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Machinic Bodies, Ghosts, and para Selves Confronting Rl1e Singularity PDF
Machinic Bodies, Ghosts, and para Selves Confronting Rl1e Singularity PDF
Machinic Bodies, Ghosts, and para Selves Confronting Rl1e Singularity PDF
Besid.e
Ot1.rselves:
The Alphabet,
Ghosts,
and
Distributed
Hun1an Being
BRIAN ROTMAN
WUH A FOREWO.RD BY TIMOTHY L!BNO!LR
Becoming
Beside
Ourselves
. . .
..
i
The Alphabet,
Ghosts,
and
Distributed
Human Being
Brian Rotman
0
u
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
D11rham &L�ndon
v 2008
• •
ecomin,...... es1
Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying Beside is an interesting preposi
ing; neither i s it corresponding, establishing corre ing very dualistic about it; a
Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; not an infinity of them.Beside
it does not reduce to, or lead back to, "appearing:' permits a spacious agnosticism
Pedagogy, Performativity
urse ves
But who is this "self" ...and why is it at this par
PREFACE xxxi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XXXV
Aura xxxv ii
Part I
Interlude
THREE Technologized Marl1ematics 57
Part II
NOTES 139
REFERENCES 151
INDEX 163
Foreword
MACHINIC BODIES, GHOSTS, AND PARA
Timothy Lenoir
X FOREWORD
about virtual creatures can be considered devices that suture together the
analog subjects we still are, as we move in the three-dimensional spaces in
which our biological ancestors evolved, with the digital subjects we are be
coming as we interact with virtual environments and digital teclmologies"
(2005, 204). The narratives of the computational universe serve then as
both means and metaphor. In our current analog/digital situation Hayles
proposes an analytical strategy she calls intermediation to analyze the new
processual human/machine texts of the posthuman era.
XU FOREWORD
shaping the results of their researches into a powerful new argument for
the co-evolution of humans and technics, specifically the technics of lan
guage and the material media of inscription practices. The general thrust
of tllis line of tllinking may best be captured in Andy Clark's phrase, "We
have always been cyborgs" (2003). From the first "htm1an singularity" to
our present incarnation, human being has been shaped tl1rottgh a com
plicated co-evolutionary entanglement with language, techtlics, and
commwlicational media. Drawing upon empirical findings from recent
cognitive neuroscience, studies of sign language, gesture, and tl1e in1pact
of new imaging and computational sciences on contemporary habits of
tl1inking, Rotman teases out the significance of Clark's apt phrase i n a
powetful framework of material senliotics.The materiality of media rather
tl1an tl1eir content is what matters.Commw1icational media are macllines
operating at the heart of subject formation. Like Gilles Deleuze and FelLx
Guattari, Rotman views macllinic operations at the basis of consciousness
and mind as an emergent phenomenon; and while wliike Wolfran1 (2002)
and Edward Fredkin (2001), he is less certain about embracing cellular
automata as tl1e ftmdamental ontology of the w1iverse, Rotman sketches
out a position sympatl1etic toward Deleuze's and Guattari's notions of
tl1e human body being tmderstood as an assemblage of mutating ma
chines-a Body without Organs-rather than as a teleologically orches
trated organism with consciousness as tl1e core of coherent subjectivity.
Consistent with tl1e flattening of differences between biological and in
orgatlic machines central to contemporary nanotechnology and cogtli
tive neuroscience, Deleuze and Guattari argued tl1at, as bodies witl10ut
organs, human assemblages are capable of absorbing a variety of entities,
including otl1er machines and organic matter. In Rotman's elaboration of
this perspective, media machines are not just prostl1etic extensions of the
body, they are evolving assemblages capable of being absorbed into tl1e
body and reconfiguring the subject. Every medium, whether it be speech,
alphabetic writing, or digital code, a11d each media ecology, such as tl1e
configmation of gramophone, film, and typewriter discussed by Friedrich
Kittler (1992, 1999), projects a virtual user specific to it. This projected
virtual user is a ghost effect: an abstract agency distinct from any particulru·
embodied user, a variable capable of accommodating any pru·ticular user
witl1in the medium.
Materialist semiotics of tl1e sort Rotmat1 proposes in concert with
recent work in cognitive neuroscience, studies of gesture and language
from psychology and evolutionru·y ethology, and a variety of recent de-
XIV FOREWORD
of gesture and the machinic body in Becoming Beside Ourselves. The revo
lutions in the computational sciences, the rise of cognitive science, and
the explosive developments in recent neuroscience, particularly work on
distributed cognition, the embodied mind, and emergence that have taken
off since the 1990s, provide empirical sources for Rotman's discussion of
ghostly subjects and machinic bodies. This incorporation of results and
implications of empirical science is what really distinguishes Rotman's Be
comin g Bes ide Ourselves and allows him to elevate the discussion to an ex
citing new plane. Drawing upon a framework he originally set out in the
1988 essay, "Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics;' Rotman elaborates in
chapter 3, "Technologized Mathematics;' one of his key theses about tl1e
ways in which computational devices anastomose witl1 and reshape tl1e
human. In tl1e intervening years since Rotman wrote Signifying Nothing
and Ad Infinitum . . . , a revolution in tl1e computational sciences took
place, particularly tl1rough tl1e developments of parallel computing-not
even contemplated as relevant by Turing-and the emergence of techno
scientific fields (by which I mean fields in which tl1e science is inextri
cably botmd to the machines tl1at enable it) of modeling, near to real-time
simulation, visualization, and computer-generated virtual environments.
