Becoming beside ourselves : the alphabet, ghosts, and distributed human being / Brian Rotman ; foreword by Timothy Lenoir.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rotman, B. (Brian)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science--Philosophy.

Science.

Physical Description:

xxxiv, 176 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2008.

Summary:

In Becoming Beside Ourselves, the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maiutains 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 speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to "lettered selves," they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

Contents:

Lettered selves and beyond

The alphabetic body

Gesture and non-alphabetic writing

Technologized mathematics

Parallel selves

Ghost effects.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [151]-161) and index.

ISBN:

9780822341833

0822341832

9780822342007

0822342006

OCLC:

179838897