Project MUSE - Theory & Event - At the Limits of Alphabetic Thought

Project MUSE Journals Theory & Event Volume 12, I ssue 4, 2009 At the Limits of Alphabetic Thought

Theory & Event

Volume 12, I ssue 4, 2009
E-I SSN: 1092-311X

DOI : 10.1353/ tae.0.0099

At the Limits of Alphabetic Thought

Bianca I saki
Brian Rotman. Becoming Besides Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being . Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2008. 176 pgs. $21.95 (pb). $74.95 (hc). I SBN: 978-0-8223-4200-7.

Becoming Besides Ourselves continues Brian Rotman's concern with God, mathematics, and minds in a
sprawling case for the reality of the imminent reconfiguration of our selves and societies by networked,
motion-capture media technologies. The book argues, based on the shaping of sentience by the media
environment, that alphabetic-culture's coming-obsolescence will give way to newer, better, more holistic
forms of being. I t is a smart book, written by a scholar undaunted by hanging world-changing claims on
theory-heavy and experimental evidence of shifts in subjectivity. Yet, I found myself frustrated with its
conclusions.

Alphabetic writing has hard-wired into us an "alphabetic body", a cyborg-conception of those capable of
thinking alphabetic-thought. As Rotman explains, "[ t] he alphabet does this by imposing its own mediological
needs on the body, from the evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write to the
invisible, neurological transformations which it induces in order to function" (15). The medium is not only
the message, nor even the inert material used. Media hardware are embodied by their users as well.
Appropriately, Becoming cites its affiliation with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project, which "can be
summarized as a meditation on 'the flesh that thinks'" (34).

Rotman thus walks us through gesticulation, movement, vocal affect, silences and other features that
attend speech presentation in order to mark constrictions on the physiological gear used to "read" the
meanings of embodied encounters - to speak, watch and hear. By contrast with embodied communication,
like speech and sign-language, alphabetic language abstracts gesture, and, in particular, vocal gestures.

This argument works so well in part because the point of the alphabet is to be partial and metonymic of a
putatively complete intended meaning. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, 'words are made for cutting.' This
'cutting' is the violent capacity of language to standardize communication and the point of entry of power
into knowledge. I nstead of pursuing Foucault's trajectory, Rotman uses the cutting-function of words as a
foil for posing the possibilities of thought excised by alphabetic regimes. The same features that make the
alphabet a handy analytical tool - its abstraction, serial linearity and compact form – also encourage the
Western metaphysical prejudice for the mind over the body. This hierarchy holds abstract words over
embodied gestures with the consequence of impoverishing communication, using the neocortex more than
the midbrain, and constricting our conception of subjectivity to the unitary, individual. I f "the moving
around, visualizing, talking, scribbling, and gesturing involved in learning and communicating the subject"
imprint physical selves, then, Rotman reasons, understanding and making one's self understood, done
differently, will configure different selves (34). This, Rotman argues, can be an emancipative difference. By
over-exercising parts and pathways that were made for communicating through alphabetic texts, the body
itself became alphabetic. The stunted bodies of "lettered selves" derive from their focused ability to abstract
meanings into words; a constricted capacities that Rotman contrasts with the expanded exercises of
gesturo-haptic encounters. Modes of communication more attuned to the diversity of things that make up
meaning, like prosody (the gestural dimension of voice), help us strain against being gathered together into
alphabetic-selves.

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Project MUSE - Theory & Event - At the Limits of Alphabetic Thought

Part of the richness of the gesturo-haptic is its capacity to convey silence; and, what is great about
"becoming silent" is that we who have become accustomed to reading writing would, not regress, but
"reoriginate," towards a state of pre-speech (49). Exploring the unspoken elements of communication will
let us understand "how… language is able to refer to impossible actions and nonexistent entities" (113).
Rotman's assertion that gesture, amongst other modes of sentience, is an extra-linguistic medium is
underwritten by studies of language's neurological operations and evolution.