Rotman discusses the impact of tl1ese developments in transforming con
ditions of proof in mathematics to a near-experimental discipline. He ex
atnines the role of images, diagratns, and other forms of mathematical
representation, issues particulat·ly releva11t to recent discussions concern
ing tl1e role of graphic methods, "imaging;' a11d visualization in compu
tational sciences. In tl1is chapter Rotma11 analyzes i n terms of his own
distinctive brat1d of material semiotics the tra11sformation being effected
in our experience of bodies a11d of agency by computer-mediated com
munication a11d especially technologies of visualization, emerging virtual
reality, and even haptic feedback in new digital systems for motion capture.
He argues tl1at these forms of representation are not just supplements to a
linear, alphabetic text that carries the "real" mea!ling of an uttera11ce, but
constitute lat1guages all their own.
Rotman's tl1eory of signification ain1s at showing that each media
regime a11d each system of signification projects a specific configuration of
the subject and a horizon of agency as a consequence of its normal opera
tion. Moreover, in Rotma11's view tl1ese semiotic systems evolve with tl1e
media machines tl1at embed tl1em. They are techno-cultural artifacts that
co-evolve with their huma11 host-pat·asites. Conceived in this fashion la11
XVI FOREWORD
XVll! FOREWORD
mate being, it is nonetheless capable of being an integrated adaptive entity
evolving with respect to htm1an hosts. This point becomes more salient
when we think of language as a conm1tmication system and examine the
effects of media, including electronic media, more broadly.
For Deacon, the most important feature of the adaptation of lan
guage to its host is that languages are social and cultural entities that have
evolved with respect to the forces of selection in1posed by human users.
Probably rl1e primary selective force on language evolution is the pressure
to produce linguistic operations that children can learn quickly and easily.
Just like computer interfaces, languages evolve around user-friendliness,
and languages that do not adapt to their user-niche disappear. In rl1is
Baldwinian co-evolution of physical and cultural processes, neurological
structure and language ability-brain and speech-interact: changes in the
newborn's brain, manifest in its cognitive abilities, exert a selective pres
sure on which features of language are learnable and which are not; rl1is
in turn feeds back, influencing the brain to change in certain ways, which
furrl1er in1pacts the gr an1matical structures and semantic possibilities of
spoken language available to the infant. And so it goes. The outcome,
over thousands of generations, is rl1e emergence of htunan language in
which symbolic reference emerges from and i s distributed among a web
of evolutionarily older forms of reference. While apes, chimpanzees, and
orl1er animals are able to operate with symbols in certain carefully con
structed contexts, everyday human cognition demands ilie construction of
novel symbolic relationships. A considerable an1otmt of normal, everyday
problem solving involves symbolic analysis or efforts to figure out some
obscure symbolic association. Deacon argues rl1at rl1e greater computa
tional demands of symbol use launched selection pressure on increased
prefrontalization, more efficient articulatory and auditory capacities, and a
suite of ancillary capacities and predispositions which eased the new tools
of communication and d10ught. Each assimilated change added to rl1e
selection pressures that led to the restructuring of hominid brains.
XX FOREWORD
XXl1 FOREWORD
vous systems, the capacities of which allow us to adapt to intricate chal
lenges of a changing cognitive environment. Rather than being rigidly
hard-wired to structures inside the brain, symbolic communication cre
ated a mode of extrabiological inheritance with a powerful and complex
character, and witl1 an autonomous life of its own. The individual mind is
a hybrid product, partly biological and partly ecological in origin, shaped
by a distributed external network ilie properties of which are constantly
changing.
The work we have discussed by evolutionary biologists and cognitive
neuroscientists has dealt primarily with the origins of language, particu
larly with speech and to a limited extent witl1 writing. Tllis work has em
phasized that the leap to ilie symbolizing mind did not depend on a built
in hard-wired tendency to symbolize reality. The direction of flow wasfrom
culture to the individual mind, from outside-to-inside? Rotman is inter
ested in expanding this analysis to include media otl1er ilian speech and
writing, especially technologically mediated and computer-based forms of
commtmication. He locates rich suggestions for tl1e path to pursue in the
work of Deleuze and Guattari.
It is in chapter 2 on gesture tl1at Rotman's "Deleuzian turn" takes flight
most dramatically. A number of"new humanists" are interested in drawing
upon work in the natural sciences, particularly recent work in cognitive
science and fields such as fw1ctional MRI, to shed new light on traditional
humanistic questions, such as tl1e role of emotion and affect in processes
of reasoning, previously treated as ilie territory of abstract, disembodied
mind. Otl1er areas in which the findings of empirical science are imping
ing on recent work in ilie humanities are analyses of neuroaesilietic bases
for artists' constmction and viewers' appreciation of images and analysis
of tl1e role of narrative and metaphor in normal reasoning processes. But
Rotman's use of tl1ese recent scientific fields is the most in1pressive-in
fact, tl1e only-attempt wiili which I an1 familiar of a n analysis aimed at
resolving key issues in postmodern philosophy. In chapter 3 on computing
and mathematics and in chapter r on the "Alphabetic Body" Rotman draws
on the work of recent cognitive neuroscience to advance his "Deleuzian"
tl1eses on ilie machirlic body as an assemblage of relatively independent
and autonomous units. For instance, recent work in ilie neurosciences
supports a reevaluation oftl1e human innate sense of number. Radler ilian
being associated with a singular "faculty:' particular organ, or region of
tl1e brain, cow1ting, according to the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas
ferent and independent brain activities each on their own having nothing
to do with number.
