as can be determined, in brain stmcture. A criti­ cal contributing factor to tl1e rapid cultural evolution tllat took off with H.

sapiens and has continued at an ever-increasing pace since is tl1e de­

velopment of supplements to individual internal biological memory in the form of visuo-graphic systems and external memory media, especially written records and otl1er forms of symbolic storage (see especially Donald

1991, 308-12). Ratl1er than being lin1ited by our neural architecture, tl1ese external material supports have only enhanced the symbolizing power of the mind. In a sense, the recent development of the Internet and distrib­ uted forms of electronic conunw1ication only furtl1er accelerate a process that has defined and shaped human being since tl1at first singularity. From tl1e perspective of the work in evolutionary cognitive science we have discussed, any change in the way information gets processed and repre­ sented inevitably constitutes a change in tl1e cognitive economy of tl1e subject, a difference in psychic architecture and ultimately of conscious­ ness itself. Teasing out tl1e in1plications ofthis notion, Rotman argues tl1at the medium of alphabetic writing introduced as silent collateral machinic effects an entire neurological apparatus enabling practices, routines, pat­ terns of movement and gestures, and kinematic, dynan1ic, and perceptual activities as part of tlle backgrotmd conditions-in terms of Deleuze and Guattari, tlle a-signifying dimensions of tl1e mediwn lying beneath tl1e medium's radar as part of its tmconscious-giving rise to tl1e lettered self, a privately enclosed, inward and interiorized mind, structmed by tlle linear protocols and cognitive processing that reading and writing demand. This mode of psychic organization is giving way to new forms as part of tl1e massive shift in computational media taking place. Of particular importance to om present situation is tl1e inflm: of parallel computation into what has been almost exclusively a serial computational regin1e. The parallel/serial duo is nothing new. In fact, as Rotman argues, the dynamic tension between parallel and serial modes of thinking and representation have characterized every media regime. Rotman examines the tandem opposition of serial and parallel forms across many types of activity: music (melody versus harmony), symbolic forms (text versus image), aritlm1etic (ordinal versus cardinal numbers), film editing (Eisenstein versus intercut montage), electrical circuits (serial versus parallel), and especially serial versus parallel modes of computing. The serial/parallel duo come together and are always in a certain tension witl1 one anotl1er. Seriality is exempli-

XA'Vl

FOREWORD

fied in narratives, routines, algoritluns, melodies, tin1elines; parallelism s i exemplified in scenes, episodes, harmonies, contexts, atmospheres, and images. Parallelism foregrounds presence, simultaneity, co-occurrence. Serialism foregrounds linear order and sequence and occurs in count­ ing, listing, lining up, and telling. Serialism privileges a certain mode of cognitive and psychic organization, according to Rotman: namely, tl1e individual mind/brain in which tl1inking takes place inside ilie closed, individual thinker. Everything outside the individual symbol-processing brain is assigned to context and plays no substantive role in the tl1inking process. This model of tl1e mind and of tl1inking is being challenged and displaced by tl1e researches of contemporary cognitive science, which are demonstrating that what was previously marginalized as context is actu­ ally a crucial element in how we think. Not only is thinking always social, culturally situated, and teclmologically mediated, but individual cogni­ tion requires symbiosis wiili cognitive collectivities and external memory systems to happen in the first place. Parallel computing, Rotman writes, puts into flLLX tl1e relations between internal self and external oilier, "since it is a machinic implementation, not of individual linear thinking but of distributed bio-social phenomena, of collective tl1ought processes and enunciations, that ca1mot be articulated solely on ilie level of an solated, i individual self. Its effects are to introduce into thought, into tl1e self, into tl1e 'I' iliat engages its various forms, parallelist behavior, knowledge, and agency that complicate and ultimately dissolve ilie idea of a monoidal self" (92). Long characterized by linear processing of code, computing s i under­ going a massive shift toward parallelism. In nearly every venue of com­ puting, from high-end processing of massive data sets, such as tl1e hlmlan genome, and large-scale imaging projects, such as GIS maps, to routine gaming machines such as ilie Sony PlayStation 3, computing is being per­ formed by multiple machines working simultaneously inparallel on differ­ ent parts of the job to be computed, or (as in video-editing workstations, game machines, and even some new laptops) multiple processors in the same machine. In addition tl1e computational affordances of cell phones, pervasive technologies for multi-tasking such as instant messaging, ma­ nipulation of multiple avatars of tl1e self in communally inhabited virtual worlds such as Wo�·ld of Warcraft and Second Life, and engagement wiili a variety of forms of distributed agency, blends of artificial and human agents in networked circuits -all these contribute, Rotman argues, to

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making the parallelist self radically different from the single, serial, alpha­ beticized psyche it is in the process of displacing. Both cmcial to and symptomatic of this shift to parallelism is the cen­ trality of visualization technology and of the strategic influx of images into all forms of contemporary cognitive work. Everywhere pragmatic images, graphs, charts, tables, figures, maps, sinmlations, and other forms of visual artifact are permeating our reading and writing practices. These apparently ilmocuous information-bearing, instmctional, explicatory, and otl1erwise instnunentally oriented images are, from Rotman's per­ spective, a (welcome) dimension of parallelism, prompting him to cite artist Helen Chadwick's dreamlike meditation, "What if dangerous fluids were to spill out, displacing logic, refuting a coherent narrative, into a landscape on the brink of 1?" Nothing better represents this "spillage of the Ego" as a prelude to the emergence of a para-self, Rotman urges, tl1an the prevalence of the post-photographic digital image, and especially tl1e

GIS map. The post-photographic in1age dissolves the classic viewer rooted in Renaissance perspectivalism that privileged a self with a point of view outside the imaged object. An increasingly familiar exan1ple of what Rot­ man is describing occurs ii1 our obsession with GIS maps, such as maps provided by Google Eartl1, with multiple (currently up to twelve) sepa­ rate graphic layers overlaying different kinds of information that can be dynamically viewed as a co-present assemblage of in1ages and proactively navigated by the user. GIS maps of tl1is sort enact parallel seeing of in1ages tl1at previously had to be viewed side by side, serially; in the process they reshape the fixity of the viewing subject and promote a dynamic viewing body that bypasses a perspectival mode of viewing. In terms of Rotman's thesis, tl1is dissolution of seriality impinges directly on the subject and the construction of the self, a falling away from a one-dimensional, singular consciousness into parallel, distributed co-presence. Rotman summarizes this transition eloquently: Once, not so long ago, there was an absolute opposition of self and other: an 'I: identical to itself, wholly present as an autonomous, indi­ visible, interior psyche against an external, an1orphous collectivity of third persons outside the skin. Now tl1e 1/me-tmit is dissolving, the one who says or who writes 'I' is no longer a singular integrated whole, but multiple: a shifting plurality of distributed !-parts, !-roles, 1-ftmctions, and !-presences. Now tl1e 'l' bleeds outward into tl1e collective, and the collective introjects, insilmates, and internalizes itself witl1in tl1e me.

XA"Vlll

FOREWORD

What was privately interior and individual is invaded by the public, the historical, the social. \Vhat was the outside world of events enters (and reveals itself as having always entered) the individual soul in the mode of personal destiny (99). As we spend more tin1e in electronically mediated environments, engag­ ing with massively parallel distributed computing processes that are merg­ ing ever more seamlessly with the material processes and technological affordances of our everyday world, we are, in Rotman's terms, becoming, literally evolving, as distributed machinic multiples, para-selves beside our selves.

CONFRONTING THE SINGULARI TY WITH BRIAN ROTMAN

X, XLX

Preface

Bewming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet) Ghosts) and Dstr i buted i Human Being is the third in a trilogy devoted to the nature and functioning of certain signs and the writing practices associated with them. In each essay I explore ideas, imaginings, conceptual innovations, subjectivities, and forms of consciousness which the signs facilitate (and prevent), as well as the absent agencies and metaphysical beliefs that seem to arrive with them. The first essay, Signifying Nothing:

The Semiotics ofZero, focused on

the mathematical zero, o-its contested entry into European thought as an infidel and paradoxical concept; its relation to various tmderstandings of 'norl1ing' and emptiness; its disruptive semiotic effects; its midwifing of cognate forms in painting (the vanishing point) and economics (imagi­ nary money); its secondary formations; and the complexities of its dual mathematical role: as a number like any other and as a meta-sign at the heart of the familiar Hindu-Arabic place notation that assigns names to rl1e endless progression

1, 2,

. .

10, n

. . . of whole numbers. This latter

role, essentially a marking of absence, serves also to signify rl1e mathemati­ cal origin (of cotmting, of a system of coordinates) by standing in for an absent person, indicating the trace but not the presence within marllemati­ cal texts of the one-who-cotmts or coordinatizes, and thereby ftmctioning as a sign of the "necessary residue" within marl1ematics, as Hermann Weyl put it, "of ego extinction?'

Ad Infinitum . . . The Ghost in Ttwing)s Machine: Taking God out ofMathematics and Putting the Body Back In. An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics, pursues rl1e metaphysical and disembodied agencies The second essay,

rl1at accompany the writing and thinking of the mathematical infinite. A concept one encow1ters in1mediately in the diagram ' .

. ? of endless con­

tinuation ('potential' infinity), and in the ideogram 'oo: rl1e mathematical inverse 1/o of zero, comprehending a 'completed' infinity of passage to the limit. From classical until recent times (and for some still today) these two infinities were opposed and not equally meaningful. For Aristotle only

the former, potential, infinite-the ability to always add another lmit and hence to colmt without end-made sense; an ability intrinsic to his con­ ception of 'mind: or nous, the incorporeal organ of thought, and he re­ jected the actual infinite as the source of the infan1ous paradoxes of Zeno. "With tl1e entry of zero-based place notation in tl1e Renaissance, the actual infinite entered matl1ematics in the form of a completed infinite sum (1

=

1/2 + 14 + Vs + . . .) , and, then, in a more radical form toward tl1e end of tl1e nineteentl1 century, when Georg Cantor introduced transfinite numbers and a hierarchy of infinities. Echoing Aristotle, the constructivist matl1e­ matician Leopold Kronecker rejected the reality of such abstractions, con­ demning them as artificial and m1real compared to the 'natural: potential infinity enshrined in the progression 1, 2, 3, . . . of whole numbers: "God:' he insisted in a remark widely attributed to him, "made the integers, tl1e rest is the work of Mankind?'! But what is it that makes the mm1bers 'natural: that prompts matl1e­ maticians to call them so and conceive of them as given, always somehow 'there: before and independent of tl1e hmnan mind and its works? And why invoke God as tl1eir creator? In a sense such questions seek to out­ Kronecker Kronecker by insisting that even the potential infinity of mm1­ bers is a cultural construct, the "work of Mankind?' Tl1is leads to a ques­ tioning of Aristotle's nous, the source of the supposedly natural ability to repeat endlessly. On tl1e contrary, the ability requires a supernatmal-dis­ embodied-agency operating, as God is presumed to operate, metaphysi­ cally, outside the exigencies of time, space, energy, and physical presence; in short, an immaterial ghost. Some such agency is invoked by mathema­ ticians (though tl1ey do not describe it so) when they write '. . ? and imag­ ine the endless continuation of mm1bers signified by it. To say more, one can try to imagine what it would be like to conceive cOlmting and think numbers outside a metaphysics of tl1e infinite. One can ask what it might mean to iterate in this lmiverse, the one which in-corporates us, which we embodied humans in-habit, in contrast to the transcendent ghost-space appropriate to a bodiless 'mind.' Under tl1e rubric of non-Euclidean colmt­ ing I sketch one idea of what this might involve.

Becoming Beside Ounelves pushes tl1e question of supernatmal agencies fmtl1er back, situating them mediologically, in the context of their pro­ duction. It asks: How, by what material, cognitive-affective, means, did God and 'n1ind' come to be-to exist, to be known, to be objects of be­ lief-witl1in \Vestern culture? Unlike its predecessors, tl1is essay's primary orientation is not mathematical signs. True, God and Mind arrive floating XXXll

l'REFACE

ghostlike inside the matl1ematical infinite; their origins, however, are in the letters of tl1e alphabet which write speech, not in mathematical ideograms and diagrams inscribing ideas. Specifically, I argue the following tl1esis. God and 'mind' (Mind, nous,psyche, soul) are media effects of tl1e alphabet, hypostatized entities, ghosts tl1at emerged from the writing of 'l' in the sixtll century BCE witllln tlle respective Jewish and Greek deployments of alphabetic writing, born at a point when the medium had become natu­ ralized, tlle effects of written mediation invisible. Crucial to tl1e argument is a fw1damental mediological point, namely the insistence tllat any act of self-enw1ciation is mediwn specific. This inunediately implies that tlle four reflexive acts- a gestural self-pointing 'l'; an 'I' spoken in language; an inscribed 'l' witllin alphabetic writing; and a digital 'I: a self-enunciation witllin contemporary network media­ though intercmmected and co-present are to be distinguished from each otl1er. They project different sorts of affect, have different relations to em­ bodiment, operate differently in tl1eir milieus, and engender tlleir own forms ofsubjectivity. In particular, and of cardinal importance for the exis­ tence and features of God and Mind, to utter 'I' and to write 'I: despite their everyday conflation witl1in V\lestern textual discourse, are radically different signifying acts; and it is precisely tlle fusing of them, tl1e near w1iversal lmawareness of their difference and what might turn on it, tllat provides tl1e rhetorical matrix for belief in disembodied agencies known only tllrOltgh writing. Along with belief in tlleir existence are their profiles, tl1e features tlleir believers attribute to them, and coupled to this tl1e affect tllese agencies project. The affect proper to human speech, which pertains to moods, feelings, passions, attitudes, or emotions it conveys and induces, lies in its tone, a phenomenon determined by tl1e gestures of the voice, those audi­

tory movements of tlle body witllln utterance: its hesitations, silences, em­ phases, sharpness, timbre, musicality, changes of pitch, and otl1er elements of prosody. The alphabet knows notlling of all tllls. It eliminates tone and any kind of prosody completely: it reduces tl1e voice to words and writes 'what's said' but not tl1e matmer of its saying, its delivery, how what's said is said. What, one eatl ask, would be tl1e features of a 'speaker: and tl1e affect of a 'voice' known only through alphabetic writing? Since tone is tl1e presence atld action of tl1e body in speech, such a figure would be disincarnate and invisible, as indeed botll God and Mind are. But tone of voice also serves two otl1er functions: it is tlle meat1s by which a speaker registers tl1e presence of and attitude toward a listener, PREFACE

XXXlll

and it is an m i portant means-one of the earliest-humans have of indi­ viduating themselves and others. Lacking all tone, an agency known only through the alphabetic inscription of its words would appear abstract and (chillingly) indifferent to the existence or not of its supposed addressee; it would also, by being mliocatable and unspecifiable as an individual, project an 'other'-nonhuman-form of identity. But the alphabet's twenty-five hundred year textual domination of ·western culture, "the era of alphabetic graphism" (Leroi-Gourhan 1993), wirl1 its singularizing, monadic, and linear logic appears to be ending. All that was founded and so long held in place by the alphabet's mediation be­ comes increasingly difficult to sustain confronted wirl1 rl1e parallelist and distributed logic of multiplicities. In rl1is light, once revealed as media­ effects, God and Mind along with 'soul' become no longer tenable items of belief and begin to feel strange and of diminishing relevance within the increasingly networked contemporary scene, the lettered self which co­ evolved with rl1ese agencies and gave them credence now past its heyday and increasingly overshadowed by a new self-enunciation. This fourth 'I' which is beginning to disrupt and reconfigure its gestural, speaking, and writing predecessors, is a plural self, a self beside itself, which cannot but appear as unstable, virtual and 'tmreal' wirl1 respect to us-the deeply em­ bedded denizens of alphabetic culture.

XXXIV

l'REFACE

Acknowledgments My thanks to the many audience members at meetings of the Society for Science and Literature for providing a sympathetic forum for several of the ideas here. My thanks to friends and colleagues in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University, whose rare multi­ disciplinary make-up and comparativist ethos have made a perfect place to develop ideas that are off conventional academic maps. My thanks to Tim Lenoir for the generous support and critical evaluation he has shown my work over the many years we've known each other. My gratitude to rl1e fertile philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze on multiplicities, becomings, Spinoza, and much else, and to rl1e imaginative reach of Fe­ lix Guattari's rl1inking of technology "at rl1e heart of the subject" which permeate rl1is essay. And my thanks to rl1e friendship, collaboration, and wit of Rich Doyle for the affect, rl1e enlightenment, and the prodigious bouts of laughter we shared over rl1e course of hundreds of telephone conversations. My rl1atlks to the staff of Duke University Press. To the editorial direc­ tor, Ken Wissoker, for taking on rl1e project and for his critical prompt­ ings that in1proved the manuscript; to my editor Courtney Berger whose suggestions, guidance, and tolerance of last-minute changes are much ap­ preciated; to Amy Rurl1 Buchanan for her elegant design; and to Mark Mastromarino for his meticulous and always helpful copyediting. Thatlks to the Royal Society for permission to reprint "Will rl1e Digital Computer Trat1sform Classical Marl1ematics" that appeared in PhilosO'phi­

cal Transactions) Royal Society, London, Series A, 361 (2003): 1675-90; to Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Science atld Literature for permission to reprint "Corporeal or Gestura-Haptic Writing'' rl1at ap­ peared in Configurations 10 (2002) : 423-38; to the University of Wisconsin Press, for permission to reprint "Going Parallel" rl1at appeared in Sub­

Stance 91 (2ooo) : 56-79; to Taylor atld Frat1cis for permission to reprint "The Alphabetic Body" which appeared in Parallax 8 (2002) : 92-104; atld to rl1e University of Memphis for permission to reprint "Aura" rl1at ap­ peared in River City 20 (2ooo): 14.