The evolutionary neurologist Terrence Deacon's account of linguistic evolution offers evidence of the
intergenerational accumulation of physiological changes in human brains. As further evidence that
alphabetic language is implanted in our bodies, Rotman cites the neurologist J. Le Doux, who shows that
the formal distinction between written versus affective communication is mirrored in the spaces they occupy
in the brain. The neural pathways of affect and memory (in the limbic system) are discrete from rational,
context -dependent analysis (in the neocortex). Whereas these two pathways mediate each other in speech,
"writing's elimination of vocal affect foregrounds the neocortical dimension, which is thus set in opposition
to the speech it purports to represent" (30).

Texts of captured-motions, because they are embodied and non-representational, are more than alphabetic
writing. The absent center of this intelligibilizing process is the identity between meaning and word, or, as
Rotman pursues it – the gesturo-haptic dimension of voice, body and motion. Beyond even "the writing of
speech," human and inhuman motions like strutting, dancing, making faces, and the movement of a
musical conductor's baton constitute "a gesturo-haptic medium of vast, unrealized, and as yet untheorized
or critically narrativized potential" (47). Basically, being-human was shunted away from being- more through
its embrace of alphabetic-writing and new gesturo-haptic resources of motion-capture media could restore
them.

Rotman calls for a "gesturology," a study of the semiotics of a body that has been overshadowed by a
written-body. I n this sense, a gesturology seems to be a counterpoint to a "grammatology" - Derrida's
explorations of the presumed privilege of speech over writing. But it's not. As Timothy Lenoir's cogent
foreword explains, the two studies share a common concern with the tendency to localize presence and
identity in Western thought. Further, as with a grammatology, a gesturology is less concerned with
compiling an inventory of gestures than with the kind of thoughts, selves and worlds that they make
possible. Of course, Rotman explains, gestures are not words nor , signs in the Saussurean sense, "except
insofar as they become so retrospectively in that they signify (if that is the term) their own happening and
its expected or habitual affects" (51). This larger lexicon of the body's meaning-making puts together
subjects who are "differently operative and differently sourced;" they operate across media and through
prosthetic extensions rather than from authoring selves. Their sources are exogenous rather than
endogenous; they assemble from out-there media like pop-up toasters and administrative apparatuses and
the very bodies we inhabit, which are newly restructured by gesturo-haptic inclusive media.

I n the midst of this argument, Rotman introduces an "I nterlude," which he sets aside from those readers
"averse to mathematics or for whom a little of the subject goes a long way" (58). This chapter belongs in
Becoming because it engages gesture as a mode of human meaning that inheres to machines, "mechanical
or electrical or digital-information transductions of patterns of specific body movements and assemblages of
gestures" (58). This discussion builds on Rotman's earlier book, Ad I nfinitum… The Ghost in Turing's
Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back I n (1993), in which he brings "the
body back" into mathematics by enumerating the co-evolution between machines (the computer in
particular) and a new conception of a "materially framed historical account of mathematics alert to the
present and activity of the body" (58). Mathematical arguments, he points out, are historically realized
events and situated rhetorics that cannot escape through claims to being transcendent truths. The body
gets brought "back in" with computers because they begat computational mathematics, an empirical science
that the mechanical limits of computation itself to produce a new concept of math in contrast to a purely
theoretical classical mathematics. Becoming adds another layer to his case by articulating the materiality of
computer math as particularly appropriate to a new parallel subject. But, what that subject is, and for
whom it is meant, and of what it is capable, remains opaque.

Rotman makes his overarching claim that we are "becoming beside ourselves" by recounting the many and
uninevitable ways that subjectivity has been corralled into the individual mind. He unravels this usual

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Project MUSE - Theory & Event - At the Limits of Alphabetic Thought

unitary subject into "an inherent feeling of ghostliness in the one who speaks 'I '" (109). The ghostliness of
"I " merits an inquiry into media communication because it is constituted through "media effects, invisible,
technologically induced agencies that emerge, under appropriate circumstances, as autonomous self -
enunciating entities" (113).