What Rotman offers in Becoming Beside Ourselves is an extension and
revitalization of Derrida's grammatological project, updating it for the
computationally intensive environments that increasingly constitute us as
posthtm1an. In his critique of Western metaphysics Derrida pointed to the
logic of rl1e supplement as a way of deconstructing rl1e power of logocen
trism. 'Whereas speech is normally treated as primary, ilie site of presence
to oneself, and writing is treated as secondary, a supplement rl1at comes
after speech as a technique for notating it, Den·ida argued rl1at writing
comes before speech. Writing, Derrida argued, is really a form of graphism,
a general mode of signifying operating in all cultural production. Writing
and speech are both dependent on rl1is higher form of writing, what Der
rida called arche writing, a writing before the letter.
But Derrida did not successfully extend rl1is provocative analysis to
other signifying systems such as in1ages. As Rotman points out, Den·ida's
commentary on Husserl's The Origins of Geometry, for instance, never
mentions the complete absence of diagrams or reference to rl1em through
out the text. While critiquing rl1e Western metaphysical system, Den·ida's
deconstruction remained bound to ilie world of print it called into ques
tion. Rotman's project on corporeal writing introduces the exploration of
graphism in ilie wider sense as a synthesis of semiotics, computation, and
experimental science.
Rotman's brilliant treatment of gesture, speech, and rl1eir relations
to other signifying systems moves consideration of ilie posiliuman sub
ject onto a new page of clarity and rigor. Some of the resources Rotman
draws upon are neurological studies that argue for a form of internal
touching, a virtual auto-hapticity iliat appears to be the condition for self
consciousness. He draws on empirical investigations of verbal narration
in cognitive psychology iliat demonstrate rl1at gesticulation-previously
believed to be an tumecessary supplement to speech and iliought-is a
deep component of utterance, having to do with rl1e semantics, pragmat
ics, and discursive aspects of speech. These studies call into question the
causal or conceptual priority of speech by demonstrating a tight temporal
binding, accurate to fractions of a second, discovered to operate between
gesticulation and speech. Drawing on these sorts of empirical studies,
Rotman argues rl1at iliinking that eventuates in speech has its origins
XXIV FOREWORD
i n pre-verbal visuo-kinetic images which then become gesticulated and
verbalized to form utterance. Spoken thought starts as a yet-to-be real
ized gesture. Thought, including abstract thought such as mathematical
reasoning, rests on metaphors and diagrams derived from repeated and
deeply layered patterns of body movement. Moreover, he draws upon
other work on phonetics and speech synthesis which demonstrates that it
is precisely as a gestural system that speech is best apprehended and per
ceived by a listener.Drawing on the work of the evolutionary neurobiolo
gist Terrence Deacon once again, Rotman argues that auditory processing
of speech soLmds does not appear to be based on extracting basic acoustic
parameters of the signal before mapping them onto speech sounds. Speech
sounds appear designed instead to predict which oral-vocal movements
produced them and ignore the rest. We listen, Rotman concludes, not to
speech sOLmds as such but to what rl1ey signal about the movements of rl1e
body causing them.We listen to speech as symptoms of gestures.
In two very engaging chapters, "The Alphabetic Body" referred to
above and "Gesture and Non-Alphabetic Writing;' which introduces rl1e
notion of rl1e body without organs of speech, Rotman e-xplores recent
work on American Sign and argues for gesture and orl1er non-alphabetic
systems of expression as languages in rl1eir own right. In these chapters,
Rotman points to the importance of the materiality of media i n "wiring"
thought, and in the chapter on alphabetism, even draws upon work from
ethology and neurobiology to bolster his claim rl1at in the historical pro
cess of establishing non-pictorial alphabetism as rl1e basis for thought, rl1e
alphabet dismpted "the integrated complementarity of upper and lower,
tongue and larynx, articulation and breath, consonant and vowel; it effects
a pulling apart and deactivating of rl1e circuits between neocortex and the
midbrain?' (Rotman 2002, 97) The powerful result of this disjLmction, he
argues, was the hierarchical subordination of the midbrain to rl1e neocor
tex, and attendant to that rl1e cutting loose of words from voice. Going
one step furrl1er, Rotman argues rl1at the result of this vertical neurologi
cal separation was rl1e institution of a prin1ary dualism of mind over body,
the ultimate expression of which is rl1e notion of the pure, disembodied
mind, rl1at constant rl1eme threaded rl1rough all Rotman's work.
\Vhat rl1en about the posthuman? Are we transitioning to some new
form of self adapted to our environment of ubiquitous computing tech
nology, and if so, how is rl1is self assembled and transformed by rl1e
machinic processes of our technoscientific milieu? Since the rise of Hmno
sapiens between wo,ooo and 2oo,ooo years ago, there has been little change
in brain size or, as far as can be determined, in brain stmcture. A criti
cal contributing factor to tl1e rapid cultural evolution tllat took off with
H. sapiens and has continued at an ever-increasing pace since is tl1e de
velopment of supplements to individual internal biological memory in
the form of visuo-graphic systems and external memory media, especially
written records and otl1er forms of symbolic storage (see especially Donald
1991, 308-12). Ratl1er than being lin1ited by our neural architecture, tl1ese
external material supports have only enhanced the symbolizing power of
the mind. In a sense, the recent development of the Internet and distrib
uted forms of electronic conunw1ication only furtl1er accelerate a process
that has defined and shaped human being since tl1at first singularity. From
tl1e perspective of the work in evolutionary cognitive science we have
discussed, any change in the way information gets processed and repre
sented inevitably constitutes a change in tl1e cognitive economy of tl1e
subject, a difference in psychic architecture and ultimately of conscious
ness itself. Teasing out tl1e in1plications ofthis notion, Rotman argues tl1at
the medium of alphabetic writing introduced as silent collateral machinic
effects an entire neurological apparatus enabling practices, routines, pat
terns of movement and gestures, and kinematic, dynan1ic, and perceptual
activities as part of tlle backgrotmd conditions-in terms of Deleuze and
Guattari, tlle a-signifying dimensions of tl1e mediwn lying beneath tl1e
medium's radar as part of its tmconscious-giving rise to tl1e lettered self, a
privately enclosed, inward and interiorized mind, structmed by tlle linear
protocols and cognitive processing that reading and writing demand.