Aura It was as if everything she thought, felt, remembered, had an aura; behind the briefest eye-blink, the least flicker of touch, a shadow, a kind of ghost presence. This aura wasn't part of her, nor was it in any sense that she could fad10m pro­ duced by her, nor did it seem answerable to her, even though-of this she was certain-only she was aware of it. Neid1er did it seem to precede her and her business: it wasn't there before-couldn't be anywhere-before she felt what she was able to feel, before she perceived what she-her body-decided she could perceive. And yet d1ere it was, ghost of d1ings present, faint pulsation of the real; at times like the glow on the surface of d1e universe, at others the dark outline of a world dazzled by d1ere being nodung in it but its own presence. Often it was neid1er light, nor dark, nor anydung visible, but just a presence­ simply d1ere-clinging to the motion of her being in space-like the field of a magnet, or radiation from d1e earth's rocks. Of late it had occurred to her: perhaps it was the aura that was real, felt dUngs, had a body, sat and moved through space and perceived the cotmdess pulsations of light and energy in the tmiverse, and that she was d1e shadow clinging to it, following it arotmd, copying its business before it had time to look around and be aware of who she was and how her very presence was no more d1at1 a confirmation of d1e aura's desparate need for somed1ing-anything-to keep it company. -Brian Rotmat1, River City 20 (zooo)

Introduction

LETTERED SELVES AND BEYOND

Reflecting on the relation between the human and the machinic, the cog­ nitive rl1eorist Andy Clark urges "vVe shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound sense of being human-tedmology symbionts: thinking and reasoning sys­ tems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non­ biological circuitry?' ( 2006, 1) Until recently it was possible to believe orl1erwise. To believe rl1at hmnan organisms and rl1eir technologies, however messily intermixed and interdependent, were fundan1entally different and in principle could be separated: on the one side, mind and culture and things of rl1e spirit, on the other, tools, machines, and techno-apparatuses; the former invents and uses technology but is not itself, in its 'essence; tedmological. Now, as technological systems penetrate every aspect of contemporary culture, bringing about an escalating and radical series of cognitive and social up­ heavals, it has become clear that no such separation ofmind and machine is possible. Nor was it ever. Humans beings are "natural born cyborgs"; rl1e 'htm1an' has from the beginning of rl1e species been a duee-way hybrid, a bio-cultural-technological amalgam: the 'human mind'-its subjectivities, affects, agency, and forms of consciousness-having been put into form by a succession of physical and cognitive technologies at its disposal. Leaving language aside for the moment, which properly speaking is a bio-cultural given rarl1er rl1an a technological medimn, the chief mind­ constituting technology, "mind upgrade" in Clark's phrase, and rl1e morl1er of almost all subsequent cognitive upgrades, is writing. Writing in its two dimensions: the writing of ideas, patterns, and procedures whose most focused and abstract realization is rl1e symbolic ecology of mathe­ matical thought, and writing as an apparatus for inscribing human speech and thought among whose multiform achievements is the production of

a literature and of a literate form of discourse, that enables one to read and write texts-such as the present essay-about the natme of writing. Though I shall touch on some aspects of mathematical writing, my main concern will be with writing as the inscription of spoken language. For Western cultme rl1e writing of speech has been exclusively alphabetic, a system which from its inception has served as the West's dominant cog­ nitive teclmology (along wirl1 marl1ematics) and the medium in which its legal, bmeaucratic, historical, religious, artistic, and social business has been conducted. The result has been an alphabetic discomse, a shaping and textualization of rl1ought and affect, a bringing forth of a system of metaphysics and religious belief, so pervasive and total as to be-from wirl1in that very discomse-almost invisible. Certainly, for at least rl1e last half millennium rl1e very concept of a person has adhered to that of a 'let­ tered self; an individual psyche inextricable from rl1e apparatus of alpha­ betic writing describing, articulating, coJ1U11lll1icating, presenting, and framing it. "In the society rl1at has come into existence since the Middle Ages, one can always avoid picking up a pen, but one cannot avoid being described, identified, certified, and handled-like a text. Even in reach­ ing out to become one's own 'self; one reaches out for a text" (Illich and Sanders 1988, x). The "text:' as Steven Shaviro observes, is the "postmod­ ern equivalent of the soul" (1995, 128), a fact only recognized within the newfow1d interest in alphabeticism over the last two decades. In the nineteenth century the totality of rl1e alphabet's textual domina­ tion of Western cultme encow1tered its first real resistance, its monopoly challenged by new media, tedmologies of reproduction and representa­ tion that have since appropriated many of the functions which had so long been discharged and organized by the alphabetic text: thus the alphabet's hold on factual description and memory was broken by photography; its inscription and preservation of speech sounds eclipsed by the direct re­ production of sOlmd by the phonograph and its descendants; its domina­ tion of narrative form, fictional and orl1erwise, upstaged by documentary and film art; and its lmiversal necessity weakened by television's ability to report or construe rl1e social scene, via images and speech, in a manner accessible to the non-literate. But this dethroning of the alphabetic text is now entering a new, more radical phase brought about by technologies of the virtual and networked media whose effects go beyond the mere appropriation and upstaging of alphabetic functionality. Not only does digital binary code extend rl1e alphabetic principle to its abstract limit-an alphabet of two letters,

2 INTRODUCTION

o

and

1, whose words spell out

mm1bers-but the text itself has become

an object manipulated within computational protocols foreign to it. At the san1e time the text's opposition to pictures-its ancient iconoclastic repudiation of the image-is being reconfigmed by its confrontation with the digitally produced image. With the result rl1at teclmologies of parallel computing and those of a plmi-din1ensional visualization are inculcating modes of rl1ought and self, and facilitating imaginings of agency, whose parallelisms are directly antagonistic to the intransigent monadism, linear coding, and intense seriality inseparable from alphabetic writing. On a different (but ultimately related) track is the alphabet's reductive relation to rl1e corporeal din1ension of utterance, to speech's embodiment. Not only are letters in no way iconic, their visual form having no relation to rl1at of the body or to how the sounds produced by the body's organs of speech are received by those hearing them, but the sotmds which the let­ ters notate are meaningless monads, minimal hearable fragments of speech absent any trace of the sense-making apparatus of the body producing rl1em. This disconnect between alphabetic writing and the speaking body occurs most radically at the level of the phrase and the utterance. For what rl1e alphabet eliminates is the body's inner and outer gestures which extend over speech segments beyond individual words. Both those visually ob­ servable movements rl1at accompany and pw1ctuate speech (which it was never its ftmction to inscribe) and, more to rl1e point, those inside speech, the gestures which constitute the voice itself-the tone, the rhyrlm1, rl1e variation of emphasis, rl1e loudness, rl1e changes of pitch, rl1e mode of attack, discontinuities, repetitions, gaps and elisions, and rl1e never absent play and musicality of utterance that makes human song possible. In short, rl1e alphabet omits all the prosody of utterance and with it the multitude of bodily effects of force, significance, emotion, and affect that it conveys. It was the recognition of the reductive consequences of rl1is omission, evident early in Greek literacy as soon as speeches were delivered by ora­ tors rather than the bards who composed them, that was instmmental in fotmding rl1e art of Gorgian rhetoric. Since rl1en confronting it has been the driving force in the historical development of all forms of 'prose' and poetic diction along wirl1 the reading and writing protocols associated wirl1 rl1em. It is not by chance that this previously ignored gestural dimension of speech should now be of interest. Among orl1er things (its role in Sign language, the discovery of an intimate association between gesticulation and narrative speech, its relevance to voice-recognition software), gesture LETTERED SELVES AND BEYOND

3

and gestural communication (to include haptic and tactile modalities) have become of growing importance within contemporary explorations of body/machine interfaces. A significant component of this reappraisal is the development of motion capture technology, a new digital medium which works by tracking the positions of markers attached to rl1e moving body and recording their parl1s through rl1ree-dimensional space. What is captured as a digital file can include any kind of human (or animal) move­ ment from dance, sport, and theatrical petformance to the postures and passing gestures of social interaction. As such, the technology offers the possibility of capturing the entire communicational, instrumental, and af­ fective traffic of the mobile body-projecting the outlines of a gestura­ haptic medium of vast potential. One whose rl1eoretical significance has yet to be thought rl1rough, but whose practical realizations are already to be fotmd in art objects and installations, animated film, computer gaming, electronic dance petformance, and attempts to create virtual theatre. As alphabetic writing segmented rl1e flow of speech into separate, decontex­ tualized, discrete, and fLxed objects of awareness-'words'-rl1at could be examined and compared, giving rise to granunar, its own form of literate awareness, and the study of rl1e resulting written language, so motion cap­ ture likewise opens the possibility of a 'gesturology; a science of gesture that might allow rl1e semiotic body rl1e conceptual space to emerge from under rl1e shadow of spoken language's lettered, disembodied inscrip­ tion. This is not of course to proclaim (which would be absurd) rl1e im­ minent demise of alphabetic writing, or to want for communication in general the equivalent of what Artaud desired in particular for a rl1eatre freed from subservience to written texts-rl1e pre-eminence of screams, silences, and above all rl1e gesturing body as rl1e superior and proper ve­ hicle for theatrical affect. But rather to point to rl1e end of writing's du·ee­ millennia hegemony as rl1e result of its ongoing subsumption within a digitally expanded mediational field.

It is not, then, its still important and

widespread use, but rl1e regime of the alphabet that appears to be drawing to a close, the "period of alphabetic graphism" in Andre Leroi-Gourhan's phrase giving way to an era in which the inscribing of speech sotmds with letters is but one element, not necessarily the overriding one, in rl1e on­ going bio-cultural-technological 'writing' of the body's meanings, expres­ sions, affects, and mobilities.

In rl1e process, rl1e alphabetic self, rl1e embodied agency who writes and reads 'I: and in so doing performs a complex play of same and other­ 4

INTRODUCTION

ness, actuality and virtuality, with the one who speaks and hears 'I: will be confronted by a third 'I: a self coming into being to the side of the writ­ ten form, what might be termed a para-self, whose enunciation of 'I' will take place (and only take place if it is not to collapse back into its written predecessor) in the interior of a post-, better, trans-alphabetic ecology of ubiquitous and interactive, networked media. "Writing:' Walter Ong insists, "alters consciousness?' (1982, chap. 4) Indeed.As do all media, not least each strand of the lattice of commlmica­ tional technologies currently dissolving writing's pre-eminence, loosening the alphabet's hold by substituting their hold on consciousness. As Felix Guattari has observed, informational and conm1lm icational technologies "operate at the heart of hlmlan subjectivity . . . within its sensibility, af­ fects and w1conscious fantasms?' (1995, 4) An observation that repeats the inescapable two-way intimacy remarked earlier between techne andpsyche. Technology's mode of operation at "the heart" of tl1e subject is not simply the action of something external introduced into a 'natural' psyche, one that was inner, private and secluded from technological influence. The operation of machines both augments already existing sites of tedmologi­ cal mediation of the self and is transformative and works to constitute the very subject engaging with tlmn. A phenomenon Roland Barthes ob­ served for the action of writing: "In tl1e modern verb of middle voice 'to write: tl1e subject is constituted as immediately contemporary with tl1e writing, being effected and affected by it. . . ?' (1986, 18) This lmderstanding of technology rejects the instnm1ental view of it as tl1e use of tools and body-extending prostheses by pre-existing hlmlan subjects fully articulated before its deployment.And it likewise rejects the conception of technological media in terms of their representations, in terms of tl1eir content, the intentional manifest meanings they signify­ whetller linguistically, aurally, pictorially, kinetically, haptically-to pre­ existing, self-sufficient subjects. In botl1 views the phenomenon that is unseen and lmexamined is the direct effect of technology's materiality, an effect always outside its explicit human, socio-cultural character and which transforms tl1e bodies, nervous systems, and subjectivities of its users. This action of technology's 'radical material exteriority: tl1e subject­ constituting work it petforms, occurs at a pre-linguistic, pre-signifying and pre-theoretical level.As such it is antagonistic to understanding tech­ nology's achievement in terms of its purely discursive, socio-cultural con­ structions. CoJnnllmicational media and semiotic apparatuses never co­ incide witl1 tl1eir intended social uses or cultural purposes or their defined LETTERED SELVES AND BEYOND

5

instrumentality or the effects sought and attributed to their manifest con­ tents. Always something more is at work, a corporeal effect-a facilitation, an affordance, a restriction, a demand played out on the body-which de­ rives from the uneliminable materiality and physicality of the mediological act itself, and which s i necessarily invisible to the user engaged in the act of mediation. Expressed differently, no encotmter with a mediating apparatus can be reduced to the purely mental, ideational effects, one articulated within the discourse of its declared signifying and representational means, that occludes its physiological actions. As Steven Shaviro puts it for tl1e appa­ rattts of film, "\Ne neglect the basic tactility and viscerality of cinematic ex­ perience when we describe material processes and effects, such as tl1e per­ sistence of vision, merely as mental illusions. Cinema produces real effects

in the viewer, ratl1er than merely presenting phantasmatic reflection to the viewer?' (1995, 51) What is true of tl1e "psychophysiology of cinematic ex­ perience" holds for any encounter with a mediating apparatus -cinematic, computational, telephonic, televisual, photographic, audiophonic, tele­ graphic, or any other: always the user s i used, tl1e psyche-body of the one who views, listens, speaks, computes is activated and transformed by an w1declared affect, a force outside the apparatus's explicit instrumentality. Ignoring the action of tl1is material underbelly projects an account of technological mediation tl1at denies it an unconscious, denies it any under-tl1e-radar, pre-discursive or pre-semiotic effects, and embeds its action and mode of being entirely in language and discourse, thereby domesticating it as a project and set of processes wholly captttrable and able to be made explicit witl1in conscious, representational tllottght. Mark Hansen describes this reduction as a fall into technesis, a "putting into dis­ course" of technology, a body-denying move that, he clain1s, underlies twentieth-century thinking about tl1e natttre of tedmology and material agency (2ooo, 2004). \Vriting, like any medium, is a re-mediation; it engenders a clutch of interconnected discontinuities in the milieu of what preceded it: a disrup­ tion of the previous space-tin1e consensus of its users and an altered rela­ tion between agency and embodiment giving rise to new forms of action, conm11mication, and perception. It introduced a domain of virtual, seem­ ingly 'tmreal' objects, entities that are without context, endlessly repeat­ able, and free to be reproduced at any time, place, and cultural situation. For the medium of writing these virtual entities are texts. To engage with them writing posits, as does any medium, a virtual user, an abstract read­

6

INTRODUCTION

ingjwriting agency who or which is as distinct from any particular, em­ bodied, and situated user as an algebraic variable is from the n i dividual numbers substitutable for it, an agency who/which acconunodates all pos­ sible readers and writers of texts regardless of how and when in space and time rl1ey have or might have appeared. Tllis floating entity makes ideas of disembodied agency, action at a distance, and thought transference plau­ sible. As a result all commtmicational media have about them an aura of rl1e tmca1my and the supernatural, a ghost effect which clings to them. In the case of the telegraph, whlch introduced a new form of written con­ verse with an absent agent, rl1e effect conjured not ghosts as such; rarl1er it inspired a new religion based on a telegraphic, table-tapping mode of conversation wirl1 the newly conceived ghost-spirits of the departed. Long before thls, writing (which had always been friendly to messages and self-proclamations from rl1e dead) conjured into being ghosts of a different sort. Unlike telegraphy rl1e conjuring did not follow immediately on the medium's deployment; it depended on a specific phenomenon-a self-reference wirl1in or by the medium, a written '1'-to bring it about. Writing 'I; pointing to a self in writing, s i in effect making writing circle back onto the writer and confronting rl1e self with a virtual simulacnm1. Unlike rl1e spoken 'I; chained to its utterer with its referent tmambigu­ ously the one speaking, who or what rl1e written 'l' is is indeterminate. It could be real or fictional, existent or nonexistent. It could be any writer of a text anywhere at any time for any purpose, a hypostatization or entifica­ tion of the alphabet's virtual user: an tmembodied being outside the con­ fines of time and space operating as an invisible and unlocatable agency. A trio of entities answering rl1is description, nan1ely God, Mind, In­ finity, have formed rl1e metaphysical horizons of Western religious, phllo­ sophical, and marl1ematical d10ught. Each such ghost is a phenomenon inseparable from alphabetic writing. The first arose from the writing of 'l' as in "I an1 rl1e Lord rl1y God" and "I am that I am" to refer to and define Hin1Self; the second from the writing of 'I' in Greek philosopllical thought to refer to an un-embodied psyche lodged in the soma; the last from rl1e writing of'l' as a pronotm designating Aristotle's nous, that dis­ embodied organ of rational rl1ought able to cotmt without end. To summarize: A succession of media-speech, alphabetic writing, digital writing-each transforming their enviro1m1ents du·ough a wave of virtuality specific to them. In the first, virtuality is located within the symbolic ftmction per se, inherent in a speaker's capacity to refer to non­ existent and disembodied agencies; in the second, virtuality is located in LETTERED SELVES AND BEYOND

7

writing's ability to signify across space and time in the absence of a real or embodied speaker; the third, still breaking, wave is manifest in the contemporary phenomenon of virtualizing X, where X ranges over the characteristic abstractions and processes of the alphabetic, pre-digital age. Associated with each of these virtual waves is a potential ghost effect, one specific to the medium concerned, realized in relation to a self-emmciation expressed within or by the medium. For language it is the ghostly pres­ ence of the other in the spoken 'I' giving rise to the belief in a 'spirit' sepa­ rate from the gestural 'l' n i separable from the proprioceptive body; for alphabetic writing it is a transcendental agency, the hypostatizations we call God, Mind, and the Infinite Agent. For the digital or better network 'I: a self-emmciation specific to contemporary media ecologies is still in flux, so a ghost effect, identifiable as a stable and repeatable phenomenon invoked by it cannot yet emerge. However, witllin the contemporary digitally enabled scene, a network i being heralded. The featmes of such a tllird self-enunciating agency, '1' s differentiating it from the oral and scriptive 'l's, are becoming discernable. Such an '1' is immersive andgestut·o-haptic, lmderstanding itself as mean­ ingful from without, an embodied agent increasingly defined by the net­ works threading through it, and experiencing itself (notwitl1standing the ubiquitous computer screen interface) as much through touch as vision,t through tactile, gestmal, and haptic means as it navigates itself through informational space, traversing a "world of pervasive proximity" whose "donlinant sense . . . is touch" (de Kerckhove 2006, 8). Such an '1' isporous, spilling out of itself, traversed by other 'l's networked to it, permeated by the collectives of other selves and avatars via apparatuses (mobile phone or e-mail, ambient interactive devices, Web pages, apparatuses ofsurveillance, GPS systems) that form its tedmo-cultural environment and increasingly break down self-other bow1daries thought previously to be lmcrossable: what was private exfoliates (is blogged, Webcammed, posted) directly into the social at the san1e time as the social s i introjected into the interior of tl1e self, making it "harder and harder to say where the world stops and tl1e i person begins?' (Clark 2006, 1) Lastly, such an 'l' is plural and dstributed, as against the contained, centralized singularity of its lettered predecessor; it is internally heterogeneous and multiple, and, like the computational and in1aging technologies mediating it, its behavior is governed by paral­ lel protocols and rhytlm1s-perforn1ing and forming itself through many actions and perceptions at once-as against doing or being one tiling at a tin1e on a sequential, predonlinantly endogenous, itinerary. In short, a self 8

INTRODUCTION

becoming beside itself, plural, trans-alphabetic, derived from and spread over multiple sites of agency, a self going parallel: a para-self. Mental pathways, ways of believing, modes of thinking, habits ofmind, an entire logic of representation, born from and maintained by alphabeti­ cism over the last twenty-five hLmdred years, become increasingly incom­ patible with such a self. Metaphysical claims by religions of the book, au­ thenticated by the assertions of an absolute monobeing from within an alphabetic text, become less tenable as their Lmcompromising insistence on an aboriginal singularity confronts the pluralizing, dispersive vectors of contemporary mediation. The West's ontotheological metaphysics, with its indivisible, muque-unto-themselves and beyond-which-nothing monads of an absolute Truth behind reality and a monolithic transcendent God entity begins to be revealed as a mediological acluevement-magnifi­ cent but no longer appropriate-of a departing age.