Rotman thus moves from alphabetic bodies to the kinds of thoughts that happen through the alphabetic-
subjects who think them. He argues that alphabetic thought – like the alphabetic body – has underwritten a
pervasive metaphysic of interiority as the dominant regime for conceptualizing an "I ." I n Rotman's terms,
"Now, the 'I ' bleeds outward into the collective" (99). Although this multiple of [ now-I ] was realized much
earlier by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Hume, what is new is that the disjuncture between the
emergence of the idea of a multiple-subject and the technological conditions under which those pluralized
selves emerge occasion a historically material process of becoming beside ourselves. I n this sense,
Rotman's contribution lies less with the novelty of a claim to the radical embodiment of thought than with
his use of these findings to argue that new media are moving us towards a richer, networked, radically-
different form of subjectivity.

I n increasing degree, writing, speech and then motion-capture technologies have become better attuned to
the gestures, affects, pacing and overall nuance of embodied communication. They herald the overcoming
of the limits of alphabetic thought and therefore new "parallel" subjects. We will not be alphabetic-selves,
those whose subjectivities are frozen within representational and symbolic entities. Breaking free from the
serial linear, monadic "lettered selves" of alphabetic culture, we become networked 'I ''s. I t is these parallel
beings that are "becoming beside ourselves" (92).

Far from a tautology, the assertion that "'I ' am the one who speaks as 'I '" importantly maps a move to
localize the unitary self within speech. I nnovations in media environments are changing this state of things;
we are coming towards a world in which subjectivity is networked instead of localized in individuals.
Amongst other new fields of knowledge, a gesturology would make it possible to posit, and make-readable,
a prediscursive reality that conditions the eruption of concepts that are likewise prediscursive, such as
infinity, Others, and God. Thus, overcoming alphabetic-thought will also let us overcome the limits to
thinking within discourse.

The elaborate enumerations of these earlier discussions mostly pay off in the final section, "Ghost Effects."
Whereas Nietzsche announced the death of God by showing that He is a function of grammar, Rotman
announces the coming-archaism of the alphabet and, therefore, the death of religions governed by the
Book. Becoming is set up for this moment. I n one economical paragraph, Rotman deftly deploys his
arguments to move through a material history of Judeo-Christianity, describing the global impacts of four
shifts in God's media presence. First, it switched from clay tablets to writing on skins (allowing for more
lengthy treatises such as the Torah ) and then to bound-codices that could be held in one hand while the
other pointed, quoted or otherwise gestured elsewhere. A third media change was from handwritten copies
to a mass-produced, standardized Bible "… and the universal, directly accessible privatization of the word it
made possible" (136). Fourthly, Rotman posits the move from printed books to networked media as media-
induced innovation of our time.

This is also where it gets a little weird. I nsofar as a religion authorizes itself by the means of alphabetic
text, the rise of networked digital media threatens its authority. Rotman suggests "the rise and frenzied
appeal of Bible-obsessed evangelism and the fundamentalist surge in Jewish and Koranic literalism as
reactions - fearful and defensive" against the threat that the end of a writing-based era poses to their God
(136). Critical purchase on this linkage between writing and God is beyond religious fundamentalists
because the very concept of a media-constituted divine being would destroy their faith (along with "the
Biblical and Koranic justification for their long-standing support of patriarchal oppression") (137). By
contrast, this will not be a problem for those "non-believers" who can toss off alphabetic culture's dying
hold in order to better embrace the expanded possibilities of a new media era.