This mode of psychic organization is giving way to new forms as part
of tl1e massive shift in computational media taking place. Of particular
importance to om present situation is tl1e inflm: of parallel computation
into what has been almost exclusively a serial computational regin1e. The
parallel/serial duo is nothing new. In fact, as Rotman argues, the dynamic
tension between parallel and serial modes of thinking and representation
have characterized every media regime. Rotman examines the tandem
opposition of serial and parallel forms across many types of activity: music
(melody versus harmony), symbolic forms (text versus image), aritlm1etic
(ordinal versus cardinal numbers), film editing (Eisenstein versus intercut
montage), electrical circuits (serial versus parallel), and especially serial
versus parallel modes of computing. The serial/parallel duo come together
and are always in a certain tension witl1 one anotl1er. Seriality is exempli-
XA'Vl FOREWORD
Once, not so long ago, there was an absolute opposition of self and
other: an 'I: identical to itself, wholly present as an autonomous, indi
visible, interior psyche against an external, an1orphous collectivity of
third persons outside the skin. Now tl1e 1/me-tmit is dissolving, the one
who says or who writes 'I' is no longer a singular integrated whole, but
multiple: a shifting plurality of distributed !-parts, !-roles, 1-ftmctions,
and !-presences. Now tl1e 'l' bleeds outward into tl1e collective, and the
collective introjects, insilmates, and internalizes itself witl1in tl1e me.
XA"Vlll FOREWORD
What was privately interior and individual is invaded by the public, the
historical, the social. \Vhat was the outside world of events enters (and
reveals itself as having always entered) the individual soul in the mode
of personal destiny (99).
Preface
1/2 + 14 + Vs + . . .) , and, then, in a more radical form toward tl1e end of tl1e
nineteentl1 century, when Georg Cantor introduced transfinite numbers
and a hierarchy of infinities. Echoing Aristotle, the constructivist matl1e
matician Leopold Kronecker rejected the reality of such abstractions, con
demning them as artificial and m1real compared to the 'natural: potential
infinity enshrined in the progression 1, 2, 3, . . . of whole numbers: "God:'
he insisted in a remark widely attributed to him, "made the integers, tl1e
rest is the work of Mankind?'!
But what is it that makes the mm1bers 'natural: that prompts matl1e
maticians to call them so and conceive of them as given, always somehow
'there: before and independent of tl1e hmnan mind and its works? And
why invoke God as tl1eir creator? In a sense such questions seek to out
Kronecker Kronecker by insisting that even the potential infinity of mm1
bers is a cultural construct, the "work of Mankind?' Tl1is leads to a ques
tioning of Aristotle's nous, the source of the supposedly natural ability to
repeat endlessly. On tl1e contrary, the ability requires a supernatmal-dis
embodied-agency operating, as God is presumed to operate, metaphysi
cally, outside the exigencies of time, space, energy, and physical presence;
in short, an immaterial ghost. Some such agency is invoked by mathema
ticians (though tl1ey do not describe it so) when they write '. . ? and imag
ine the endless continuation of mm1bers signified by it. To say more, one
can try to imagine what it would be like to conceive cOlmting and think
numbers outside a metaphysics of tl1e infinite. One can ask what it might
mean to iterate in this lmiverse, the one which in-corporates us, which we
embodied humans in-habit, in contrast to the transcendent ghost-space
appropriate to a bodiless 'mind.' Under tl1e rubric of non-Euclidean colmt
ing I sketch one idea of what this might involve.
Becoming Beside Ounelves pushes tl1e question of supernatmal agencies
fmtl1er back, situating them mediologically, in the context of their pro
duction. It asks: How, by what material, cognitive-affective, means, did
God and 'n1ind' come to be-to exist, to be known, to be objects of be
lief-witl1in \Vestern culture? Unlike its predecessors, tl1is essay's primary
orientation is not mathematical signs. True, God and Mind arrive floating
XXXll l'REFACE
ghostlike inside the matl1ematical infinite; their origins, however, are in the
letters of tl1e alphabet which write speech, not in mathematical ideograms
and diagrams inscribing ideas. Specifically, I argue the following tl1esis.
God and 'mind' (Mind, nous,psyche, soul) are media effects of tl1e alphabet,
hypostatized entities, ghosts tl1at emerged from the writing of 'l' in the
sixtll century BCE witllln tlle respective Jewish and Greek deployments of
alphabetic writing, born at a point when the medium had become natu
ralized, tlle effects of written mediation invisible.
Crucial to tl1e argument is a fw1damental mediological point, namely
the insistence tllat any act of self-enw1ciation is mediwn specific. This
inunediately implies that tlle four reflexive acts- a gestural self-pointing
'l'; an 'I' spoken in language; an inscribed 'l' witllin alphabetic writing;
PREFACE XXXlll
and it is an m
i portant means-one of the earliest-humans have of indi
viduating themselves and others. Lacking all tone, an agency known only
through the alphabetic inscription of its words would appear abstract and
(chillingly) indifferent to the existence or not of its supposed addressee;
it would also, by being mliocatable and unspecifiable as an individual,
project an 'other'-nonhuman-form of identity.