LETTERED SELVES AND BEYOND

9

PART I

One

THE ALPHABETIC BODY

The Alphabetic West For Victor Hugo "Htm1an society, the world, the whole of mankind is in the alphabet?' (quoted in Ouaknin

1999, 9)

Not quite. The Chinese sys­

tem of writing speech is logographic: its characters notate morphemes, the smallest meaningful sounds, rather rl1a11 rl1e alphabet's meat1ingless phonemes. The Japanese use a mixture of morpheme- and phoneme­ based systems. Neither of iliese cultures figured largely in Hugo's view of ilie world, but for Western civilization his tnunpeting of the alphabet makes petfect sense: each of ilie two originating worlds, Judaic a11d Greek, which have respectively determined ilie ·west's religio-edllcal a11d techno­ rational/artistic horizons, was indeed created out of a11 encounter wiili a system of alphabetic writing.! The encotmters could not have occurred in more different social, histori­ cal, cultural, economic, religious, a11d intellectual milieus: 'cattle-herding semi-nomad' Israelites against slave-owning denizens of the Greek polis; agricultural exchat1ge versus a monetized economy; scribe-priest control of writing versus a distributed citizen literacy; tribal kingdoms versus rl1e militarized city-state; fixation on a single written corpus defining a religio­ etlmic identity against a11 expanding ecology of literary and philosophical writings. The Israelite encounter produced rl1e trat1scendental Jewish God in­ habiting a holy text, ilie sacred scroll of rl1e Talmud or Five Books of Moses, a "library'' of texts comprising "the verse of nomadic people, popu­ lar a11d religious songs of all sorts, myrlllcal tales based on the cosmogony of rl1e Middle East, oral traditions concerning national origins, prophe­ cies, legislative and sacerdotal doctunents bearing . . . liturgical pieces, atmals or chronicles, collections of proverbs written down long after ilieir first appearat1ce, . . . tales a11d romat1ticized fiction?' (Martin 1994, 103-4)

The Greek encotmter 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 fotmding texts of Western philosophical discourse. Each of these encotm­ ters and rl1eir metaphysical import will occupy us later (chapter s). Different alphabets were involved. Greek (its Romanized form now worldwide) was created circa 8oo BCE when the Greeks modified rl1e Phoenician consonantal alphabet by adding letters for vowels plus some consonants; Hebrew, used by the Israelites from circa 1000 BCE, rl1ought also to be derived from Phoenician was, like it, voweless. VVhereas vowels were necessary to inscribe Greek, a language which used rl1em to regis­ ter granmutical differences, Hebrew, a tri-consonantal semitic language, could be written wid10ut rl1em. Plainly, rl1e two alphabets will involve different writing and reading practices and be an1enable to different uses.2 Being entirely phonetic, ilie Greek alphabet allowed a word to be read outright from ilie text, whilst ilie Hebrew required interpretive work to determine it from ilie oiliers within ilie semantic family indicated by its triple of consonants. For Ivan lllich and Barry Sanders, rl1e former "picks the sotmd from the page and searches for ilie invisible ideas in ilie sounds the letters command him to make;' and rl1e latter "searches wiili 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 bream life (or soul, nefesh) into the dry bones "so that rl1ey may live" is a meta­ phor for ilie need to add rl1e moistness of vowels to lifeless consonants. More extravagantly, David Pomsh claims iliat all that is intellectually sig­ nificant about ilie accomplishments of ilie Jews stems from dlis failure to notate vowels; an "in1perfection" he connects to rl1e "central metaphysical tenet" of Judaism, the "w1pronow1ceability, rl1e unwritability, and rl1e un­ thinkability of the name of God?' (1998, 54) For dlis essay, rl1e metaphysics of alphabetic writing, borl1 Hebrew and Greek, will be seen from a perspective which doesn't tmn on ilie presence or absence of vowels, or on the supposed travails of reading and interpret­ ing an 'in1perfect' script, or on rl1e tmpronounceability and so on of God's name (and its supposed metaphysical consequences), though all raise interesting issues, but railier on a feature of writing rl1at precedes such phenomena, nan1ely its ability, in its capacity as a medium, to petform a reflexive, self-citational move-inherent in ilie writing of'l'-and rl1ereby give rise, under appropriate conditions, to a disembodied, supernatural agency. 14

CHAPTER ONE

But before disembodied agencies come embodied ones. Alphabetic writing, like all technological systems and apparatuses, operates accord­ ing to what might be called a corporeal xiomatic: it engages directly and inescapably witl1 tl1e bodies of its users. It makes demands and has corpo­ real effects. As a necessary condition for its operations it produces a cer­ tain body, in tl1e present instance an 'alphabetic body' which has relations (of exclusion and co-presence) witl1 existing semiotic body practices. The alphabet does tllls by imposing it own mediological needs on the body, from tl1e evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write to the invisible, nemological transformations which it induces in order to function. It s i the latter effects, beneath the radar of tl1e alphabet's explicit ftlllction of inscribing speech and so quite separate from its manifold in­ scriptional activities, that will be significant. I shall approach the alphabetic body through the topic of gesture. The particular motive for proceeding tlms will emerge in due course, but in relation to tl1e general question of embodiment, communication, and human subjectivity the idea is not tlllnatural: there are deep-lying lines of force between gesture and becoming human. As an affective medium of tl1e body and its semiotic envelope, gestme reaches deep into htllllan so­ ciality through its vital role in hominization (tl1e proffered breast, the use of facial expressions, pointing, cuddling, the phenomenon of turn taking, the induction via visual capture and motl1erese into speech), and through its linkage to tl1e embodied wordless empathy, the psychic mirroring of each other necessary for meaningful utterance and witl10ut which what sociologist Michel Maffesoli (1994) calls puissance, tl1e 'will to live: would not be possible. For Giorgio Agamben gestme constitutes a key category in relation to political ontology, a tlllrd term between means (pure action) and ends (pure production) whose essential mode of action is tl1at within it something is "being endured and supported"-activities which, he claims, allow the "emergence of being-in-a-mediun1 of htllllan beings and thus opens up the ethical dimension for them?' (2ooo, 57-58)

Human Gesture Notwithstanding its role in empatl1y, hominization, and its relation to tl1e etllical, making gestme the point of entry into the alphabetic body nlight seem puzzling. After all, tl1e alphabet inscribes speech, and compared to tl1e latter gestme is widely held to be cmde and pantominlic, an atavistic, semantically impoverished mode of sense making overtaken by the develTHE ALPHABETIC BODY

15

opment 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, tl1e nature of thought, and tl1e technology of writing. Such a diminished status is no longer tl1e case.3 Nor was it always so. In tl1e middle of tl1e seventeenth centmy John Bulwer, pmsuing Francis Bacon's dream of discovering mankind's original language that disap­ peared in the Biblical catastrophe of Babel, turned to gestmes, "transient hieroglyphs" Bacon had called tl1em, as tl1e key to tl1e search. Bulwer, a physician, was interested in gestme's physiological character. He looked to tl1e fact and manner of gesture's evident embodiment to provide clues to the original but now lost tmiversal language. Bulwer, inventor of tl1e first finger-spelling alphabet, opens his book Chirowgia with an extraor­ dinary tribute to the hands' abilities to convey meaning and incite affect:4 "With tl1ese hands;' he says, "we sue, entreat, beseech, solicit, call, allme, 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 gestmal microcosm ofmid-seventeenth-century English social, religious, and legal encotmters. In an earlier essay, Panthomyotomia, Bulwer attempts a meta­ phorical dissection of the muscles of the face and head in an attempt to re­ :

late tl1eir movements to the motions of thought taking place so near tl1em. Bulwer's writings inaugurate a (yet to be constm1mated) gesturology and make him the first theoretician of the semiotic body. In tl1e next century others followed, most famously Condillac with his attempt to lay out tl1e gestmal roots of language, Charles de Brasses's project on tl1e gestura­ physiological origins of language, and the Abbe de !'Epee's chan1pioning

of a language for the deaf composed of gestmes. But by tl1e mid- to late-nineteenth century gesture had fallen victim to a scientific psychology which subordinated an emotionalized (in1plicitly ,

feminine), gestming body to a rational, speaking mind. A cmel conse­ quence of tl1is 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 tl1e deaf: "Ges­ ture;' the organizers insisted, "is not the true language of man . . . . Ges­ ture, instead of addressing the mind, addresses the imagination and tl1e senses. Thus for us, it is an absolute necessity to prohibit tl1at language and

16

CHAI'TER ONE

to replace it with living speech, the only instrument of human thought!' (quoted in Lane 1984, 391) Some eighty years later rl1is phonocentric dis­ missal of Sign started to collapse when rl1e gestural systems used through­ out the world by the deaf to commw1e 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 rl1eories proclaiming the gestural affiliations and origin of htm1an language.s (Nevertheless, some rl1irty years after Sign's linguistic recognition, traces of rl1e phonocentric and textocentric derogation of gesture remain: several universities in rl1e United States refuse Sign as a fulfillment of graduate language require­ ments on rl1e kettle-logic grotmds rl1at 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 rl1e vehicle and physical means of language is not the deepest nor, for our purposes, rl1e most significant aspect of rl1e relation between gesture and speech. Interestingly, Maxine Sheets-Jolmstone observes that the "skeptical as­ sessments of sign languages, not to say their derision" are tied to rl1e fact that in all forms of Sign the gestural articulations of thought are perceived rather than, as rl1ey are in verbal languages, apperceived. Tllis fact makes mind-body dualists for whom rl1ought is invisible and mental-inside the head-tmcomfortable and reluctant to grant Sign the status of a language. (2002, 157) In relation to rl1e body and alphabetic writing of spoken lan­ guage gesture operates in the interior of speech itself as rl1e presence of rl1e body wirl1in 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 ges­ ticulations-each with its own relation to language.

Enwlem Gestum Like spoken words, ASL gestures are coded entirely by a linguistic sys­ tem. Distinct from rl1ese, 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 dmmb, 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

THE ALPHABETIC BODY

17

fist, tapping the nose, shrugging, chuckling, beating one's breast, giving tl1e finger, winking, and innumerable other visible, haptic, auditory, and tactile disciplined mobilities of tl1e 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 tllem­ selves, 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, tl1reaten, seek protection, express contempt or fear?' (1992, 64) This list (that could easily be describing a portion of Bulwer's enun1eration of the expressions of tl1e hand) makes it clear tl1at emblems are social, experiential, and interper­ sonal, deployed to make sometlling happen, to impinge on the behavior of the self and otl1ers; emblems are not really interested in making state­ ments, 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 tl1at their meanings are neither explicitly defined nor (outside of instmction in rhetoric or act­ ing) are they intentionally learned or studied, but ratl1er tl1ey are picked up, absorbed and inculcated, taken in directly by the body, as it were, and (perhaps for tl1is reason) remain stable in form and import over long peri­ ods of time despite linguistic changes in tl1e commtmities of their users. These features indicate that emblem gestures might operate according to a different dynanlic and logic, and might accomplish different ends, from tl1ose of speech. Calling them 'speech' acts, suggests tl1ey are within tl1e horizons of speech and assumes they operate, as a mode of meaning or af­ fect creation in tl1e same ways and for the san1e purposes as speech. But s i tl1is so? Are emblems in any sense translatable into spoken language? Can tl1ey be transposed into words? What, for example, is the speech equiva­ lent 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, tl1eir way of refusing and displacing speech, calls for an explanation. McNeill offers one in terms of 'word magic? "Spoken words are special and carry witl1 tl1em tl1e responsibility for being articulated. However, conveying 18

CHAPTER ONE

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 tmth in the idea that ges­ turing rather than talking removes one from the net of justifications, argu­ ments, questions, deceptions, interpretive qualifications, and recrimina­ tions that speech inunediately introduces. But how many emblem gestures admit of tl1e same meaning as a word or spoken phrase? Indeed, what does "having tl1e '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 confron­ tation from saying "up yoms" or "fuck you" or "go screw yomself:' and so on. (That there are inequivalent verbalizations suggests emblems generate meanings by their very exclusion of speech.) But in any event, assuming tl1at 'san1eness' of meaning makes sense, is the difference between ges­ turing and voicing the 'same' meanings reducible to "lessened responsi­ bility"? Thus, consider otl1er deployments of emblems, for exan1ple their ex­ tensive, deeply embedded, and seemingly indispensable use in secular and religious rituals and practices. Here sometlling different from lessened re­ sponsibility, almost the opposite, seems to be in play; as if words, so easily uttered, are insufficiently responsible, not binding enough, too fleeting and precise at the same tin1e, and only bodily action can fulfill tl1e rele­ vant ceremotlial and devotional or litmgical pmposes; as if gestures are able to create and stabilize belief, to induce as well as express religious feelings, social ideologies and moods, and forms of consciousness more radically and with more appropriate affect than the specialized precision of speech.6 In tl1is context, what Andre Leroi-Gourhan says about speech's (and writing's) inferiority to art vis-a-vis religion, "tl1at graphic expression restores to language tl1e din1ension of tl1e inexpressible-tile possibility of multiplying the din1ensions of a fact in instantly accessible visual symbols" (1993, 2oo), carries over from graphic symbols to visual gestmes? Evidently, emblem gestmes say notl1ing (even when tl1ey are auditory and even when they can be verbally parsed). In fact they ftmction at their most characteristic when differentiated and opposed to speech. Unlike words, which stand in a coded relation to ideas, things, interpretants, people outside themselves, emblem gestures signify and have mearling­ better: have force, affect, point-tl1rough tl1e fact of tl1eir taking place, in the effects they help bring about, in the affectual matrices tl1ey support, in all tl1at tl1ey induce by virtue of tl1eir occm-rence as twents. In other words, THE ALI'HABETIC BODY

19

emblem gestures do not say anything outside their own situated and em­ bodied petformance: their relation to speech is one of exclusion, avoid­ ance, and on occasion silencing. Agan1ben locates the essence of gesture in this silencing and articulates it as an exclusively metamedialogical phe­ nomenon: "Because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something in language; it is always agag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor's in1provisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak?' (2ooo, 59) However illwninating it is to construe gesture in metacommwlica­ tional terms, as the "making of a means visible;' the formulation is ulti­ mately reductive in several senses. First, as we've seen, emblem gestures execute a variety of speech-act-like ftmctions such as pronlising, threaten­ ing, and the like, as well as devotional and meditational acts rl1at have little or norl1ing to do with the "exhibition ofmediality?' Second, insofar as they metacommunicate in rl1is way, it is as emblems rl1at they do so and not as ges tures at large; moreover, they behave in dlis way in relation to speech and not necessarily wirl1 respect to other media. Third, even in relation to speech, gesture behaves in ways other than a gag: besides excluding or silencing speech or marking its inability to articulate in sentences rl1e state of being inside language, gesture co-originates with and accompanies spo­ ken language asgesticulation, and on a deeper level is intrinsic to speech as tone or prosody, the auditory gestures of the voice, without which htm1an verbal utterance is impossible. Lastly, characterizing gesture in exclusively metalogic terms, "what is relayed to human beings in gestures is . . . the conummication of a commtmicability" (Agamben 2ooo, 58) masks the fact rl1at gesture is also and always a medium ofno small in1portance in its own right. To say more we need first to describe its gesticulatory and prosodic forms of mediation.