I f we are open to seeing selves form in and through this more capacious non-alphabetic technological
landscape, neurologically configured body, and regimes of thought, then we might be able to "shuck off
these ancient…ghosts to make way for new ones" (137). Becoming holds large hopes that new media,
through hastening the demise of an alphabetic-era, will bring broadened possibilities to a contemporary

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Project MUSE - Theory & Event - At the Limits of Alphabetic Thought

moment. "Possible…," Rotman cautions, because "in the alphabetic, all-too-archaic present, science in the
form of physics dreams of a 'God particle'…a God-saturated America in thrall to the Bible remains convinced
of its exceptional and special relation to the monobeing; and Muslims fight holy wars against infidels who
dare insult God's one true prophet" (137). What is frustrating is that his treatise should be concluded here.
The messy failures of the world to live up to the possibilities of its material conditions are Becoming 's most
crucial claims and, at the same time, indicate a critical limit of its analysis. Specifically, I refer to the limits
of a theoretical frame within which orthodox Muslims and Jews are only holdovers from alphabetic-regimes.

With so many claims about the multifaceted nature of becoming and selfhood, this book's contributions are
difficult to situate within a specific political theory. Based on its archive, Becoming seems most comparable
to William Connolly's 2002 Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed . But this comparison suggests a
sustained engagement with the political in Becoming . I nstead, Rotman fails to address the ways that
difference, technologies, and new -ness are forms of power . Power, particularly in the ways it complicates
questions of subjectivity, knowledge, and, especially, difference, feel oppressively absent in Rotman's
discussion. Raced, gendered, sexual, religious, national and disabled bodies are absent, or linger at the
edges of his assertions, leading me to suspect that the turn towards this neurobiological, networked, non-
alphabetic embodied self smuggles a toxic and unacknowledged desire to do away with difference. Why, for
instance, is the proposed entrenchment of orthodox Muslims against non-alphabetic culture not made into
an object of inquiry? Or, to use Slavoj Zizek's challenge to posthuman studies, does it matter if the
alphabetic body or the networked-"I " is a woman? Becoming 's conclusion betrays an inattention to the
ways that bodies are technologies for the identity-differences through which social and political power takes
form – such as sex, race, nationality, gender and ability. Given this, we might read Becoming as another
step in the same direction of an under-raced, de-sexualized, and otherwise-blankly 'human' posthuman
studies. Such a reading does not mean to only underplay Becoming's important contributions toward
unraveling tight imbrications between the physiological, social and conceptual materialities of subjectivity.

I highlight the book's failures here because Becoming has much to contribute to political lives that are
staked on deeply embodied differences. Becoming could articulate the politics of indigenous ontologies or
feminism's ongoing engagements with sexual difference (the opening epigraph from Eve Kosofsy Sedgwick
suggests an articulation with queer and feminist scholarship, but these linkages are not made explicit).
Amongst other venues, Becoming 's challenge to disembodied notions of subjectivity could be deployed
against the putatively-liberal concepts of abstract equality that underpin "colorblind" conservative attacks on
enunciations of historical difference in legal arguments for Native trusts and entitlements. I ts multiply-
mediated networked subject would be useful for articulating place-based and genealogical claims to Native
land, history and identity are something other than, as U.S. "colorblind" conservatives have it, a collection
of individuals who want special unequal privileges based on race and ancestry.

I am unfairly, of course, asking Becoming to become another book. But, it is a request made in good faith
and, hopefully, in the idioms of opening, room-making, and world-making that Becoming assigns to its
readers. Nudged towards a politics of difference, perhaps the advent of a post -alphabetic age will, as
Rotman anticipates, "make room for other less-imprisoning, more open-ended, ecophilic, and planetmindful
and ethical horizons of the human" (137).

Bianca I saki

Bianca I saki is teaching media studies and cultural politics in the Women's Studies Program at the
University of Hawai` i at Mänoa in Honolulu, Hawai'i. She is currently completing a manuscript based on her
doctoral dissertation, A Decolonial Archive: Asian Settler Politics in a Time of Hawaiian Nationhood . Please
contact her at bisaki@hawaii.edu.

Copyright © 2009 Bianca I saki and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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