But the alphabet's twenty-five hundred year textual domination of
·western culture, "the era of alphabetic graphism" (Leroi-Gourhan 1993),
wirl1 its singularizing, monadic, and linear logic appears to be ending. All
that was founded and so long held in place by the alphabet's mediation be
comes increasingly difficult to sustain confronted wirl1 rl1e parallelist and
distributed logic of multiplicities. In rl1is light, once revealed as media
effects, God and Mind along with 'soul' become no longer tenable items
of belief and begin to feel strange and of diminishing relevance within the
increasingly networked contemporary scene, the lettered self which co
evolved with rl1ese agencies and gave them credence now past its heyday
and increasingly overshadowed by a new self-enunciation. This fourth 'I'
which is beginning to disrupt and reconfigure its gestural, speaking, and
writing predecessors, is a plural self, a self beside itself, which cannot but
appear as unstable, virtual and 'tmreal' wirl1 respect to us-the deeply em
bedded denizens of alphabetic culture.
XXXIV l'REFACE
Acknowledgments
It was as if everything she thought, felt, remembered, had an aura; behind the
briefest eye-blink, the least flicker of touch, a shadow, a kind of ghost presence.
This aura wasn't part of her, nor was it in any sense that she could fad10m pro
duced by her, nor did it seem answerable to her, even though-of this she was
certain-only she was aware of it. Neid1er did it seem to precede her and her
business: it wasn't there before-couldn't be anywhere-before she felt what
she was able to feel, before she perceived what she-her body-decided she
could perceive. And yet d1ere it was, ghost of d1ings present, faint pulsation of
the real; at times like the glow on the surface of d1e universe, at others the dark
outline of a world dazzled by d1ere being nodung in it but its own presence.
Often it was neid1er light, nor dark, nor anydung visible, but just a presence
simply d1ere-clinging to the motion of her being in space-like the field of
a magnet, or radiation from d1e earth's rocks. Of late it had occurred to her:
perhaps it was the aura that was real, felt dUngs, had a body, sat and moved
through space and perceived the cotmdess pulsations of light and energy in
the tmiverse, and that she was d1e shadow clinging to it, following it arotmd,
copying its business before it had time to look around and be aware of who
she was and how her very presence was no more d1at1 a confirmation of d1e
aura's desparate need for somed1ing-anything-to keep it company.
Reflecting on the relation between the human and the machinic, the cog
nitive rl1eorist Andy Clark urges "vVe shall be cyborgs not in the merely
superficial sense of combining flesh and wires, but in the more profound
sense of being human-tedmology symbionts: thinking and reasoning sys
tems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and non
biological circuitry?' ( 2006, 1)
Until recently it was possible to believe orl1erwise. To believe rl1at
hmnan organisms and rl1eir technologies, however messily intermixed
and interdependent, were fundan1entally different and in principle could
be separated: on the one side, mind and culture and things of rl1e spirit,
on the other, tools, machines, and techno-apparatuses; the former invents
and uses technology but is not itself, in its 'essence; tedmological. Now,
as technological systems penetrate every aspect of contemporary culture,
bringing about an escalating and radical series of cognitive and social up
heavals, it has become clear that no such separation ofmind and machine is
possible. Nor was it ever. Humans beings are "natural born cyborgs"; rl1e
'htm1an' has from the beginning of rl1e species been a duee-way hybrid, a
bio-cultural-technological amalgam: the 'human mind'-its subjectivities,
affects, agency, and forms of consciousness-having been put into form by
a succession of physical and cognitive technologies at its disposal.
Leaving language aside for the moment, which properly speaking is a
bio-cultural given rarl1er rl1an a technological medimn, the chief mind
constituting technology, "mind upgrade" in Clark's phrase, and rl1e
morl1er of almost all subsequent cognitive upgrades, is writing. Writing in
its two dimensions: the writing of ideas, patterns, and procedures whose
most focused and abstract realization is rl1e symbolic ecology of mathe
matical thought, and writing as an apparatus for inscribing human speech
and thought among whose multiform achievements is the production of
a literature and of a literate form of discourse, that enables one to read and
write texts-such as the present essay-about the natme of writing.
Though I shall touch on some aspects of mathematical writing, my
main concern will be with writing as the inscription of spoken language.
For Western cultme rl1e writing of speech has been exclusively alphabetic,
a system which from its inception has served as the West's dominant cog
nitive teclmology (along wirl1 marl1ematics) and the medium in which its
legal, bmeaucratic, historical, religious, artistic, and social business has
been conducted. The result has been an alphabetic discomse, a shaping
and textualization of rl1ought and affect, a bringing forth of a system of
metaphysics and religious belief, so pervasive and total as to be-from
wirl1in that very discomse-almost invisible. Certainly, for at least rl1e last
half millennium rl1e very concept of a person has adhered to that of a 'let
tered self; an individual psyche inextricable from rl1e apparatus of alpha
betic writing describing, articulating, coJ1U11lll1icating, presenting, and
framing it. "In the society rl1at has come into existence since the Middle
Ages, one can always avoid picking up a pen, but one cannot avoid being
described, identified, certified, and handled-like a text. Even in reach
ing out to become one's own 'self; one reaches out for a text" (Illich and
Sanders 1988, x). The "text:' as Steven Shaviro observes, is the "postmod
ern equivalent of the soul" (1995, 128), a fact only recognized within the
newfow1d interest in alphabeticism over the last two decades.
In the nineteenth century the totality of rl1e alphabet's textual domina
tion of Western cultme encow1tered its first real resistance, its monopoly
challenged by new media, tedmologies of reproduction and representa
tion that have since appropriated many of the functions which had so long
been discharged and organized by the alphabetic text: thus the alphabet's
hold on factual description and memory was broken by photography; its
inscription and preservation of speech sounds eclipsed by the direct re
production of sOlmd by the phonograph and its descendants; its domina
tion of narrative form, fictional and orl1erwise, upstaged by documentary
and film art; and its lmiversal necessity weakened by television's ability to
report or construe rl1e social scene, via images and speech, in a manner
accessible to the non-literate.