Gesticulation A casual look at conversation and storytelling shows verbal utterance ac­ companied by fleeting, often barely discernible, seemingly idiosyncratic and indefulite gestures of rl1e fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, and face. Gestures that appear to be cotmected, although how is not clear, to rl1e substance of what is being narrated. These gesticulatory movements are not platmed or consciously produced; rl1ey are involwltary and sponta­ 20

CHAPTER ONE

neous and are for the most part tmnoticed and communicationally super­ fluous. Certainly, blind people have no difficulty comprehending speech, and people converse easily on the telephone, listen to recorded messages, and fully understand speech on the radio, without registering too much disturbance at the absence of any accompanying gestures. More than other kinds of gesture, gesticulation seems an mmecessary addendum to utter­ ance, an echo perhaps of a pre-intellectual, pre-verbal form of communi­ cation, having little to do wirl1 the articulation or expression of rl1ought in speech. Empirical investigations of rl1e gesticulatory activity accompanying verbal narration suggest orl1erwise. Far from being epiphenomenal, a surface effect tmconnected to rl1e expression of thought, gesticulation re­ lates to rl1e semantic, pragmatic, and discursive aspects of speech in non­ trivial ways, embracing various kinds of gesture accomplishing distinct semiotic tasks. There are iconographic gestures, for example outlining a square shape depicting literally a 'window' or metaphorically indicating a 'window of opportunity'; kinetographic gestmes, for example miming handwriting to indicate 'writing' or a 'text' or 'literacy'; or bringing rl1e hands togerl1er accompanying the expression 'an agreement was reached'; or gestures to mark an abstraction introduced into the narrative, for ex­ ample cupped hands (rl1e container metaphor in Western cultme) when narration jumps out of the story being told and refers to its genre. There are also 'beat' gestures, brief on/off movements marking rl1e word rl1ey accompany as significant not for its semantic content but for its discur­ sive or pragmatic role, for exan1ple, a hand flick when a new character or rl1eme or metalingual gloss is introduced into a story. Beside rl1ese self­ contained or holistic gestures there are also contrastive pairs. For example, a straight-line gesture indicating a direct somce of information against a cmved one indicating information that is mediated; or evolution in time by a series of looping gestures in contrast to a straight line for a succession of stages having no element of transformation. And there is a class of ges­ tures rl1at realizes experiential meanings, from self-pointing to specifying times and places, rl1at correspond to deictic or indexical terms in speech such as 'I:'you: 'here: 'now' which make essential reference to the physical circumstances of rl1e speaker.8 Plainly, gesticulation (notwithstanding its conmmnicative redtmdancy in most practical contexts) is linked to the words it accompanies at non­ trivial levels of speech. Why and how this has come about is not as yet m1derstood. One might attempt an explanation along rl1e lines that gesTHE ALPHABETIC BODY

21

ticulation translates a prior version of the sentence that is uttered, or that gesticulatory movements are created to illustrate, an1plify, or gloss speech as the latter is produced. That such explanations (which give causal pri­ ority to speech) are not feasible follows from the way gestural form and the meaning of the utterance it accompanies are connected: there is a tight temporal binding, accurate to fractions of a second, discovered to operate between gesticulation and speech. Any gesture has a preparatory phase, a stroke phase in which the gesture proper occurs, and a withdrawal phase. In gesticulation, the preparation precedes the word(s) it relates to while the gesture itself coincides exactly at the height of its stroke phase with tl1e word(s) in question, after which gesture and words disperse together; a sinmltaneous anticipation, coincidence, and falling away only possible if gesture and words are produced together, only if tl1ey issue from some­ thing preceding each of tl1em; only if, McNeill argues, there were some earlier linkage, a common 'origin; in some sense pre-verbal and pre­ gestural, to them both. For McNeill (1992, 2005) this gesture-word nexus consists of a dia­ lectic of opposed modes of representation: gestural (imagistic, holistic, and syntl1etic) and verbal (linear, segmental, and analytic); the final utter­ ance being the result of an interaction between a relatively free, privately formed, individual gestural in1pulse and the rule-based, public, socially constrained demands of a linguistic system. In other words, thinking, at least insofar as it eventuates in speech, has its beginning in visuo-kinetic images which then become gesticulated and verbalized to form an utter­ ance. One might note in tl1is connection the linguist ·wallace Chafe's analy­ sis of verbal utterance as composed of 'idea units' corresponding to single 'thoughts'; the duration of each tmit being about two seconds, more or less tl1e tin1e for a complete gesture to take place. (Chafe 1985) It is as if spoken thought starts life as a yet-to-be-realized gesture, an idea we shall encotmter later in a more developed form operating within mathematical thought. I turn now to the third form of gestural mediation and speech, tl1at which inhabits speech itself, nan1ely prosody.

Gestures ofthe Voice Emblem gestures operate outside of and alternative to speech; gesticula­

tion operates alongside and parallel to speech. We come now to another

form, ultimately more significant for our purposes, tl1e audible body

22

CHAPTER ONE

movements which operate

inside speech:

gestures which constitute the

voice itself. Speech involves systematic and interconnected movements of the lips, tongue, cheeks, jaw, glottis, vocal chords, larynx, diaphragm-identifi­ able and repeatable patterns of body parts-suggesting that it might be usefully regarded as a species of gesture, auditory as distinct from visual, but gestural nonetheless. Findings from research in phonetics and artificial speech synthesis over the past two decades confirm this. They indicate that it is precisely as a gestural system that the complex kinematics-the aural/ oral assemblage of movements rl1at make up rl1e human voice-are best comprehended. Specifically, the task-dynamical, physiological models of rl1e type describing the assemblage of movements and skeleto-muscular organization of the body during walking have proved ideal for modeling the dynamics of rl1e lips, tongue, larynx, and so on, during speech produc­ tion. Moreover, not only s i rl1e production of speech gestural, but so it turns out, somewhat Lmexpectedly, is its perception: "Surprisingly:' as the evolu­ tionary neurologist Terrence Deacon finds himself saying, "auditory pro­ cessing of speech sOLmds does not appear to be based on extracting basic acoustic parameters of the signal, as a scientist might design a computer to do, before mapping rl1em onto speech sounds. Speech analysis appears designed instead to predict which oral-vocal movements produced them and ignore rl1e rest?' (1997, 14) We listen, it seems, not to speech sOLmds as such, not, rl1at s i , as isolatable sonic entities, but to rl1e movements of the body causing rl1em; we focus on what happens between the sOLmds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away, and completions-the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them. In a certain sense, we listen to speech-sounds as signs of their gestural origins, as a physician listens to the sOLmds a patient's heart makes in order to analyze the movements causing them. Linguists draw a fundan1ental division between two aspects of spo­ ken utterance: they separate what s i considered by them to be 'proper' to language-what is actually said, the grammatically and syntactically gov­ erned strings of phonemes, words, phrases, and so on, for example, "To be or not to be"-from rl1e 'paralinguistic' manner of rl1eir saying, from how what is said is said, for exan1ple in this case, the prosodically varied ways such a line might be delivered by an actor playing Hamlet. Prosody s i the gestural dimension of the voice, its "grain" (Barthes): it comprises all the

THE ALPHABETIC BODY

23

vocal dynamics often referred to simply as 'tone: or 'tone of voice: namely the phrasing, the intonation, rl1e musicality, the rhyrl1m, the volume and emphasis, the rise and fall of pitch, the fallings away and accelerations, rl1e pauses, gaps, hesitations, the anticipations, elisions, silences, elongations, repetitions, and contractions that the word-strings of an utterance are sub­ ject to. Prosody has an ancient lineage. It originates from innate primate calls. But though rl1e two are closely related as signals, and though "laughing, sobbing, screan1ing with fright, crying with pain, groaning, and sighing" constitute a more or less innate repertoire ofprosody-like calls, rl1e two are distinct.9 For, ''tmlike calls of orl1er species:' Deacon points out, "prosodic vocal modification is continuous and highly correlated with the speech process. It is as though the call circuits are being continuously stimulated by vocal output systems" (1997, 418), as d10ugh, as a neurological conse­ quence ofhearing oneself speak, the midbrain and limbic systems respon­ sible for primate calls become detached from instinctual control, become de-i1mate. This allows them to be eventually re-deployed in expressively and semiotically variable ways: rl1e vocal gestures that constitute prosody become culturally malleable vehicles of human affect.IO According to a recent, neurological account of the evolution of lan­ guage by 1errence Deacon (1997) (see chapter 5), rl1is move, rl1e escape from instinctual calls to what we now identify as the prosodic din1ension of spoken utterance, did not occur overnight. The prosodic system which is essentially a "system of indices" that direct attention to what rl1e speaker deems to be most salient, must have been "tightly linked to the evolution of speaking abilities:' rl1at is, to the trans-indexical, symbolic use of words, over a considerable time period, since rl1e two systems are "parallel and complementary to one anorl1er anatomically as well as ftmctionally?' This deeply laid down parallelism, manifest as a "seamless complementarity" (1997, 364), rests on a neurological division of labor between control of the rapid-fire articulatory phonemic movements and rl1e slower waves of prosodic gestures. One might observe here a similarity to rl1e paralinguistic activity of gesticulation. The split-second coincidence of words and rl1eir accom­ panying gesticulation-a consequence of rl1eir co-origination-is here a literal fusing: word and gesture are integral, two sides of rl1e same utter­ ance heard as a single acoustic event. However, in the case of gesticulation, rl1e gestures signal meta-linguistic and discursive features of the ongoing verbal narration, which are essentially markers of cortical origin, whereas 24

CHAPTER ONE

here the gestures constituting tone of voice signal subcortical, affectual aspects of the utterance originating in the midbrain, aspects that are often vital to the meanings put into play. As rhetoricians and actors know, dif­ ferences in tone can make the same words gentle or witl1ering, questioning or threatening, flattering, indifferent, or menacing, or sardonic or gleeful or seductive or pleading, and so on. But, as we shall see, tl1e inseparability of words and their tone, the seanuess whole tl1at constitutes verbal utterance, applies only to speech. It is precisely what is lost when writing enters the scene; as soon, that is, as utterance is transcribed and rendered as an alphabetic text. (Indeed it is 01uy in tl1e wake of writing that tl1ese separate aspects of speech appear.)

Writi?W Speech What if one could separate speech from the voice? Eliminate tl1e tone and keep tl1e words? Alphabetic writing is a communicational medium, and every medium disrupts what had been for its predecessor conceived as a seanuess whole, an integrated assemblage. The process of remediation involves a recalibration of space-time with consequent separations and severings of what were spatial and temporal and physical and aural con­ tiguities and a reconstitution of (a dimension of) the original content in virtual form, which for writing is the text, speech being reconstituted in virtual form as 'speech at a distance! Writing segments tl1e spoken stream of sotmds into words (which tl1emselves owe tl1eir status as separate items to the action of writing) from the time, place, circumstances, psychologi­ cal wherewitl1al, and social contexts of its production and re-situates it at another time, elsewhere, for otl1er purposes, in other circumstances, in unknown contexts. It cuts speech loose from the voice, substituting for tl1e individual, breathing, here-and-now agency of the one who utters them by an abstract, invisible author, and replacing a unique event, tl1e utterance which w1folds over time, by fixed, repeatable, atemporal alpha­ betic inscriptions, inscriptions which necessarily fall short of representa­ tion. "Speech:' Barry Powell observes, "is a wave:' and the alphabet's sepa­ rate graphic marks "cam10t represent it!' (2002, 123) And, more salient here, alphabetic writing eliminates all and any connection speech has to the body's gestures. One might object tl1at handwritten alphabetic texts evade this total disjtmction from gesture. ·written emphasis, uncertainty, rhythm, discontinuity, stress, tailing off, and other scriptive traces of the body, might be said to be the handwriting correlates to certain rudimenTHE ALPHABETIC BODY

25

tary forms of vocal gestmes. But the effect, to the extent it exists, is tenu­ ous and not uniform enough to serve any reliable communicative ftmc­ tion. In any event, it was effectively eliminated from public texts with the arrival of printing and increasingly from private ones by typewriting.ll At first glance this elimination of gesture is what one would expect. After all, the alphabet writes speech and has no truck with emblems, which operate outside the domain of speech, and it has no interest in ges­ ticulation, which adds norl1ing in practice to speech and is dms irrele­ vant to the alphabet's task. But omitting the gestures that are interior to speech-eliminating the entire prosodic landscape of vocal gestme-is anorl1er matter, one which makes clear that the alphabet does not and in fact cannot write speech. Alphabetic letters don't captme or represent or notate rl1e utterance rl1at comes out of the mouth and is heard by a listener. They notate individual(ized) words, which (in the wake of writing) can, as we've seen, be designated simply as 'what's said; but they do not notate the prosodic dimension, not rl1e affect, force, point, and manner of deliv­ ery of the words, not how what's said is said. It would be difficult to exaggerate the consequences of prosody's OJnis­ sion for the development ofWestern literacy: responding to it has been the condition for the possibility of this literacy, shaping and inventing what cow1ts as a text and, what is rl1e same thing, establishing rl1e protocols of reading alphabetic writing. The recognition rl1at such writing falls short of speech was of comse immediately apparent early on: in the writing down of Greek fw1eral orations and the problem of their delivery by an ora­ tor orl1er than their bardic author; and in the Jewish Talmudic tradition of endless rabbinical interpretation engendered by rl1e problem of inter­ preting the 'spoken' word of God. A contemporary accotmt of writing's inability to render tone is offered by speech-act rl1eory: "Writing;' David Olson writes, "lacks devices for representing the illocutionary force of an utterance, rl1at is, indications of the speaker's attitude to what is said which the reader may use to determine how the author intended the text to be taken. The history of reading is largely the history of attempting to cope with what writing does not represent?' (1994, 145) This is at best a partial trurl1. More is involved in prosody's absence than the loss of illocutionary force, understood here in terms of a speaker's "attitudes" and author's "intention" as a deliberately formulated, linguis­ tically explicit, consciously presented 'thought'; an abstract entity whose very conception within the written history of the West is of an item origi­ nating in a 'mind'; itselfan abstract disembodied entity brought into being 26

CHAPTER ONE

by alphabetic writing. Equating what writing omits with the content of a conscious speech act only obscures the inexplicit, a-conscious effect of dlis loss which, as we shall see, s i key to the very construction of 'mind! For the present we can observe that rl1e identification is perforce reduc­ tive: it occludes rl1e corporeal underside of the alphabet's action. What writing onlits from speech is rl1e body: rl1e feelings, moods, emotions, attitudes, intuitions, embodied demands, declarations, expressions, and desires located in ilie voice, rather ilian consciously formulated (writable) rl1ought. What it onlits is rl1e entire field ofaffect conveyed and induced by human vocality, through ilie voice's impulsions, inflections, and rhythms, its aural texture and emotional dynamics. A vocal field bordered on one side by song and on rl1e orl1er by ilie non-speech of sighs, moans, cries, gnmts, screams, laughs, and so on, all iliat, in Roland Barthes's phrase, surrounds a "language lined with flesh?' (1975, 66-67) Notwiilistanding rl1is, it is still true rl1at the history of reading is rl1e !lis­ tory of redressing what writing fails to represent. Or, rl1e same thing, rl1e history of writing consists principally of attempts to find readable equiva­ lents and alternatives to ilie vocal prosody necessarily absent from it. Lack­ ing vocal gestme, writing was obliged to construct its own modes of force, its own purely textual sources of affect, which it accomplished ilirough two dialectically opposed-or better, co-evolutionary-principles of cre­ ation: transduction (rl1e discourses of narrative prose) and min1esis (the voices of poetic diction). The poetic generation of affect is ilie more direct, iconic, and cor­ poreally rooted one of mimetic retrieval: it seeks to recuperate vocalic gestures, to reproduce the oralfamal achievements of an embodied voice wirl1in ilie sound effects of speakable te-xts. Paul Zwnilior commenting precisely on the performance and reception of oral poetry talks of "body movements" being "integrated into a poetics;' and he notes rl1e "aston­ ishing permanence rl1at associates gesture and utterance;' insisting rl1at "a gestmal model s i part of ilie 'competence' of the interpreter and is pro­ jected into performance?' (1990, 153) The impulse is to reproduce a kind of sonically faithful sinmlacmm of rl1e work of rl1e voice: rl1rough words chosen as much for ilieir amal/oral features as rl1eir significance, through fusions and splittings of phrases, through rl1e deployment of textual ar­ rangements-and ordering, jtLxtaposing, spacing, enjambment-which minlic ilie gesture-based dynamics of toned speech.12 \Vim prose, retrieval gives way to textual reinvention. Here, alphabetic writing brought into being an entire apparatus of its own for inscribing THE ALPHABETIC BODY 27

affect. Prose rejects any directly sonic recuperation of vocalic gestures in favor of a textual transduction of tl1em. It transposes or transmutes pro­ sodic effects into inscriptional ones through tl1e invention of new, tex­ tual forms governed by granunar and syntax rather than sonic values, in the process distributing (written versions of) affect across the entire lexi­ cal and syntactic landscape via the creation of a range of devices-neolo­ gisms, phrasal conventions, textual diagran1s, rhetorical inversions, fig­ ures of 'speech; letter-forms, and narrative formulas and 'styles? These devices serve and facilitate a great variety of affectual desiderata for various purposes, from tl1e literary project of inducing polyvalence and estrange­ ment (tl1e primary fw1ction of literature according to Victor Schlovsky) to tl1e sought-after clarity and unambiguous neutrality of legal texts and the 'plain style' of scientific prose intended to eliminate any trace of'sub­ jective' and nonliteral affect. Observe that, strictly speaking, the development of prose and poetic diction s i not tl1e fruit of tl1e alphabet alone, in tl1e sense of being con­ structed from letters. Both min1esis and transduction called for and in turn were forwarded by devices and teclmiques of ptmctuation that discharge a core set of functions handled orally by tone. These are extra-alphabetic having to do with handling text-blank spaces between words, conm1as, question marks, periods, quotation marks, paragraphs, hyphens, marks of ellipsis, capital letters, exclamation marks, parentl1eses-ratl1er tl1an rep­ resenting sound elements of speech. Moreover tl1eir introduction went hand in hand witl1 tl1e conceptual iimovations they offered, "Certain con­ structs that cannot exist without reference to the alphabet-thought and language, lie and memory, translation, and particularly the self-devel­ oped parallel to these writing techniques?' (Illich and Sanders 1988, x) To this must be added the use of these devices to aid reading. Thus St. Jerome described tl1e segmenting of texts, writing 'by clauses and phrases' (per coma et commata), that he had found in classical texts, as being more intel­ ligible to the reader than the textual practices of his day: "It told the reader either to raise or lower tl1e voice, in order to render sense tlu·ough proper intonation?' (Fischer 2003, 48) But, as we have seen, only a small portion of (tl1e work of) intonation, proper or otherwise, has been built into the augmented devices of the alphabet. Interestingly, tl1e process continues: a whole new generation of ptmctuation teclmiques-mark-up languages, scripting codes, and style sheets-specifically for augmenting electronic texts are now being developed and used to make them easier to be read aloud by voice-synthesizing machines. 28

