"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
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.
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