But this dethroning of the alphabetic text is now entering a new, more
radical phase brought about by technologies of the virtual and networked
media whose effects go beyond the mere appropriation and upstaging
of alphabetic functionality. Not only does digital binary code extend
rl1e alphabetic principle to its abstract limit-an alphabet of two letters,
2 INTRODUCTION
o and 1, whose words spell out mm1bers-but the text itself has become
an object manipulated within computational protocols foreign to it. At
the san1e time the text's opposition to pictures-its ancient iconoclastic
repudiation of the image-is being reconfigmed by its confrontation with
the digitally produced image. With the result rl1at teclmologies of parallel
computing and those of a plmi-din1ensional visualization are inculcating
modes of rl1ought 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.
On a different (but ultimately related) track is the alphabet's reductive
relation to rl1e corporeal din1ension of utterance, to speech's embodiment.
Not only are letters in no way iconic, their visual form having no relation
to rl1at of the body or to how the sounds produced by the body's organs of
speech are received by those hearing them, but the sotmds which the let
ters notate are meaningless monads, minimal hearable fragments of speech
absent any trace of the sense-making apparatus of the body producing
rl1em. This disconnect between alphabetic writing and the speaking body
occurs most radically at the level of the phrase and the utterance. For what
rl1e alphabet eliminates is the body's inner and outer gestures which extend
over speech segments beyond individual words. Both those visually ob
servable movements rl1at accompany and pw1ctuate speech (which it was
never its ftmction to inscribe) and, more to rl1e point, those inside speech,
the gestures which constitute the voice itself-the tone, the rhyrlm1, rl1e
variation of emphasis, rl1e loudness, rl1e changes of pitch, rl1e mode of
attack, discontinuities, repetitions, gaps and elisions, and rl1e never absent
play and musicality of utterance that makes human song possible. In short,
rl1e alphabet omits all the prosody of utterance and with it the multitude
of bodily effects of force, significance, emotion, and affect that it conveys.
It was the recognition of the reductive consequences of rl1is omission,
evident early in Greek literacy as soon as speeches were delivered by ora
tors rather than the bards who composed them, that was instmmental in
fotmding rl1e art of Gorgian rhetoric. Since rl1en confronting it has been
the driving force in the historical development of all forms of 'prose' and
poetic diction along wirl1 the reading and writing protocols associated
wirl1 rl1em.
It is not by chance that this previously ignored gestural dimension of
speech should now be of interest. Among orl1er things (its role in Sign
language, the discovery of an intimate association between gesticulation
and narrative speech, its relevance to voice-recognition software), gesture
4 INTRODUCTION
ness, actuality and virtuality, with the one who speaks and hears 'I: will be
confronted by a third 'I: a self coming into being to the side of the writ
ten form, what might be termed a para-self, whose enunciation of 'I' will
take place (and only take place if it is not to collapse back into its written
predecessor) in the interior of a post-, better, trans-alphabetic ecology of
ubiquitous and interactive, networked media.
"Writing:' Walter Ong insists, "alters consciousness?' (1982, chap. 4)
Indeed.As do all media, not least each strand of the lattice of commlmica
tional technologies currently dissolving writing's pre-eminence, loosening
the alphabet's hold by substituting their hold on consciousness. As Felix
Guattari has observed, informational and conm1lm icational technologies
"operate at the heart of hlmlan subjectivity . . . within its sensibility, af
fects and w1conscious fantasms?' (1995, 4) An observation that repeats the
inescapable two-way intimacy remarked earlier between techne andpsyche.
Technology's mode of operation at "the heart" of tl1e subject is not simply
the action of something external introduced into a 'natural' psyche, one
that was inner, private and secluded from technological influence. The
operation of machines both augments already existing sites of tedmologi
cal mediation of the self and is transformative and works to constitute
the very subject engaging with tlmn. A phenomenon Roland Barthes ob
served for the action of writing: "In tl1e modern verb of middle voice 'to
write: tl1e subject is constituted as immediately contemporary with tl1e
writing, being effected and affected by it. . . ?' (1986, 18)
This lmderstanding of technology rejects the instnm1ental view of it
as tl1e use of tools and body-extending prostheses by pre-existing hlmlan
subjects fully articulated before its deployment.And it likewise rejects the
conception of technological media in terms of their representations, in
terms of tl1eir content, the intentional manifest meanings they signify
whetller linguistically, aurally, pictorially, kinetically, haptically-to pre
existing, self-sufficient subjects. In botl1 views the phenomenon that is
unseen and lmexamined is the direct effect of technology's materiality,
an effect always outside its explicit human, socio-cultural character and
which transforms tl1e bodies, nervous systems, and subjectivities of its
users. This action of technology's 'radical material exteriority: tl1e subject
constituting work it petforms, occurs at a pre-linguistic, pre-signifying
and pre-theoretical level.As such it is antagonistic to understanding tech
nology's achievement in terms of its purely discursive, socio-cultural con
structions. CoJnnllmicational media and semiotic apparatuses never co
incide witl1 tl1eir intended social uses or cultural purposes or their defined
6 INTRODUCTION
ingjwriting agency who or which is as distinct from any particular, em
bodied, and situated user as an algebraic variable is from the n
i dividual
numbers substitutable for it, an agency who/which acconunodates all pos
sible readers and writers of texts regardless of how and when in space and
time rl1ey have or might have appeared. Tllis floating entity makes ideas of
disembodied agency, action at a distance, and thought transference plau
sible. As a result all commtmicational media have about them an aura of
rl1e tmca1my and the supernatural, a ghost effect which clings to them. In
the case of the telegraph, whlch introduced a new form of written con
verse with an absent agent, rl1e effect conjured not ghosts as such; rarl1er
it inspired a new religion based on a telegraphic, table-tapping mode of
conversation wirl1 the newly conceived ghost-spirits of the departed.