CHAPTER ONE

Textual Brains The two sides of human speech, syllables (self-contained, discrete) and the tone (continuous and extended) of their delivery, are governed neuro­ logically by the comparatively recent neocortex and rl1e ancient midbrain or limbic area respectively. In speech-indeed as speech-they occur simultaneously, are w1ited, coupled into a single meaningful sonic event. Alphabetic writing disrupts dtis tmity. It splits ilie voice, selecting from the stream of speech (what it defines as) words to notate, jettisons all trace of their tone, and sets up its own neurological apparatus to handle rl1e writing and reading of the resulting letter notations. At rl1is point a nemological qualification is in order. Here and in what follows I deliberately adopt a simplified topographic pictme of ilie ar­ rangements of ilie brain's fw1ctions. In reality rl1ere seems to be not one localized area of affect and feeling-the midbrain and limbic structmes­ and one localized area of cognitive iliought-the neocortex-but a num­ ber of separate, interconnected regions, distributed rl1roughout the brain, each specific to types of emotion and cognitive processing. This is part of an emerging consensus of the brain as "a collection of systems, sometimes called modules, each wirl1 different fw1ctions?' (LeDoux

1996, ros)

An

adequate neurological pictme of how affect and abstract iliought, tone and 'what's said' are interrelated, then, would have to incorporate how rl1e relevant modules are connected to and interact wirl1 each other. No such account at present exists. In fact neurological interest in ilie topic of affect is relatively recent and has yet to provide such a picture. However, for the purpose of identifying the rudimentary, but highly significant neurologi­ cal effects brought about by the practice of alphabetic writing and reading, a crude first approxin1ation, framed as an opposition of cortical and mid­ brain systems, is more than adequate.l3 'Learning one's alphabet: acquiring ilie ability to read and write alpha­ betic inscriptions, is an intense cognitive business requiring a permanent alteration of their brains that takes human children a protracted period of repetition and practice to accomplish. Neurologically, ilie requirements of literacy create in rl1e brain what we might call a 'literacy module: a neural complex wirl1in the neocorte.,x dedicated to writing and reading purely textual entities, rl1at is, handling ilie production and reception of phonemic strings rl1at constitute written words shorn of rl1eir prosodic content and associated affective fields, words decoupled from the moods, feelings, desires, and regulatory activity routinely evinced (and induced)

THE ALPHABETIC BODY 29

by spoken utterance. The module comprises a mesh of pathways centered in the frontal-occipital lobes and virtually unmoored from the midbrain. As such it is distinct from the 'speech areas: rl1e lateral-parietal network governing the generation and reception of utterance and which from the advent of language has been coupled to rl1e affect apparatus of rl1e limbic systems and midbrain. One can relate the picture here to the neurological theory of'emotional conditioning' put forward by the neurologist J. LeDom: (1994, 1996), ac­ cording to which an input train of stimuli is split in two pathways: one going to rl1e lin1bic systems and the orl1er to the neocortex. The result s i a division of labor: the older and earlier lin1bic systems govern the rapid affective evaluation of the stimuli with respect to memory and condition­ ing; the more recent neocortical apparatus handles the slower, context­ dependent rational analysis of the stimuli. Though autonomous, the two padnvays intertwine and combine affect and analysis within an emotional response. In like manner, rl1e signifying neocortical dimension of words and rl1eir affective, prosodic dimension mediated by rl1e limbic systems combine in speech. But writing's elin1ination of vocal affect foregrounds the neocortical dimension, which is thus set in opposition to rl1e speech it purports to represent. The opposition between speech and disembodied writing is a hier­ archy. This is in the obvious sense that in the process of establishing itself as rl1e vehicle for rl1e creation and furtherance of Western culture, writ­ ing has from its inception dominated speech, assigning it a subordinate status within literacy's increasing colonization of all that was the prov­ ince of oralism. And also in a less evident sense of being patterned on a neurological precedent difficult to avoid. Thus Terrence Deacon observes rl1e production of human speech might be modeled on rl1e "superposi­ tion of intentional cortical motor behavior over autonomous sub-cortical vocal behavior" necessary to cow1ter rl1e "unintended eruption ofprimate cries?' (1997, 244) In like manner, writing can be seen as demanding a neocortical override of rl1e midbrain, a superposition necessary to sup­ press or inhibit rl1e production of prosodic speech. Corresponding to the tmintended eruption of primate cries, then, one has the cotmterproduc­ tive eruption of vocal affect, of prosodic gestures which, interestingly in rl1is connection, themselves derive from de-instinctualized primate cries. In any event, it seems rl1at the familiar hierarchies-cognition over affect, d10ught over feeling, signification over force, and ultimately mind, soul, and spirit over body and soma-that permeate rl1e intellectual mainstream 30

CHAPTER ONE

and values of Western culture, might have their antecedents in an absent­ better, disenfranchised and repressed-midbrain set against a consciously present, inevitably foregrounded and dominating neocortex. This means that on the one hand, writing's de-prosodized words ap­ pear incorporeal,

as

if they issued from a disembodied and autonomous

source.l4 On the other hand, from its begim1i.ng, writing has effaced its own role in constmcting the hierarchies of mind over body, thought over feeling, and so on. By clain1ing (in writing) to re-present speech wirl1out loss, by systematically identifying itself as a medium which transparently inscribes speech, it masks the radical disjw1ction from speech rl1at enables it to make such a claim. Conflating virtual and actual speech has consequences of an ontologi­ cal and metaphysical kind. Once the alphabetic body is in place, once rl1e neuronal padnvays of literacy have been installed in the brains of its users and becan1e automatic du-ough the repeated alphabetic writing of speech and reading of lettered texts, that is, as soon as writing "invisiblizes" itself as a medium, rl1e stage is set for rl1e coming into being of an entity-nec­ essarily incorporeal-who is in1agined to write 'I.' Such a being or agency 'speaks' itself with a virtual voice and, in (undeclared and unexan1ined) analogy to the spoken 'I: is imputed to be the source and origin of vir­ tual speech.

In chapter 5, we shall see how two such agencies-Mind and

God-exhibiting different modes of transcendental escape from corpo­ reality can be w1derstood as medialogically engendered ghosts, spectral quasi-presences which emerged out of the alphabetic writing of 'l.' One can ask about rl1e 'speech' of such virtual beings. For exan1ple, seeing that the cmmections essential to vocalic affect are routed rl1rough the frontal lobes, imagine the suppression of rl1em

as

performing a kind

of orthographic version of a pre-frontal lobotomy: certainly, descriptions of lobotomized speech, "in their words . . . no traces of affection could be detected" (Amaral and Oliviero 2005), suggest how, if it were possible to realize it, we might perceive de-prosodized words, speech emptied of all affect; an idea I return to later.

THE ALPHABETIC

BODY 3 1

Two GESTURE AND NON-ALPHABETIC WRITING

Gesture inside Mathematics Thinking

is not a process

that takes place 'behind' or 'w1derneath' bodily

activity, but is the bodily activity itself. -Ricardo Nemirovsky and Francesca Ferrara,

New Avenues for the Micro­

analysis ofJWathematics Learning: Connecting Talk) Gestttl·e) and Eye Motion (2004)

Gesture's relation to alphabetic writing lies in the omission of prosodic affect and its subsequent textual retrieval and re-invention in poetry and prose. We come now to the action of gesture in relation to a species of non­ alphabetic writing-the ideogran1S and diagrams which encode meaning in mathematics. The last decade or so has seen an increasing focus on the importance of physical activity and bodily mechanisms within all forms of learning and thought, not least within the highly theoretical, abstract, and long­ considered disembodied concepts of mathematics. Thus, when George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez contend rl1at "Mathematics is embodied, it is grotmded in bodily experience in the world" (2ooo, 365), or N u t' 1ez refers to "rl1e embodied cognitive foundations of mathematics" (2006, 160) they are claiming that marl1ematics rests on a network of inferences derived from metaphors of basic body activities-such as starting, stopping, final­ izing an action, continuing along a path of motion, gathering together a plurality of objects, etc.-which they tmderstand as cognitive mappings and schemas tmderlying the various operations of elementary arithmetic, the theory of sets, and other mathematical abstractions out of which the bulk of mathematical concepts are formed. Other, more directly empirical, studies take a more inunediate route to

the body's engagement with mathematical ideas by observing it in situ, as part of a discourse or performance, observing how, for example, the body behaves in the process of grappling with a new mathematical concept. Here, tl1e question is not one of representation-the apparatus of em­ bodied metaphors, similes, or metonyms supposedly 'behind' the matlle­ matics-but on what is revealed by tl1e physical activities themselves, tl1e moving around, visualizing, talking, scribbling, and gesturing involved in learning and commw1icating tl1e subject. Thus, by tracking the moment­ to-moment eye movements (saccade gestures) of a group of mathematics students arguing about, notating, and engaging with real and imagined diagrams, Nemirovsky and Ferrara found tl1e students' tl1inking to en­ compass "parallel strean1s of bodily activity" manifest as a "coordinated activity among hands, eyes, and talk in the process of expanding, or bring­ ing into tl1e open, aspects of visual meaning" (2004), an organic notion tl1at leads tl1em to concur witl1 tl1e thesis tl1at "Children's tl1inking;' and hence htm1an thinking in general, "is more akin to an ecology of ideas, co-existing and competing with each other for use, tl1an like monolithic changes from one stage of tmderstanding to tl1e next?' ( 1-2) l One consequence of tllis embrace of an ecologically tmderstood think­ ing body is to establish tlut tl1e deep links gesture has to speech and tl10ught are not confined to verbally expressed narration, but appear to be significantly linked to tl1e nonverbal ideograms and diagrams tl1at com­ prise mathematical languages. The idea tl1at gestures of tl1e body, abstract tl1ought, and mathematical diagrams are intertwined is not new. The philosopher Maurice Merleau­ Ponty, whose entire phenomenological project could be summarized as a meditation on 'the flesh that tllinks; was advocating a version of it half a century ago. Thus, starting with tl1e presupposition tl1at the geometer is dynamic and embodied, "The subject of geometry is a motor subject" (1962, 443), and confronted witl1 the standard definition of a triangle as a tluee-sided figure, he insists that "There is no definition of a triangle which includes in advance the properties subsequently to be demonstrated;' no "logical definition of tl1e triangle could equal in fectmdity the vision of tl1e figure?' (441) On the contrary, the creative force, their ability to mediate new meanings, of mathematical entities such as triangles is pre-formal, in­ separable from our lived, embodied, and dynan1ic interaction with tl1em. Before all else triangles are 'tl10ught' tl1rough the active body. A triangle's essence is physical, concrete, a "certain modality of my hold on the world?'

34

CHAPTER T\'1'0

y

\ \ \ \ \

\ X

Figure 1. .Merleau-Ponty's triangle.

(442) And this is literally so: a 'hold' consists for him of the drawing and perceiving gestures which determine any diagram, but which is never ex­ hausted by them, since, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the gestures over­ flow any particular diagranm1atic representation. The standard geometrical proof that the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees goes as follows: a = a* and b = b*, since lines X and Y are parallel and any transversal intersecting parallel line does so at equal angles. From this we can conclude that a + b + c = a * + b* + c. But the right-hand side of this equation is the angle subtended by a straight line, which by definition is

180 degrees. After presenting tllis demonstration Merleau-Ponty observes, "My per­

ception of tl1e triangle was not . . . fixed and dead . . . it was traversed by lines of force, and everywhere in it new directions, not traced out yet, came to light. In so far as the triangle was in1plicated in my hold on the world, it was bmsting with indefinite possibilities of which the constmc­ tion actually drawn was merely one:'' (443) More recently, the matl1ematician Gilles Chatelet elaborated a matlle­ matically far-reaclling and more-sophisticated version of Merleau-Ponty's

GESTURE AND

NON-ALI'HABETIC WRITING 35

account of diagrams in his work on the mathematization of space (2ooo). For Chatelet, the fecundity of diagrams, their ability to mobilize what Merleau-Ponty sees as "indefinite possibilities" of mathematical meaning, derives precisely from their relation to gestures. Two principles organize Chatelet's genealogy of physico-mathematical space. One is an insistence on intuition and premonition, on the a-logical, the 'metaphysical' or contemplative dimension of mathematical thought; the other is an insistence that mathematical abstraction cannot be divorced from "sensible matter;' from the movement, perceptual activity, and agency of bodies. Their combination-an embodied rumination-is for Chatelet the generative source of mathematical ideas, a claim he demon­ strates by examining the role that gesture and diagran1s (they are for him inextricable) play throughout mathematics, and especially their ftlllction wirl1in the geometrization of space. Diagran1s, figures of contemplation, live for Chatelet in rl1e aftermath of the body's gestural mobility: gesture at both an organizational and merl1odological level. Thus, speaking of the large-scale periodization of rl1e historical dynamic forming the mathematics/space nexus, he declares : "Gesture and problems mark an epoch?' (3) And in terms ofmethod: "The concept ofgesture seems to us crucial in our approach to the amplifying abstraction of marl1ematics": a mode of abstraction that cannot be para­ phrased nor metaphorized nor captured by formal systems that "would like to buckle shut a gran1mar of gestures?' The gesture is not referential, "it doesn't throw out bridges between us and things;' and it is not pre­ determined, "no algorithm controls its staging?' It would be better, he says, "to speak of a propulsion, which gathers itself up again as an impulse, of a single gesture that strips a structure bare and awakens in us other ges­ tures?' (9) He emphasizes that gestures refer to a "disciplined distribution of mobility before any transfer takes place: one s i infused with the gesture before knowing it?' (10) In other words, gesture is outside rl1e domain of the sign insofar as signs are coded and call for a hermeneutics, an interpre­ tive apparatus separable from, and in place prior to, rl1e act of signification. Rather, rl1e mode of action of gesture is enactive, exterior to anything prior to its own petformance: it works through bodily executed events, creating meaning and mathematical significance "before one knows it?' One consequence of the fotUldational rigor imposed on rl1e presen­ tation of marl1ematics in rl1e twentierl1 century has been an obscuring of its connection to the activity-gestural, visual, meditational-of rl1e

36

CHAPTER TWO

body. Characterizing mathematics as an edifice of formal, set-theoretical structures ignores the corporeality, the physical materiality (semiotic and performative), as well as the contemplative/intuitive poles of mathemati­ cal activity; and in so doing dismisses diagrams as mere psychological props, providing perceptual help but contributing nothing of substance to mathematical content.2 Against this, Chatelet explains their ubiquity within mathematical practice by assigning a fundan1ental importance to the work they do in the creation of'content': diagrams are more rl1an de­ pictions or in1ages: they are frozen gestures, rl1ey "capture gestures mid­ flight" and thus have a kinematic as well as a purely visual dimension. "A diagram can transfix a gesture, bring it to rest, long before it curls up into a sign;' which is why, he says, "modern geometers and cosmologists like diagrams with rl1eir peremptory power of evocation?'( 10) A crucial attribute of diagrams in Chatelet's tmderstanding is their after­ life, their capacity to be re-activated, to not get used up or "exhausted?' This separates rl1em from metaphors: they can "prolong themselves into an operation which keeps them from being worn out?' True, like metaphors, they can "leap out in order to create spaces and reduce gaps;' but tmlike a metaphor, a diagran1 initiates another phase: when a diagram "inm10bi­ lizes a gesture in order to set down an operation, it does so by sketching a gesture rl1at then cuts out another?' Chatelet thus understands rl1e work of diagrams as a relaying of gestures, as a "technique of allusions;' and speaks of dynasties of rl1em, "fan1ilies of diagran1s of increasingly precise and an1­ bitious allusions?' (ro) which extend through the historical development of marl1ematics; rl1e recuperation of their lineage is one of rl1e principal tools Chatelet uses to organize his genealogies.3 Diagrams are not repre­ sentations of existing knowledge or already available content; rl1ey dis­ till action and experience and "reveal rl1emselves capable of appropriating and conveying 'all this talking wirl1 the hands' . . . of which physicists are so proud?' Chatelet sees the appeal to and deployment of diagrams as a pere1mial element of marl1ematical practice: "The diagran1 never goes out of fashion: it is a project that aims to apply exclusively to what it sketches; rl1is demand for autonomy makes it rl1e natural accomplice of d10ught experin1ents?'4 (u) Mathematics, rl1en, offers two modes of converting the "disciplined mobility of rl1e body" into signs: transducing it via metaphors which "shed their skin" to become symbolic operations such as adding numbers; and capturing it, freezing mobility n i mid-flight to form a diagran1. (Recall

GESTURE AND NON-ALI'HABETIC WRITING 37

our earlier encotmter with these two modes as the means of engendering literate versions of vocal affect wirl1in alphabetic writing: prose, Chatelet's metaphor (transduced gesture), and rl1e poetic, his diagrams (captured gesture). In each case the source of the mathematics is not itself marlle­ matical; it arises from what Chatelet calls 'mminative' or 'contemplative' and on occasions 'metaphysical' rl1ought. It corresponds to what most mathematicians refer to sin1ply (and opaquely) as 'intuition': the hunches, instincts, premonitions, convictions of certainty without evidence, and numerous other gut feelings that seem to hover over any engagement with rl1e subject. Attempts to accoLmt for these a-logical, pre-verbal feelings in terms of an epistemology of 'objective' marl1ematical objects usually end up in a form, more or less mystical, of Platonic metaphysics. Thus, for example, the mathematician Alain Connes proclain1ing his belief in a mad1e1natical realm that exists "independently of rl1e hLmlan mind" insists rl1at marlle­ matics is the exploration of an "archaic reality"; rl1e mathematician "de­ velops a special sense . . . irreducible to sight, hearing or touch, that en­ ables him to perceive a reality every bit as constraining as physical reality, but one rl1at is far more stable . . . for not being located in space-time" (1995, 28). But talk of an 'archaic reality' is romantic and mystifying. If one accepts the embodied-metaphorical and gestural-origins of mathemati­ cal thought, then mathematical intuition becomes explicable in principle as rl1e Lmarticulated apprehension ofprecisely this embodiment. And iliere is no reason why mathematicians' perceptions of rl1eir inner kinesis, auto­ hapticity, and proprioception, should lie outside ilie space-time in which rl1eir bodies consciously or otherwise situate rl1emselves. After all, such ap­ prehensions are by no means strange: humans 'know' things; they embody knowledge of their environment that has enabled them to survive, gesture to each oilier, make tools, hLmt other bodies (hun1an and not), and roam the world long before the advent of speech and rl1e configuration of con­ sciousness that came with it. So that Connes's archaic reality, his intuition of it as the domain of marl1ematical objects, might be no more and no less rl1an a felt cmmection to his body, rl1e apprehension of his inner gestu­ ral activity, a perception, perhaps, of his own neurophysiology which, it seems, Cmmes (and others) is able to harness as a source of mathematical abstraction.s

