Rotman 2008

Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.

Lettered Selves and Beyond

“as technological systems penetrate every aspect of contemporary culture, bringing about an escalating and radical series of cognitive and social upheavals, it has ecome clear that no such separation of mind and machine is possible” – we are “natural born cyborgs”

the chief “mind upgrade” is writing: writing of ideas, patterns, and procedures, and writing as an apparatus for insciribng human speech and thought

alphabet: "the West's dominant cognitive technology (along with mathematics) and the medium in which its legal, bureaucratic, historical, religious, artistic, and social business has been conducted. The result has been an alphabetic discourse, a shaping and textualization of thought and affect, a bringing forth of a system of metaphysics and religious belief, so pervasive and total as to be -- from within that very discourse -- almost invisible." (2)

concept of person related to "lettered self"

text as postmodern equivalent of soul

since 19c, new media (audio, video) have challenged alphabet's hegemony

dethroning of alphabet followed by rise of binary code that "extend[s] the alphabetic principle to its abstract limit"

text/image dichotomy "is being reconfigured by its confrontation with the digitally produced image"

the result: "technologies of parallel computing and those of a pluri-dimensional visualization are inculcating modes of thought 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." (3)

Connection to body, "corporeal dimension of utterance" (3) -- letters are not iconic, have no visual relationship to the body's organs, how the body produces their sounds; "disconnect between alphabetic writing and the speaking body" (3)

"what the alphabet eliminates is the body's inner and outer gestures which extend over speech segments beyond individual words ... the alphabet omits all the prosody of utterance and with it the multitude of bodily effects of force, significance, emotion, and affect that it conveys" (3)

Gorgian rhetoric is attempt to negotiate this division between body and speech

Digital media giving rise to new gesturology through e.g. motion capture

Not the widespread use of writing/alphabet that is coming to an end "but the regime of the alphabet that appears to be drawing to a close" (4) -- "giving way to an era in which the inscribing of speech sounds with letters is but one element, not necessarily the overriding one, in the ongoing bio-cultural-technological 'writing' of the body's meanings, expressions, affects, and mobilities" (4)

New "I", new "para-self, whose enunciation of 'I' will take place ... in the interior of a post-, better, trans-alphabetic ecology of ubiquitous and interactive, networked media" (5)

Rejects "instrumental view of [tech] as the use of tools and body-extending prostheses by pre-existing human subjects fully articulated before its deployment" and "the conception of technological media in terms of their representations, in terms of their content, the intentional manifest meanings they signify ... to pre-existing, self-sufficient subjects" (5)

"In both views the phenomenon that is unseen and unexamined is the direct effect of technology's materiality, an effect always outside its explicit human, socio-cultural character and which transforms the bodies, nervous systems, and subjectivitgies of its users." (5)

Subject-constituting work of technology happeens at "pre-linguistic, pre-signifying, and pre-theoretical level" (5) -- can't understand tech's achievement "in terms of its purely discursive, socio-cultural constructions"

Media never coincide with intended social uses or cultural purposes; always "something more is at work, a corporeal effect -- a facilitation, an affordance, a restriction, a demand played out on the body -- which derives from the uneliminable materiality and physicality of the mediological act itself, and which is necessarily invisible to the user engaged in the act of mediation" (6)

"always the user is used, the psyche-body of the one who views, listens, speaks, computes is activated and transformed by an undeclared affect, a force outside the apparatus's explicit instrumentality" (6)

Can't embed its action or mode of being entirely in language and discourse -- this domesticates technology as a "set of processes wholly capturable and able to be made explicit within conscious, representational thought" (6)

"Writing, like any medium, is a re-mediation; it engenders a clutch of interconnected discontinuities in the milieu of what preceded it: a disruption of the previous space-time consensus of its users and an altered relation between agency and embodiment giving rise to new forms of action, communication, and perception." (6) -- introduces domain of virtual, "unreal" objects [texts], that posit a virtual user, an abstract reader

"As a result all communicational media have about them an aura of the uncanny and the supernatural, a ghost effect which clings to them." (7)

The writing "I" -- pointing to a self in writing -- "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 entification of the alphabet's virtual user: an unembodied being outside the confines of time and space operating as an invisible and unlocatable agency." (7)

Speech -- alphabetic writing -- digital writing -- "each transforming their environments through a wave of virtuality specific to them" (7)