Long before thls, writing (which had always been friendly to messages
and self-proclamations from rl1e dead) conjured into being ghosts of a
different sort. Unlike telegraphy rl1e conjuring did not follow immediately
on the medium's deployment; it depended on a specific phenomenon-a
self-reference wirl1in or by the medium, a written '1'-to bring it about.
Writing 'I; pointing to a self in writing, s
i in effect making writing circle
back onto the writer and confronting rl1e self with a virtual simulacnm1.
Unlike rl1e spoken 'I; chained to its utterer with its referent tmambigu
ously the one speaking, who or what rl1e written 'l' is is indeterminate. 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 entifica
tion of the alphabet's virtual user: an tmembodied being outside the con
fines of time and space operating as an invisible and unlocatable agency.
A trio of entities answering rl1is description, nan1ely God, Mind, In
finity, have formed rl1e metaphysical horizons of Western religious, phllo
sophical, and marl1ematical d10ught. Each such ghost is a phenomenon
inseparable from alphabetic writing. The first arose from the writing of
'l' as in "I an1 rl1e Lord rl1y God" and "I am that I am" to refer to and
define Hin1Self; the second from the writing of 'I' in Greek philosopllical
thought to refer to an un-embodied psyche lodged in the soma; the last
from rl1e writing of'l' as a pronotm designating Aristotle's nous, that dis
embodied organ of rational rl1ought able to cotmt without end.
To summarize: A succession of media-speech, alphabetic writing,
digital writing-each transforming their enviro1m1ents du·ough a wave
of virtuality specific to them. In the first, virtuality is located within the
symbolic ftmction per se, inherent in a speaker's capacity to refer to non
existent and disembodied agencies; in the second, virtuality is located in
8 INTRODUCTION
becoming beside itself, plural, trans-alphabetic, derived from and spread
over multiple sites of agency, a self going parallel: a para-self.
Mental pathways, ways of believing, modes of thinking, habits ofmind,
an entire logic of representation, born from and maintained by alphabeti
cism over the last twenty-five hLmdred years, become increasingly incom
patible with such a self. Metaphysical claims by religions of the book, au
thenticated by the assertions of an absolute monobeing from within an
alphabetic text, become less tenable as their Lmcompromising insistence
on an aboriginal singularity confronts the pluralizing, dispersive vectors
of contemporary mediation. The West's ontotheological metaphysics,
with its indivisible, muque-unto-themselves and beyond-which-nothing
monads of an absolute Truth behind reality and a monolithic transcendent
God entity begins to be revealed as a mediological acluevement-magnifi
cent but no longer appropriate-of a departing age.
PART I
One
14 CHAPTER ONE
But before disembodied agencies come embodied ones. Alphabetic
writing, like all technological systems and apparatuses, operates accord
ing to what might be called a corporeal xiomatic: it engages directly and
inescapably witl1 tl1e bodies of its users. It makes demands and has corpo
real effects. As a necessary condition for its operations it produces a cer
tain body, in tl1e present instance an 'alphabetic body' which has relations
(of exclusion and co-presence) witl1 existing semiotic body practices. The
alphabet does tllls by imposing it own mediological needs on the body,
from tl1e evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write
to the invisible, nemological transformations which it induces in order to
function. It s i the latter effects, beneath the radar of tl1e alphabet's explicit
ftlllction of inscribing speech and so quite separate from its manifold in
scriptional activities, that will be significant.
I shall approach the alphabetic body through the topic of gesture. The
particular motive for proceeding tlms will emerge in due course, but in
relation to tl1e general question of embodiment, communication, and
human subjectivity the idea is not tlllnatural: there are deep-lying lines of
force between gesture and becoming human. As an affective medium of
tl1e body and its semiotic envelope, gestme reaches deep into htllllan so
ciality through its vital role in hominization (tl1e proffered breast, the use
of facial expressions, pointing, cuddling, the phenomenon of turn taking,
the induction via visual capture and motl1erese into speech), and through
its linkage to tl1e embodied wordless empathy, the psychic mirroring of
each other necessary for meaningful utterance and witl10ut which what
sociologist Michel Maffesoli (1994) calls puissance, tl1e 'will to live: would
not be possible. For Giorgio Agamben gestme constitutes a key category
in relation to political ontology, a tlllrd term between means (pure action)
and ends (pure production) whose essential mode of action is tl1at within
it something is "being endured and supported"-activities which, he
claims, allow the "emergence of being-in-a-mediun1 of htllllan beings and
thus opens up the ethical dimension for them?' (2ooo, 57-58)
Human Gesture
Notwithstanding its role in empatl1y, hominization, and its relation to tl1e
etllical, making gestme the point of entry into the alphabetic body nlight
seem puzzling. After all, tl1e alphabet inscribes speech, and compared to
tl1e latter gestme is widely held to be cmde and pantominlic, an atavistic,
semantically impoverished mode of sense making overtaken by the devel-
16 CHAI'TER ONE
to replace it with living speech, the only instrument of human thought!'