38

CHAPTER TWO

Gestura-haptic Writing

The hand in the age of the image seems amputated, no longer able to cover the eyes or the face, overwhelmed by the landscape of speed. Yet, this frenzy of the surface provides the hand its cachet; touch has become synonymous with the genuine, the real, the human. Touch, is nostalgic. Touch cannot be mediatized, technologized, mechanized. Yet this dichotomy is false-or at least simplistic. -Christof J'v!igone, "The Prestidigitator: A Manual" (2004) It is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds. -Antonin Artaud,

The Theatre and Its Double ( I958), 99

the curiously archaic present Imagining a future in which alphabetic writing and with it philosophical essays and literature as we know them will disappear, replaced by forms evolved from them, Andre Leroi-Gourhan assures us at the end of Ges­ ture and Speech that the mentality and accomplislm1ents of these artifacts will not be lost, since rl1e "curiously archaic forms employed by rl1inking human beings during the period of alphabetic graphism will be preserved in print?' (1993, 404) Leroi-Gourhan's belief in rl1e eventual demise of alphabetic writing and its illustrious products is e.,xpressed in the very medium whose dis­ appearance it heralds. If his prophecy is successful, rl1en any response to it from rl1e archaic present will be inadequate and lin1ited in ways expres­ sible only by its successor. It also seems fantastical and infeasible-outside rl1e weightless imaginings of speculative fiction-to think of somerl1ing as deeply folded into our Western historical and religious being and cul­ tural self-identity as alphabeticism disappearing. (Of course, from a non­ alphabetic standpointsuch as Chinese orthography, its demise might seem less impossible and more imaginable, but such a perception doesn't in1­ pinge on the question of archaization rl1at prompts his prediction.) And yet is not the opposite belief to Leroi-Gourhan's just as outrageous? Can one really believe alphabetic writing will never be archaic, will always be wirl1 us, rl1at in all possible, foreseeable, or imaginable futures of rl1e human extending our present technologized state, alphabetic inscription will go on being rl1e principal medium for recording, creating, and trans­ mitting human knowledge, telling history, thinking philosophy, and in­ scribing affect? GESTURE AND

NON-ALPHABETIC WRITING 39

Leroi-Gourhan asks us to imagine our present alphabetic graphic prac­ tices as ancient before tl1eir time. In an immediate empirical and manual sense, alphabetic writing already feels obsolescent: writing a text, such as tl1e present one, by making half a million minutely different, attention­ needing, error-prone, and irksomely intricate finger movements on a key­ board s, i in ilie scheme of practical things, hardly less archaic ilian labori­ ously incising cuneiform syllables one by one into wet clay. But this seems not to be in tl1e direction ofhis question. One might, mindful of ilie alpha­ bet's limitations in respect to rendering ilie prosodic elements of spoken utterances, invoke ilie mark-up languages extensions to it being developed to remedy the situation. These so-called languages are scripts along tl1e lines of an extended HTML embedded in text files; only instead of enabling a browser to display a hypertext page iliey enable voice-syniliesizing de­ vices to read aloud alphabetic texts. Their purpose is to improve tl1e machine-readability of texts along affective dimensions by providing tags whose decoding allow text-recognition software to reproduce a passable version of certain standardized prosodic effects. But textual augmentation to in1prove machine vocality embeds us furilier ramer than takes us out of the regime of alphabetic writing. Of course it is possible that existing and not new graphic practices are in ilie process of rendering ilie alphabet archaic. Certainly ilie explosion of visual in1ages brought about by digital teclmology has resulted in many of tl1e traditional semiotic functions discharged by alphabetic writing (notably but not exclusively the display, recording, manipulation, and transmission of technical and scientific knowledge and information from demographic datasets to weatl1er patterns) being usurped by visual artifacts-tables, graphs, arrays, diagrams, charts, and maps-replacing words; and it has resulted in changes in parellelist subject positions and subjectivity in di­ rections quite distinct from that coLmtenanced by alphabeticism and tl1e textual protocols it furtl1ers (more of which later). But again, notwitll­ standing tl1e threat to alphabetic inscription, iliis is not what seems in­ tended by Leroi-Gorhan's prognostication, since visual practices which have long petformed their own dance in relation to alphabetic writing are governed as much by an orthogonality to written texts as by one of obso­ lescence or supersedence. After all, tl1e rivalry between words and images is as ancient as ilie alphabet's acrophonic emergence from pictogran1S, and the iconophobia embedded in the alphabetic-text-based monotl1eisms of tl1e West testifies to a long-established antagonism which would have to be dismantled or rendered irrelevant for tl1e image to sufficiently destabilize 40 CHAPTER TWO

the alphabetic word to the point of its archaization. What Leroi-Gourhan points to is not anorl1er move in an old battle between pictures and words but a new medium: a conummicational teclmology which would operate in a maimer related to rl1e fact that the alphabet writes rl1e movement of the speaking body. The operative term here is body. For it is from an embodied etlmologi­ cal perspective iliat he tmderstailds alphabeticism, writing being for him "the subordination of rl1e hai1d to language;' a servitude coming to an end as Homo sapiens s i «freed from tools, gestures, muscles, from prograi1m1ing actions, from memory, freed from imagination by rl1e perfection of rl1e broadcasting media, freed from rl1e ailimal world, ilie plailt world, from cold, from microbes, from the unknown world ofmotmtains aild seas . . . !' (407) But forty years later, in ilie full flood of a digital trailsformation of our cultural infrastructure not suspected by Leroi-Gourhail or his con­ temporaries, we are begimung to understand that bodies aild their (our) inunersion in the world are not so easily abai1doned, iliat escaping from corporeality merely replays ail ailcient failtasy of trailscendence rather d1ai1 follows a narrative of teclmological advance, and rl1at contrary to wirller­ ing the body or leaving it behind it will be by tmiting wirl1 it-merging, augmenting, capturing, and re-engineering it-rl1at technology might render our present alphabetic dispensation archaic. In light of tlus, responding to Leroi-Gourhail's provocation requires attending to ilie link between alphabetic writing and the body, one which will go beyond, or behind, rl1e usual instrumental aild representational formulas governing that connection. notating against capturing The alphabet, as we've seen, notates a portion of ilie sigrufying sounds produced by ilie orgai1s of speech. A suitably specific escape from its pre­ sumed archaic state might go by way of a double leap. First jtm1p, beyond rl1e written mark: why interpret 'writing' as notation, as ilie projection of body activity (here, speech) onto a pre-set list of inscribed marks and a syntax? vVhy not ail a-symbolic mediation-a direct sampling or capture rather IDail a coded representation? Second jump, beyond the oral-vocal apparatus: why the restriction to the movements of rl1e orgailS of speech, to the physiology aild neurology of brearl1ing aild its articulation into con­ sonailts and vowels? Why not ilie movements of ail)' aild all of ilie body's orgailS aild parts, oral, aural, or otherwise, traditionally signifying aild a­ signifying alike? GESTURE AND

NON-ALPHABETIC WIUTING

41

The dominating interpretation of notation and writing (outside the pragmatically w1helpful totalization of the latter as 'spacing' within de­ constructionist discourse) is that of media comprised of marks and syntax with pre-assigned meanings ranging from the constative to the perfor­ mative and operational. ·within this formulation there are many different examples. Thus: the originating example, at least in the present context, is of comse the alphabet whose letters (along with ptmctuation and other marks) are operational signals for a human reader to reproduce specified sounds and their relation according to a juxtapositional and linear syn­ tfux. Or the symbol system of Western five-line musical notation, where the sotmds are to be reproduced by pre-calibrated voices and instruments and rl1e syntax has a simple two-dimensional structme. And rl1e various systems for notating dance movements, of which Laban notation with its larger mm1ber of symbols, inclusion of musical notation, and more elabo­ rate two-dimensional syntax is the best known. And, older dun alphabetic writing and in a category of its own, the vast field of marl1ematical writing wirl1 its open-ended array of ideograms and diagrammatic symbols and multidimensional syntax rl1at can (and systematically does) become part of the meanings being mediated. But against notational media are the practices, apparatuses, and modes of capture which constitute non-symbolic media. In these, what is medi­ ated operates w1der the regime of rl1e enacted or reproduced rather rl1an rl1e symbolized. Thus, the phonogran1 and tape recorder don't notate sotmd in rl1e form of symbols but write it-record or captme it-as a direct signal to an apparatus able to reproduce (a perceptually indistinguishable version of) the captmed sotmds; likewise the can1era for the reproduction of captured visual scenes (though with the additional layer of convention and subsequent interpretation of images not present with sound capture). Described in terms of figmes of speech, notational media are regulated by metaphor and similitude, while captme media operate under rl1e regimes of metonymy and synecdoche. Or, focusing on semiosis, notation involves a discrete algebraic framework or relational structure of prior terms, while capture presents a continuous topological model of posteriorly identifi­ able, internal differences. The existence ofmedia like photography, film, video, and sotmd record­ ing, rl1en, which are able to make a direct iterable trace of the look of rl1e visual real, or the sotmd of the audible real, addresses rl1e second of rl1e two jwnps just indicated by way of an immediate suggestion: why not an analogous form of mediation for the perception of the moving real.

42 CHAPTER TWO

Is there any reason-biological, physical, theoretical, or practical-why movement could not similarly be recorded? Could there not be a form of kinematic writing able to capture the perceptual feel of actual movements in space? The answer is yes, there could be such a medium: digital tech­ nology in fact offers rl1e possibility of a non-notational meditml capable of reproducing rl1e kinesis of bodies, called, appropriately enough, motion capture. But before elaborating, it will help to gloss common and for our pur­ poses not irrelevant uses of the term 'capture' connecting it to older forms of mimesis. Thus, within traditional theatrical and ceremonial discourse one talks of imitation, min1icry, copying, and quotation as modes of cap­ ture, in which rl1e htm1an body and voice are used to capture movements, postures, and sounds of humans (but also of animals and machines). But these actions lack any trace or record of rl1emselves, and though they ftmc­ tion as vital forms of capture within artistic performance are not a form of writing as interpreted here-their impermanence, their lack of any iter­ able trace, being precisely the point of rl1e epithet that theatre s i 'written on the wind! From rl1e opposite direction rl1ere are those media which do indeed record and notate (unwittingly) a mimicked movement, though rl1is aspect-which legitimates calling them written media-is not in rl1eir accepted description foregrounded about them. Examples would be painting, carving, calligraphy, pottery, sewing, embroidery, knitting, and weaving, all of which achieve a certain freezing of actions by reproducing traces of human movements (rather than the movements themselves) as inextricable components of the pots, written messages, depicted images, tapestries and textiles whose production is rl1eir primary ftmction. Of rl1ese modes of tmintentional capture, painting by virtue of its cul­ tural preeminence resulting from its representational usages is exemplary; its recording of the artist's gestures through brushstrokes constitute what is recognized to be an essential aspect of rl1e art, an aspect, however, dis­ cursively downplayed and neglected when compared to painting's repre­ sentational function. The art historian James Elkins, battling dlis neglect of the sheer materiality of paint and arguing against the marginalization of rl1e embodied action and painted gestures in favor of rl1e depicted content, insists on rl1e paint-psyche connection, how paint "embeds thought;' how it furnishes a "cast of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and d10ughts?' Seen thus, paintings, particularly oil paintings, be­ come records of a d10usand accunmlated strokes of rl1e brush, which "preserve rl1e memory of tired bodies rl1at made them, rl1e quick jabs, GESTURE AND NON-ALPHABETIC WRITING

43

the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures?'

(1999,

5) Or, less

deliberate and localizable, infamously brushless as it were, and detached from the depictive and representational agenda offigurative art, are the so­ called action paintings of Jackson Pollock-paintings which enact a ver­ sion of the corporeal question?' Pro­

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REFERENCES

161

Index Abacus, 58, 59 Abbe de I'Eppe, 16

of, 29; elimination of gesture by, 3 ;

Absence of signs, xv

140n2, 149n2o; inability of, to wtite

Abstract expressionism, 44

speech, 26; Phoenicia11, 14; psycho­

Abuse, 100

neurological effects of, 54; seriality

Action painting, 44

of, 93-94, 134; tl1e visual a11d, 124­

Adam, 123

25; virtualization of speech a11d, so

ghosts of, u8-19; Greek, 14, 125,

Adaptation, xviii, xi.x, xxi

Alphabetic body, tl1e, 13-31

Adlnfinitmn

Alphabetic culture, 93

.

.

.

(Rotman), xiv, xvi

Affect, 4, 5, 16, 24, 26, 27, 94, 104, 108, 133; alphabetic discourse and, 2, 3;

Alphabetic fetishism, 123 Alphabetic wtiting, 54, 105, 108; con­

in htm1an mind, 1 ; inscribing of, 39;

sequences of, 2; corporeal axiom­

location of, in brain, 29; in poetry,

atic of, 15; as creation of persons,

27; in prose, 28; in reasoning, 23; in

94; dethroning of, by virtual, 112;

speech, xxxiii, 121; technology and,

disruption of tmity of voice by, 29;

6; in theatre, 4; the virtual and, u1;

future of, 39; monotl1eism and, u9;

vocalic, 31, 126

neurophysiology of, 54, 57, 82; ob­

Agamben, Giorgio, 15, 20, us

solescence of, x.xxiv, 2, 4, 40, 54, 57,

Agency, xiv, xv, xvi, xxvii, x. xxi, 91,

137; lack of prosody in, 128; prose

u8, 127, 128, 135; collective, 102; of Jahweh, u9; in mathematics, 6o-61, 64; multiple sites of, 9; para-htmlail a11d, 134; speech and, 121; super­ natural, u8; through tedmology, 6; xiii' 4·) virtual ' through writing' xx. ..

l!I, u2; the virtual a11d, u6

a!ld, 28 Amaral, JUlio Rocha do, and Jorge Martins de Oliviero, 31 America11 Sign La11guage (ASL), x.w, !6 Analog, huma11 consciousness and perception as, xi

Aleph, 124

Analog thought in mathematics, 61

Algoritlm1s, x.wii, 36, 46, 62, 63, 69;

Animal commtmication, xviii, xi.x

feasibility a11d, 70, 72; seriality of, 83 Allusions, 37 Alphabet: x.w, xx. xi, x.xxiii, 13, 15,

i Animal minds, xx

Appel, Kenneth, a11d Wolfgang Haken, 64

28, 40, 41, 42, 57, 58, 82, 94, u6,

Aristotle, x.xxi-xx xii, 127, 131

124, 128, 129, 137, 140!11; binary,

Aritlunetic, x.wi, 33, 58, 62, 75, 83,

2; Bulwer's 16; childhood learning

86-88

Art, I9; aura of, 96

Brain-machine interfaces, I3911l

Artaud, Antonin, 4, 39, 48, 49, 104;

Brain size, xx, x.xvi

The Theat1·e and Its Double, 39

Brooks, Rodney, x

Artificial intelligence, 9I

Brosses, Charles de, I6

Artificial speech synthesis, 23

Brushstrokes, 42-45

Asymptotic growth, 7I-75

Bulwer, John, I6, I7; Chirologia, I6,

Attitude of the speaker, xxxiii, 26, 27,

I40n4; Panthomyotomia, I6

I26

"Aura" (prose poem), xxxviii

Calculus, 65, 89; linearity of, I44n6

Australopithecine, xvii

Calvino, Italo, I2I

Auto-hapticity, 38

Cantor, Georg, x.uii, I32; infinite

Avatars, 8, 46, I34; sex between, 47

aritlunetic of, 87

Cassell, Justine T., et al., 48

Babel, I6

Cavarero, Adriana, I2I-22, I47n11

Bacon, Francis, I6

Cellular automata, 62, 89

Bailey, James, 90

Chadwick, Helen, x.wiii, 95

Baldwin, James Mark, xviii

Chafe, \!Vallace, 22

Baldwinian evolution, 115

Chandrasekaran, B., 89-90

Barglow, Raymond, v, 8I

Chaos theory, 62

Barthes, Roland, 5, 23, 27, 126, I451112

Chatelet, Gilles, 35-38, 45, I4In3

Baudlillard, Jean, 95

Children's thinking, 34

Becoming, iv, 103

Chinese orthography, 39

Becoming beside omselves, 103, I04,

Chinese writing, I3, 94, I24

105, I34

Christianity, I36

Benjamin, \!Valter, 95

Chmch, Alonzo, xv

Benveniste, Emile, 107-8

City-states, I3

Benvenistian linguistics, Io8

Clark, Andy, xiii, I, 8

Benzon, William, and Richard Mark

Classical music, 86-88

Friedhofi 66

Beside, iv, 103

Co-evolution, x, xvi, xvii; of mathe­ matics and machines, 58-59, 62

Blind people, 2I

Cognitive etlu10graphy, 9I

Body, the, 4I, 53; alphabetic wlit­

Cognitive science, xvi

ing and, 4I; as exogenous, I33; as

Cognitivism, 9I

heterotopic, I34; as increasingly

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, I07

readable, I34; obsolescence of, 46;

Conmmndments, I2o, I24

as transparent, I33

Conm1oli, Jean-Louis, 96, I43111

Body practices, Io8; in religion, I50n27

Complexity theory, 7I, 73

Boolean logic, 69

Computability, xv

Borges, Jorge Luis, 94

Computational sciences, xiv, xvi

BOLmds, 70, 7I, 72, 73

Computer mouse, 44, 98, 110

'

Bourbaki, Nicolas, 66

Condillac, Etienne Bormot de, I6

Boyer, Pascal, I3I

Connes, Alain, 38

164

INDEX

Consciousness: postmodern, wo; of the self in Deacon, x.xii; through writing, 94

the subject in, 139n2; on writing as graphism, x..xiv Descartes, Rene, 128

Co-presence, 83, 98, 99, 104

Deus ex machina, 116-19

Corazza Eros' 115 ' Corporeal writing, x.x iv

Dewey classification, 94 Diagrams, 33-40, 58, 124, 125, 1411114,

Cortical function, 90, 128

142n2, 143n3, 148-491117; absence

Cortical migins, 24-25

from "The Oligin of Geometry;'

Cotmting, 87, 102, 131; as creation,

125, 1481116; as allusions, 37; as epi­

imagined, 76; with whole numbers,

phenomenal' 66' as 'frozen gestures' ' 37, 1o8; as more than representa­

85

tions, 37; in painting, 45; symbols

76; metaphysics and, xxxii; real vs.

