Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being

by Brian Rotman

Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine : exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In Becoming Beside Ourselves , Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West’s dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as alphabetic texts have done for millennia. Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Language, Theory

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Steen Ledet · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing book about particularly the alphabet's and digital networks' effect on human selves and embodiments. Dense at times, it is more than worth the effort.

[Scribal · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been struggling with this book for awhile. Not to read it but to figure out how to place it within the research I'm doing for a large project. It was recommended to me when I first started working with alphabets for a series of paintings. It's not about alphabets. Its about what Rotman says the alphabet did to human consciousness or self-consciousness or meta-consciousness....

It's a good and useful book. Rotman is trying to say something important--that our larger, self awareness changes through historical time as the historical material and media and social environment changes. And we are going through some big changes right now.

In my humble and likely inadequate point of view, the problem is that Rotman's trying to explore problems from within the dualistic tradition of a mind/body separation that he's trying to transcend at the same time. I mean that he's using a way of knowing that is consciously a-historical and based on the analysis of words as words and nothing else to talk about bodies.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of grand imagination and ambition, with technology, subjectivity, media, and math, all taken up in order to explore that question of questions: just what is it that makes us human? Or better: what is it that makes us the kinds of humans that we are? Attentive to the way in which our humanity is shaped and fashioned by the media which surround us, Becoming Beside Ourselves tracks the ways in which our becoming-human has, from the very beginning, evolved along the very 'tools' used to express ourselves: our gestures, our voices, our writing and, increasingly, the digital worlds in which we've become immersed. 

Key to Rotamn's epic of the human is the way in which each step of re-mediation (from gesture to voice, voice to writing, writing to the digital) has brought about new effects on - and more importantly of - the self. The human who dealt primarily with voice was not quite the same as the human who dealt primarily with writing; and so too is our contemporary humanity - digital, networked - not quite the same as our purely literate 'precursors'. And while it may sound odd to speak of 'precursors' here - as if a different species - part of the boldness of argument here is precisely that the cultural artifacts of our making have, in turn, contributed in a great way to the making of 'us'.

Indeed, one of the upshots of Rotman's argument is that not enough attention has been paid to the various kinds of self that have been engendered by each corresponding kind of media. Focusing especially on the 'I' of the written word (as distinct from the 'I' of the voice), Rotman notes how writing enables the construction of a disembodied self, a self not tied to a moving, feeling body, but a free-floating one, as it were, only as substantial as the thinness of the graphical word itself. Hence too the otherwise seemingly odd focus on 'ghosts' and Gods: freed from the body, the 'I' of the Word becomes absolute, the 'I AM WHO I AM' of the Abrahamic religions - and their corresponding Books.

One quibble I do have with Rotman's otherwise richly informed theorizing is the celebratory note that creeps in every time he starts talking about the 'next phase' (he doesn't use this phrase) of human-becoming: the 'networked', digital selves engendered and 'distributed' by our online presence(s). Pitched here as overcoming the 'seriality' and monocentrism of our linearly 'alphabetic' selves, I can't help but wonder if this 'distributed self' might not equally give rise to a whole new range of pathologies and potentials for political disempowerment. In fact, the political and ethical consequences of the human trajectory Rotman so deftly identifies are regrettably under-explored, and I would simply urge caution to anyone tempted to take Rotman's unalloyed optimism about the future at face value.

Still, those after analysis rather than prophetics will find plenty to chew on here, from anthropology to history, neurology and philosophy and more. Those coming to this from Rotman's previous, mathematically oriented works will find plenty to engage with as well, with Rotman extending his reflections on number into the realm of computer science, and onto the well-known 'P = NP' problem in particular. It's a lovely bit of theorizing, and a perfect encapsulation of the range and scope of Rotman's vision of the world. Approached with a bit of care then, Becoming Beside Ourselves is just the kind of book to become alongside with, filled to the brim with ideas well worth chasing up.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an essay on how the word creates consciousness and how the delivery of language affects the nature of the consciousness created. The written word created the possibility of an absent presence, someone not present who nonetheless communicates. The digital word is creating a multiple, fragmented, simultaneous presence. The writing is clear and inspiring, theory becomes practically graspable.

[Jason]

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