Crary, Jonathan, 97 Cryptography, 62, 69, 72, 73, 74;

·

m, 42 Diaries, 94

achievability of decryption and, 71;

Digital binary code, 2

pragmatic concerns and, 73

Digital computer, 59; antagonism

Culture, 51-52

of, to the analog, 76; effect of, on

Cyborgs, xiii, xvii, 1

mathematicians, 61; effect of, on mathematics 59, 75-77; recursive

Dantzig, Tobias, 85, 86

capacity of, 75-76; testing and solu­

Davis, Erik, 117

tion and, 143n2

Deacon, Terence, xxii, xxv, 23, 24, 30, 52, 109, 114, 115, u6, uS, 139n6; on

Digitally produced images, 3, 40, 93·

See also Images

symbolic web, 114. See also Deacon,

Digital mathematics, 132

Terence, and Merlin Donald

Digital media, 144n8; consequences

Deacon, Terence, and Merlin Donald,

of, for monotheism, 136

xvii, xx; Homo Symbolict�s, xvii, xx;

Discretization, 65-66

on language as life form, xviii

Discursive cotmmmication, 84

Deafness, 16

Distributed cognition, xv

Debray, Regis, 120, 136, 150n26

"Dogma of Natural Nm11bers"

Deconstructionist discourse, 42 Dehaene, Stanislaus, xxiii-xxiv, 52, 102 de Kerckhove, Derrick, 8, 126, 134, 135 Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 134, 140111, 145­

(Rashevskii), 75 Donald, J'v!erlin, x..xvi, 51, 84, 103, 115, 139n7, 145n11, 146n3. See also Dea­ con, Terence, and Merlin Donald Doyle, Arthur Conan, 117

ze, Gilles, and 46n2. See also Deleu Felix Guattari

Eames, Lesley, and David A. Oakley,

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, iv, . . Xlll, XIV, XXlll, XXVI, 104, 119

Edgerton, Samuel Y., 95

De-prosodized speech, 31

Edison, Thomas, 117

Den·ida, Jacques, xiv, x..xiv, 124, 139n2,

Efron, David, 18

148-491117; OfGrammatology, xv;

101

Egan, Greg, 150n24

INDEX

165

Egan, }e1mifer, 107, 149n21

Finite combinatorics, 62

xi; fluidity Ego, 1o8; extinction of, xx

"Finite Nature" hypothesis, 65

of, xxviii, 95

Fischer, Steven, 28

Egyptians, 119

Fluid dynat11ics, 89

Eisenstein, Sergei, x.wi, 83

Force capture, 47

El, 120, 124

Foucault, Michel, xiv, 143111

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP ),

Four-color problem, 63-64

117, 146n6, 146-47n7

Elkins, James, 43-44, 95

xii, 130,131 Ellipses (' . . '. ),xx.

Emblem gestures, 17-20, 48, 141119; as

distinct from 'speech acts; 18

Embodied mind, the, xvi

Fractal geometry, 62

Fredkin, Edward, xiii, 65; "Finite Na­

ture" hypothesis of, 65, 149-50n23

Frege, Gottlob, xv

Friedhoff, Richard Mark, and William Benwn,66

Embodied reason, xv

Friend) The (Coleridge), 107

Embodiment: disembodiment of

Frontal-occipital lobes, 30; speech

alphabet and, 3; in mathematics, 38;

in a technoscientific world, xii, 103

Emergence, xvi

atld, 31

Ftmeral patlegyrics, 126

Furniss, Mauren, so

Emotional conditioning, 30

Empathy, 15

Gabriel, Richard, 119, 147n9

Enactment vs. representation, 82

Gag, 20

Ethology, x.xv, 145111; cognitive, 88

Galileo, 65, 132

Exodus, 120

Geometrization of space, 36

Exponential fi.mctions, 70, 71, 72, 73

Geometry, 34, 125; as embodied, 34

External world, xx i

Gesticulation, 20-22, 48

Evolution, 24, xix, x.x; of the brain,

Gestural comnllmication in mind­

139n6; co-evolution ofhtmlatls

with machines and, x, xiii, xvii; of

body teclmologies, 4

Gesture, x.xiii, x.xiv, 3, 57, 108, 109,

cognition, 103; cultural, xvii, x.wi;

11o; in Artaud's theatre of cruelty,

Darwinian selection at1d, xviii; of

49; becoming htm1an and, 15; with

lat1guage, xvii, xviii

computer mouse, 44; diagratns

Evolutionary ethology, xiii

at1d, 35, 36; as event, 19; in history,

Eye movements, 33, 34

16; non-alphabetic wtiting at1d, 34;

opposition of, to signs, 51; painting

Feasibility in computation, 69-74

at1d, 43; performance art and, 44;

Federmatl, J\•1ark, 134

political ontology and, 15; prosody

Ferrara, FratKesca, and Ricardo Nemi­

of, 51; seeming atavism of, 15-16;

rovsky, 33, 34; New Aventtesfor the

separation of, from signification in

Microanalysis ofJWathematics Leam­

mathematics, 36; speech as symp­

mg, 33

tom of, xx iv; temporal cmmection

Feynman, Richard P., 65

of, to speech, 22, 24; tie of, to

Film, xi, xiii, x.wi, 2, 4, 6, 42, 46, 53,

speech atld writing, 140n3; types of,

83, 93, 97

166

INDEX

21; utterance at1d, xxiv, 3, 20, 21

Gesttm and Speech (Leroi-Gourhan), 39

Gi.idel, Kurt, xv God particle, 137

Gestura-haptic, the, so; difference

Goldreich, Oded, 64

between textual writing and, 51; in

Gordon, Avery F., !13

theatre, 49; as 'visual notation; 50

Gorgian rhetoric, 3, 126

Gestura-haptic body, so, 109

GPS, 8

Gestura-haptic mediation, 51, 53

Grammar, 4, 28, so, !14

Gestura-haptic writing, 39-54; conse­

Graphic User Interface, 44, 98

quences of, for writing and speech,

Graph theory, 62, 69

47; exo-textuality of, so; gestura­

Greek/Hellenic alphabet, 125, 128-29,

haptic meditml and, 47, 109; possi­ bilities of, 54

135, 140n2, 149n20 Greeks, 13-14, u8

Gesturology, 4, 16, so

Greenspan, Donald, 65

Ghost effect, xiii, 7, 8, 107-37; from

Guattari, Felix: on intimacy of tech­

human speech, !12. See also God;

nology and subjectivity 5, 82. See also

Infinity; Mind

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari

Ghostliness, bio-linguistic, u3-16 Ghostliness, biology of, u6

HI and H 2 regions, 73

"Ghost of Anyone's Father, The;' !13

Hacking, Ian, 1oo, 145!1!5

Ghosts, 107; comnumicational media

Haken, Wolfgang, and Kenneth

and, u6; definition of, u3; fictive, 131; medium-specificity of, u3; network-induced, 135; postmodern­

Appel, 64 Halle, Morris, and Roman Jakobson, 86

ness of, u3; types of, 149n22; tlle

Hamlet, 23, !13

virtual and, 150n25

Hand, 39

GIS (Graphic Information System), 98 GIS map, x.xvii, x.xviii; Google Eartll,

Handshake, 51 Handwriting, 25

xxviii; parallel and serial seeing and,

Hansen, Mark, xvii, 6

XXV!ll

Hanson, Andrew ]., 66

Globalization as planetary network, 135

GNU, 123

Haptic feedback, xvi; virtual auto­ hapticity and, xxiv Haraway, Donna, xvii; "Companion

God, 8, 9, 54, u2, u6, u8, 130, 131,

Species Manifesto;' xvii

132, 136, 148m3; alphabetic, 122;

Havelock, Eric, 127, 143!1!

freedom from judgment of, 104;

Hayles, Katllerine, xi, xii, xvii, 144n8,

as

'I-effect; 130; inside and outside

145!1!7, 150n24

of mathematics, xx.xii; invisible,

Hebrew language, 14, uo, 122

uo, u9; mathematics and, xx.xii; as

Hebrews, u8

media-effect of the alphabet, xx.xiii;

Hegelian spiral, 84, 93

obsolescence of, 136; shared origins

Heisenberg, Werner, 86

of, witll the 'mind; xx.xii; spoken

Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 124, 129

word of, 26; wliting and, 7, 124. See

Heraclitus, 127, 149!1!9

also]ahweh

Hilbert, David, xv

INDEX

I67

History, 39

Idea tmits, 22

Hockney, David, 98-99

Ideograms. See Diagrams

Homer, 126, 149n20

'I-er; 122, 123, 128, 129

Horizon effect, 87

lllich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders, 2, 14,

Hornsby, Roy, 47

How We Became Posthmnan (Hayles), xi HTML,

40

28,94 lllocution, 26 Imaged images, 97-98

Hugo, Victor, 93; in Ouaknin, 13

Imaged subjects, 93-99

Hm11an assemblages, xiii, xiv

Images, xvi, xxiii, x..xiv, x..xvi, x..wii,

Hm11an cognition, flexibility of, xxii

xxviii, 2, 3, 42, 43; digital or post­

'Hm11an computers; 90

photographic, x..wiii, 3, 40, 93; flat,

Hm11anities, use of empirical data in,

44; imaged, 97-98; instnm1ental;

XXIII

95; in Mignone, 39; on-screen,

Hm11an mind, 1

66; as parallel, 83; singularity or

Hm11an nature, 103

multiplicity of, 97; tension of, with

Hm11e, David, 101-2

words, 83-84; usurpation of alpha­

Husser!, Ed!mmd, 125, 1481116, 148­

betic writing by, 40; visuo-kinetic,

491117; Den·ida on The Origin of

Gemnetry and, 125; lack of diagrams in, 125; The OriginofGeometl"j, 125 Hutchins, Edwin, 90

22 Imaginary money, xv, xx.. xi Imaging, 93-99 Imagology, 93

Imagologies (Taylor and Saarinen), 93 I, x..u iii, 4; bleeding outward of, 99­

Index, xx, x..xi, xxii, 21, 24, 114

100; evolution of language and, 109;

Infants, xviii, 49, 115, 121

ghost spirit of, 118; Greek, 125-30;

Infinite Mathematical Agent, 110,

"I am the Lord Thy God" and, 7,

130-33

24; inunersive or gesturo-haptic, 8;

Infinite sets, 86-88, 132

Jewish, 119-25; lack of separation

Infinity, 7, 68-77, 112, 130, 132; algo­

between inner and outer, 102; as

titlm1s and, 71; computer science

medimn-specific, 109; networked,

and, 68-75; displacement of, in

8, 133-37; plural, 104, 134; property

mathematics, 62, 67; as ideal, 77;

and, 129, 1491119; reading, 135; as

mathematical Person and, 77; oppo­

reading/wtiting agent, 4; shift away

sition of computers to, 76; physics

from the monoidal and, 83, 92, 103;

and, 65

spoken and wtitten, 108, 110, 128;

Information, as embodied, xv

third, 8; in the Torah, 122; virtual,

Installation art, 44

xx xiv; as Western 'Me; 104; writing,

Instnm1ental Transcommunication

7, 31, 126; written vs. signed, xx.. xiii

(nc), 117, 146n6

I I Self I Other, 99-105

Instnm1ental view of tedmologies, 5-6

I, The, 107-10; linguistic character of,

Intetface design, 48

107

Integers, xx.. xii, 68, 74

Icon, xx, x..xi, x..xii, 3, 114, 115

Intermediation, xii

Iconophobia, 40, 83

Internet, ix, xxvi, 46, 89; as tactile, 134

168 INDEX

Intuition: as cotmection to the body,

!15, 123, 130; being-in-language

38; feasibility and, 74; in mathemat­

(Agamben) and, 20, !15; as commu­

ics, 36, 38, 58; about smallness of a

nication system, xix; evolution of,

problem, 73

xvii, xviii, xix, 16, 24, 28, 109, !15;

Isaiah, 120

ideolog)' and xi· origins of xxiii

Islam, !19, 124, 136, 137; gestures in,

processing, xx i; simultaneity and

'

..

'

)

'

·

succession in, 86

140-4!!16 Israelites, 13-14, !19, 122

Language and evolution, xviii, xix LeDom:, Joseph, 29, 30

]ahweh, !!8; agency of, !!9; as I AM

THAT I AM, 122,

123; invisibility

Leibniz, Gottfiied, 63, 94 Leroi-Gomhan, Andre, x. xxiv, 4, 19,

of, 124; as monobeing, !19, 147n9,

39, 40, 41, 54; Gesture and Speech,

148n12; self-birth of, within alpha­

39

betic writing, 123; as terrifying and tmique, 122; in T�rrah, !!9, 120, 123,

Lettered psyche, declining hegemony of, 133

124, 136, 147; writtenness of, 122,

Lettered self xxvi x.uiv 1-9 92

129, 136. See also God

Limbic system, 24, 29; function of, 30

Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle, 86

'

.

'

'

'

Lingua, 109 Linguistics, so, 52, 108, 109, !13

James, \iVilliam, 101

Lip reading, 16

Japanese writing, 13

"Liquefication of all referentials;' 95

Jerome, Saint, 28

Literacy, 2, 4, 21, 26, 54, 93; Greek, 3,

Jesus Christ, 123, 124

13, 125 Literary module, 29

Kantorowicz, Ernst, 130

Lobotomized speech, 31

Kaufma m, William J., III, and

Logicism, 66

Larry L. Smarr, 65 Kendon, Adam, 18

London, Barbara, 99 Lyric poetry, 126, 129

Keep , The (Egan), 107 Keyboard, 40

Machines, 58, 62

Kittler, Friediich, xiii, 143111

Machinic change, extra-lingual dimen­

Kronecker, Leopold, xxxii, 140!11 Kmzweil, Ray, ix, x

sions of, 82 J'vlachinic operations, xiii J'vlaffesoli, Michel, 15

Laban notation, 42 Lakoff, George, and Rafael N(mez., 33

J'vlaps and mapmaking, xxvii, xxviii, 40, 57, 64, 93,95,98

Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 124

J'vlargolis, Norman, 88

Landauer, Rolf, 65

J'vlartin, Henii-Jean, 13

Lange, !!3, !14

J'vlartins de Oliviero, Jorge, and J(Iiio

Langer, Susan, 84 Language, xiii, xiv, xxxiii, 6, 8, 17, 18,

Rocha do Amaral, 31 J'vlateiiality: of computation in mathe­

19, 23, 27, 30, 48, 51, 52, 59, 6o, 67,

matics, 68; of the computer, 76; of

77, 82, 85, 86, 88, 95, 1o8, H3, H4,

ghosts, !13; of matl1ematical activity,

INDEX

I69

Mate1iality (continued)

37; of media, xiii, xxv, 6; of paint,

43; of technology 5, 103

J'vlathematical agent, xv, x. xx i, 110,

J'vlerleau-Ponty, J'vlaurice, 34; triangle

of, 34-35

J'vletaconuntmication, 20

J'vletaphors, 42; in mathematics, 37-38

xxi,

J'vletaphysics, \Nestern, xv, xxiv, x.

130-33

Mathematical infinite, subjectivities

7, 92, 94, 137; alphabetic \\'titing

and, 2, 11o; in Den·ida, 139n2; ofthe

and, xx xi

Mathematician, 59, 6o, 61, 63, 64, 67,

infinite, xxx ii; metaphysical thought

in mathematics and, 38; ontotheo­

130

Mathematics: classical, 74, 75, 77;

computers and, 57-77; embodi­

logical, 9; Platonic, 38; I in, 99; the

voice and, 147n11

ment of, 33, 36-38; empi1ical (vs.

J'vletonymy and synecdoche, 42

classical), 68, 74; images in, xvi; as

J'vlidbrain, x.w, 24, 30, 31, 128

interplay of idea, symbol, and pro­

J'vlignone, Christo£, 39; "The Presti­

cedure, 59-6o; as near-experimental

' digitator: A Manual; 39

discipline' xvi' "new science" of' 68)·

J'vlimesis, 27, 28, 43

Person, Subject, and Agent in, 6o­

J'vlimicry, through media, 43

61, 64, 67, 76, 130; proofs in, 60-63;

J'vlind, 7, 26, 31, 110, 112, 118, 127, 130,

·

.

pure, 61; tigor of, 77; semiotics and,

xiv; simulation and, 57-58; teclmol­

136. See also Nous; Psyche J'vlind-body dualism: in preference for

ogization of, 58-62. See also Mathe­

writing over speech, 30-31; separa­

matician

tion of midbrain and neocortex and,

McClure, W., 63

xxv; sign language and, 17

McLuhan, Marshall, 54, 127, 143111

J'vlinsky, Marvin, 101

McNeill, David, 18, 22, 139n7, 141118

J'vlitchell, Vl'illiam, 83, 96; on "onto­

Meaning, sameness of, 19

Measurement problem in quannm1

physics, 86

Mechanical reproduction, 96

Media, ix, xii, xiii, xvii, xi..x, x.xiii, 5,

logical aneurism;' 96

J'vlonadology, 94

J'vlonetization of Greek society, 127,

1491119

Monotheisms, 119; consequences of

7, 20, 41, 57, 102, 104, 107, 109, 112,

digital media for, 136; monolatry

134-36, 143111, 144n8; captttre, 42;

vs., 12o; text-based, 40; \Nestern, 54

diminishing returns of, 135; ecolo­

Moravec, Hans, i..x

gies of, 8, 81; ghosts of, 113, 116,

Morgan, Steve, 72

117; memory, x.wi; network(ed),

Motphology, 114

xx xiii, 2, 5, 133; notational, 42; phi­

Morse, Samuel F. B., 116

losophers of, xiv, 93; regimes of,

Moses, 118-19, 122, 124, 147n9; inter­

xvi, xxvi; thought and, xxv; \\'Iitten,

pellation and, 1481113

J'vlotion captltre technology, 4, 43, 45,

53

Memory, 52, 84, 100, 133; conceptttal,

110, 134; commm1icative potentials

85; death and, 145n5; episodic vs.

of, 47; decontextttalization and, 46,

procedm·al, 85; evolution of cogni­

52; digital nature of, 45; muteness

tion and, 145n11; viewing and, 98

and, 49; other names for, 142n7;

170

INDEX

other teclmologies for, 142-43n8;

parallels of, to other forms of digi­

Nous, x.xxii, 7, 118, 126, 127, 128, 132; as

agent of endless reiteration, 132

tal recording, 45; potential of, for

Nm11ber sense, 52

movement, 45; sensors in, 45

Nt'u'iez, Rafael, 33; George Lakoff and,

J'vlousegrams, 142n6

33

J'vlultiple Personality Disorder, 100,

1451113

Multiplicative constants, 72

Oakley, David A., and Lesley Eames, 101

Multi -tasking, xxvii, 92

Olson, David, 26, 126, 127, 143111

Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts, 96

Ong, Vl'alter, 5, 94

Musical notation, 42

Optimization, 69

Muteness, potential of, 48, 49

Oralism, 30

My Moth{;P· Uifls a Computer (Hayles),

Oral-vocal apparatus, 40

X I

Orations, 3, 26, 27; body in, 27

Ordinals, 87; relation of, to cardinals,

Naming, 123

Nanotechnology, ix-x, xiii

87-88, 144ns Organs, xiii, x.xiii, 47, 127; artificial, x;

Narratives, xi, xii

of speech, xxv, 3, 41, 47, 48, so; of

Navier-Stokes equation, 89

touch, 47

'Natural mm1bers; x.xx ii, 131

Ouija board, 117

Natural selection, xviii

Ourselves, v, 103

Nemirovsky, Ricardo, and Francesca

Ferrara, 33, 34; New Avenuesfor the

Microanalysis oflviathematics Leam­

mg, 33

Painting, 43; action and, 44; corporeal

axiomatic of, 44; gestme in, 43

Papadimitrou, Christos H., 70

Neocortex, x.w, 29, 31; fi.mction of, 30

Papyri, 118

Neo-primitiveness, 49

Para-human, 104, 134; as alternative to

Networks, x, xx, x.xii, xxvii, 8, 57, 69,

81, 83, 90, 91, 92, 109; the body and,

post-hLm1an, 103; trepidation over,

104

134; the brain and, 52; the ghostly

Paralinguistic features of speech, 23

and, 117, 135; media, xx.xiii, 2, 5, 133;

Parallel and serial, xxvi-x.wiii, 3; aritl1­

of networks, 89; self as, 104; the

metic and, 87; in conummication

virtual and, 111; writing and, 110

modes, 84; dependence and inde­

Neurology, 102

pendence and, 85; as duo, 83-88;

Neuroscience, xiii

and how we see ourselves, 88; in in­

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101, 132, 1411111

finite sets, 87; music and, 86-87; as

Non-alphabetic writing, 33-54

organizing principle, 88; reciprocity

Nonbelievers, 13 7

in status and action and, 84; seeing

Non-linear dynamics, 62

and, 98; the virtual and, 84

Non-symbolic media, 42

Notation, 41-45; for electronic texts,

57

Non·e-Dame de Paris (Hugo), 93

Parallel computing, xvi, x.wi, xxvii,

xxix, 3, 57, 88-92, 104, 135; collec­

tive phenomena and, 90; obvious­

ness of, 89; setial computing vs., 83

INDEX

171

Parallelism, preexisting, 92

Proofs, 6o-61, 62, 63; probabilistic, 64

Parallel selves, 81-105

Proptioception, 38, 115, 140111

Para-selves, x..wiii xxix' )-' 9' 92' 104'

Prose, 3, 27; devices for cultivation of

..

'

133; incompatibility of, with meta­

physics, 9

Parole, 113, 114

affect in, 28 Proselytizing, 136-137 Prosody, xxxiii, 3, 20, 22-25, 40, 48,

Pascal, Blaise, 63

109, uo, 121, 125, 126, 128, 1411110;

Peirce, Charles Sanders, xiv, xv, xx, 51,

elimination of, in alphabet, 3, 125,

114, 130, 142n4

128; as gesture of the voice, 121; in

P=NP, 63, 68-75

gestures, 51; hm11an recognition

Petformance art, 44; body in, 44

and, 121; as index of importance, 24;

Perspective, 97; drawing and perspec­

omission of, 26

tival art and, xv; the self and, xxviii,

Protestantism, 136

97

Pseudo-masturbation, 46

Phenomenology, 34, 108, 109, 136

Psyche, xxxiii, 103, u8, 126, 127, 134;

Phonetics, xxv, 23, 125

alphabetized, xxviii; as Greek'r;

Photography, 2, 42, 57, 95, 144n9; ghosts and, 117

125-30; collectivist, 102; coming apart of, 133; co-presence and, 104;

Physics, 65, 68, 76

housing of, in soma, 7; intimacy

Pictograms, 40

of, with techne, 5; painting and, 43;

Plato, 126

technology and, 81-83

Plural selves, IOO-IOI, 102 Poetic diction, 3, 27

Psychic restructming toward the parallel, 83

Pollock, Jackson, 44, 49

Psychology, xiii, 108

Polynomials, 70; as relative to expo­

Psychophysiology of use of tech­

nentials, 71; polynomial time and,

nology, 6

Pttissance, 15

71 Pop-up toaster, 53 Porush, David, 14

Punctuation, 28; for electronic texts, 28

Post-htm1an, x, xxv; concern over, ix; future, 103; singulatity of, xi Post-literacy, 93

Post-literate self, 94-95 Post-photographic subjects, 96-97

Quantum physics, 85-86, 111, 149­ son23

Quantum (post-digital) computation, 135

Post-photography, 96

Potentia, 86

Radio, 21

Potts, John, and Andrew J'vlurphie, 96

Ragousi, Eirene, 129

Powell, Ba rry, 25, 109, 140n2, 149n2o

Random variable, 85

Presentational cotmmmication, 84

Rashevskii, Petr K., 75

Ptimate calls, 24, 31

Reading, xxvi, x..wiii, 3, 26; aloud, 121;

Ptinting, 26

history of, 27; practices of, 14

Probability, 85

Real, 41-42

Pronotms, 107-8

'Reflective observation; 130

172

INDEX

Reinhold, Arnold, 72, 73, 74

Representation, 2, s, 6, 9, 25, 34, 35,

4 1, 43, 46, 49, 51, 64; absence of, in

motion capture, 46; consciousness

as,

xxi; enactment vs., 82; in figura­

tive art, 44; gesture-word nexus and,

22; gesturo-haptic's replacement of,

Self, 28; changing conceptions of, 81; quantum, 135, 150n24; symbolic representation of, u6; temporality of, 94

Self-effects, 102

Self-emmciation, 108, 133, 135; as

medium-specific, xxx iii

49; mathematical, xvi; in painting,

Self-reference, 107

43; of representations, us; sym­

Semiosis: human, 85; notation in, 42;

bolic, xxi, xx ii, 46, u6; 'truth' and,

97; writing as, 41

Responsibility, 19

visual, 124

Setiality, xxvi-xxviii, 99; of letters, 3,

94, 134

Revenants, 113

Shaviro, Steven, 2, 6, 100, 140n1

IUuzome, 104

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 17

IU1ythm, 3, 23, 24, 25, 27, 108, 125

Sign language, 3, 48; gesturology and,

Richards, Robert, xviii

so; motion capture and, 47; reemer­

Ritual, 16, 19

gence of, 17; suppression of 16

Robo Sapiens, xii

Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of

Zero (Rotman), xiv, xv, xvi, xxxi

Robots, x, 46, 47, 89, 102

Silence, 48, so, 125

Roco, Mihail, x

Silencing, 19

Rotman, Btian, xiv, xxxvii, 64, 75, 131,

Simulation, 57-58; scientific method

Robbins conjecture, 63

141!114, 142n2, 142n4, 143111, 143n2,

144ns, 144n7, 1491119, 149-son23,

I)On26

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, xviii

and, 64-68

Singularity: human, xiii, xvii, xx; post-

human, xi; tonelessness and, 122

Sipser, Michael, 68

Smallness of a problem, 73, 74

Saarinen, Esa, and Mark Taylor, 93

Saccade gestures, 34

Sanders, Barry, and I van Illich, 2, 14,

28,94

Smarr, Larry L., and William J. Kauf­ malm III, 65

Socrates, 126, 1491118

Soloman, Ron, 63

Sass, Louis, 100

Snell, Bnmo, 126-27

Saussure, Ferdinand de, xv, 51, 113, 114

Spacing, 42, 148-491117

Sazonov, Vladimir, 75

Speech, 52, 109, 112, 113, 122; as con­

Scale: in computation, 73, 74; in see­ mg, 75

sequence of physical processes, 23; as

consequence of visual processes,

Schizophrenia, 100

xxiv; ghostliness of, 109; uncarmi­

Schlovsky, Victor, 28

ness of, 116, uS; as wave, 25

Schwartz, Hillel, 102

Speech acts, 18, 19, 20, 27

Scientific method, 65

Speech-act theory, 26

Seaford, Richard, 127, 1491119

Speech areas, 30

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, iv

Spinoza, Baruch, 53

Seeing, 97-98

Spiritualism, u6

INDEX

173

Starlings, 89

Symbolic relationships, xix, ni; be­

Steigler, Bernhard, 135 Stellarc, 46; transposed corporeality of, 46

tween tokens ni )

Symbols, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, x_xii, 51, 59, 114, 116, I32, 139n5; in mathemat­

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 81, 101

Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr·. Hyde) The (Stevenson), 81 Stroking, 45, 46, 47 Subject, xxvi, xiii, xiv, 5, 83, too-toz,

ics, 6o, 124; musical, 42; symbol­ processing brain, x_wii, 9I; visual, I9 Syntax, 18, z8, 41, 42, 63, 75, 94, 95, 114, 140n5 Synthetic assemblage, 52, 102

104, 139n2; Althusser and, 1481113; analog and digital, xii; bio-technic, 53, computing, 88-92, ghostly, xvi,

Talmud, 13; interpretation of, 26; scholars of, I24

'!'-saying, to8; imaged, 93-99; as

Talmy, Leonard, I 31

linguistic abstraction, to8; mathe­

Taylor, Mark, atld Esa Saarinen, 93

matical, 6o-6t, 64, 67, 130; parallel­

Technesis, 6

ist, 40; post-hLmlan, xxiv; speaking, )-o ' viewing' xxvii·) virtual' 111

Technics, xiii

4

·

Teclmoid subjects, 81-83

Subject formation, xii, xiii, x_x, x_xi

Technologized mathematics, 57-77

Subjectivity, xii, xiii, xiv, xxxi, X-'Lxiii,

Teclmologized subjectivity, 51-54

15, 111, 148m3; through the gesturo­

Technology, ix, xvii, xix, xxv, 1, z,

haptic, 51, 52; hLm1at1 mind at1d,

4, 39, 4I, 46, 57, 58, 65, 73, SI, 88,

1; through images, 40; outside of

102, 111, 112, 117, 133; corporeal

lat1guage atld signification, 8z, to8;

axiomatic of, 51; embodiment of, 6;

as mediLml-specific, 109; parallel

materiality of, 4; as more thatl dis­

computing at1d, 134; Person as, 6o;

cursive process, 6; multitasking at1d,

pre-linguistic, 115; reference to I

xxvii; neurological alterations of,

at1d, to8; quannm1, 15onz4; second­

53; as prosthesis, xiii, 5, 53; psyche

ary, xv; techno-apparatltses at1d, 8z;

in, 8I, 83; social atld cognitive con­

technologized, 51-54; teclmology

sequences of, I; subject and, x_xxv, 5,

atld, s; tlleatre atld, 49; visual, 95

5I-54; time and space and, 53

Superposition, 85, 134

Tele-dildonics, 47

Surveillat1ce, 8

Telegraphs, 7, 116; the dead and, 117;

Svenbro, Jesper, 129 Syllables, 86; as governed by neocor­ tex, 29 Symbolic communication: in Deacon, 24; in Deacon atld Donald, xvii, xviii; as extrabiological, x_xiii Symbolic reference, xix, 114, 115,

writing and, 117 Telephone, 6, 21, 117 Tele-surgery, 47 Television, 2, 93, 95, 117; picture in picture, 98 Texts, x_wi, 3, 4, 6, 26; affect in 27; electronic, 28; outside of, 124; post­

139n6; as efficient, xx; as interpreter­

humatl machine md, xii; prosody

independent' x_xii·) as shared' x_xii ·' as 4

of, 11o; pmely textual entities and,

specifically human, n; subject for­

29

mation and, n; as virtual, n, x_xi

174

INDEX

Textual brains, 29-31

Textualization of thought, 2

Theatre, 126; ephemerality of, 43

Theatre of cruelty, 49

Video and computer games, xxvii, 46,

92

Virtual, the, uo-12; ancientness of,

"Theo-graphy;' 136

112; ghosts and, 15onzs; meaning of

'They; us; they/we and, 134

term, 111, 145-46n2

Thinking, relation of, to visuo-kinetic

m1ages, 22

Virtuality in media, 7

Virtual reality, xvi

Thought, 26

Virtual speech, 129

Thmnos, 126

Virtual technologies and the self,

Tone, 2, zo, 24, 25, 121; absence of,

102-3

in alphabet, xxxiii, 125; governance

Virtual theatre, 4, 46

of, by midbrain or limbic system,

Virtual user, xiii, 6

29; individuality and, xxxiv; loss

Virtual voice and speech, 31

of, in writing, 25-27; ptmctuation

Visual, the, and the alphabet, 124-25

in prose and, 28; recapture of, in

Visualization: changes in subjectivity

poetry 27

Torah, 119, 123, 136, 1471110; 'I' in, 122;

multiplicity of Gods in, 120, 124;

as

political-theological instrument,

12o; role of writing in, 120-21

Touch, 8, 39, 134

"Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics" (Rotman), xv, xvi

and, 53; cognition and, xviii, 145nu;

phui-dimensional, 3, 57; in simu­

lation, 65-66; technologies of, xvi,

xviii, 53, 58, 67

Voice, 17, 108, 121; anti-metaphysics

and, 147nu; authotial, 121

Voice-synthesizing machines, 28, 40

Vowels, 14, 52

Trace, 42, 50

Transcendence, 41

Walking, 23

Transduction, 27, 28

\iVeb of words and objects, 114-116

Traveling Salesman Problem, 68-71

1Neyl, Hermarm, xx.xi; on ego extinc­

Truth, 9, 133

tion in mathematics, xx xi

Tsu, Lao, xxi

Wheeler, ]. H., 65

Turing, Alan, xv, xvi, 90

Vl'hole mm1bers, 85, 87

Turing machine, 59; as abstract ideal,

Willis, Anne-Marie, 96

76, 90; sequential nature of, 90

Vl'ilson, Elizabeth, 1411113, 142n5

Turner, Mark, 113

\i\To)fram, Steven, xiii, 68

Typewtiting, 26, u6, 1411111

\i\Tomen, 116

Typographic man, 54

Word and image in dialectic, 83-84

'Word magic; 18

Uncatminess of commtmicational

media, 7

Unconsciousness of a technological

meditm1, 82

\i\Triting, 50-51, 109, 112, 117, 127-30,

136, 137, 140n3, 142-43n8, i46­ 47n7; the Bible and, 12o; brain

ftmctions and, 30; consciousness

and, 94; hierarchy of, over speech,

Vanishing point, xv, x.xxi

30; linear protocols of, 92; as "mind

Video, xxvii, 42, 45, 93

upgrade;' t; privileging of mind

INDEX 175

Writing (amtintted)

over body in, 31; as re-mediation, 6;

as

spacing, 42; supernatural agency

and, 14; vi rtual entities and, 6

Writing speech, 25-28; elimination of

embodied gestures in, 25-27; rein­

vigorating speech and, 147n8; res­

cuing speech and, 122-23, temporal

dimension of, 25, 118

176

INDEX

Zazen, 103

Zero, xiv, xxxi, xx.xii; as absence and

origin, xxxi; consequences of, xiv-

XV

os and 1s sequences, 67

Zmnthor, Paul, 27, 140n3

Brian Rotman is a professor of comparative smdies i the author of several at Ohio State University. He s

books, including lvlathematics as Sign: Writill!J>

Imagining, Counti1l!J and Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics ofZero. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rotman, B. (Brian) Becoming beside ourselves : the alphabet, ghosts, i g I Brian Rotman ; and distributed human ben

foreword by Timothy Lenoir. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN·J3: 978-o-8223-+183-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN·J3: 978-0-8223-4200-7 (pbk. : aJk. paper) 1. Science-Philosophy. I. Title. QI75.R5655 2008 501-dc22

2007044861