(quoted in Lane 1984, 391) Some eighty years later rl1is phonocentric dis
missal of Sign started to collapse when rl1e gestural systems used through
out the world by the deaf to commw1e with each other were recognized as
full-blown languages, on a grammatical, morphological, and semantic par
with and in some respects superior to human speech. One consequence of
this reevaluation of Sign was a reemergence of rl1eories proclaiming the
gestural affiliations and origin of htm1an language.s (Nevertheless, some
rl1irty years after Sign's linguistic recognition, traces of rl1e phonocentric
and textocentric derogation of gesture remain: several universities in rl1e
United States refuse Sign as a fulfillment of graduate language require
ments on rl1e kettle-logic grotmds rl1at American Sign Language [AsL] is
not a 'real' language; ASL is not a 'foreign' language; and, in any case, ASL
lacks a written form.) But its ability to replace the tongue as rl1e vehicle
and physical means of language is not the deepest nor, for our purposes,
rl1e most significant aspect of rl1e relation between gesture and speech.
Interestingly, Maxine Sheets-Jolmstone observes that the "skeptical as
sessments of sign languages, not to say their derision" are tied to rl1e fact
that in all forms of Sign the gestural articulations of thought are perceived
rather than, as rl1ey are in verbal languages, apperceived. Tllis fact makes
mind-body dualists for whom rl1ought is invisible and mental-inside the
head-tmcomfortable and reluctant to grant Sign the status of a language.
(2002, 157) In relation to rl1e body and alphabetic writing of spoken lan
guage gesture operates in the interior of speech itself as rl1e presence of
rl1e body wirl1in utterance and the affective, intra-verbal dimension of the
voice itself. But before this, a necessary clarification of the speech/gesture
nexus by way of distinguishing two kinds of gesture: emblems and ges
ticulations-each with its own relation to language.
Enwlem Gestum
Like spoken words, ASL gestures are coded entirely by a linguistic sys
tem. Distinct from rl1ese, not captured by a code, forming at most only a
"partial code" situated between the two linguistic systems, is the field of
so-called emblems. Emblems are what we ordinarily mean by 'gestures':
holding up the palm, jerking the dmmb, kissing one's fingertips, pointing,
snorting, smacking one's forehead, squeezing a shoulder, bowing, slapping
someone on the back, giving the shoulder, biting a knuckle, flourishing a
18 CHAPTER ONE
the same meaning in gesture form avoids the articulatory act and, thanks
to word magic, this lessened responsibility for speaking transfers to the
speech act itself?' (1992, 65) Doubtless, there is tmth in the idea that ges
turing rather than talking removes one from the net of justifications, argu
ments, questions, deceptions, interpretive qualifications, and recrimina
tions that speech inunediately introduces. But how many emblem gestures
admit of tl1e same meaning as a word or spoken phrase? Indeed, what does
"having tl1e 'same' meaning" mean? How convincingly can speech render
an emblem? Giving the finger, for example, carries a different charge, has
a different meaning, enables a different affect, initiates a different confron
tation from saying "up yoms" or "fuck you" or "go screw yomself:' and so
on. (That there are inequivalent verbalizations suggests emblems generate
meanings by their very exclusion of speech.) But in any event, assuming
tl1at 'san1eness' of meaning makes sense, is the difference between ges
turing and voicing the 'same' meanings reducible to "lessened responsi
bility"?
Thus, consider otl1er deployments of emblems, for exan1ple their ex
tensive, deeply embedded, and seemingly indispensable use in secular and
religious rituals and practices. Here sometlling different from lessened re
sponsibility, almost the opposite, seems to be in play; as if words, so easily
uttered, are insufficiently responsible, not binding enough, too fleeting
and precise at the same tin1e, and only bodily action can fulfill tl1e rele
vant ceremotlial and devotional or litmgical pmposes; as if gestures are
able to create and stabilize belief, to induce as well as express religious
feelings, social ideologies and moods, and forms of consciousness more
radically and with more appropriate affect than the specialized precision of
speech.6 In tl1is context, what Andre Leroi-Gourhan says about speech's
(and writing's) inferiority to art vis-a-vis religion, "tl1at graphic expression
restores to language tl1e din1ension of tl1e inexpressible-tile possibility of
multiplying the din1ensions of a fact in instantly accessible visual symbols"
(1993, 2oo), carries over from graphic symbols to visual gestmes?
Evidently, emblem gestmes say notl1ing (even when tl1ey are auditory
and even when they can be verbally parsed). In fact they ftmction at their
most characteristic when differentiated and opposed to speech. Unlike
words, which stand in a coded relation to ideas, things, interpretants,
people outside themselves, emblem gestures signify and have mearling
better: have force, affect, point-tl1rough tl1e fact of tl1eir taking place, in
the effects they help bring about, in the affectual matrices tl1ey support, in
all tl1at tl1ey induce by virtue of tl1eir occm-rence as twents. In other words,
emblem gestures do not say anything outside their own situated and em
bodied petformance: their relation to speech is one of exclusion, avoid
ance, and on occasion silencing. Agan1ben locates the essence of gesture
in this silencing and articulates it as an exclusively metamedialogical phe
nomenon: "Because being-in-language is not something that could be said
in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to
figure something in language; it is always agag in the proper meaning of
the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth
to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor's in1provisation meant
to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak?' (2ooo, 59)
However illwninating it is to construe gesture in metacommwlica
tional terms, as the "making of a means visible;' the formulation is ulti
mately reductive in several senses. First, as we've seen, emblem gestures
execute a variety of speech-act-like ftmctions such as pronlising, threaten
ing, and the like, as well as devotional and meditational acts rl1at have little
or norl1ing to do with the "exhibition ofmediality?' Second, insofar as they
metacommunicate in rl1is way, it is as emblems rl1at they do so and not as
ges tures at large; moreover, they behave in dlis way in relation to speech
and not necessarily wirl1 respect to other media. Third, even in relation
to speech, gesture behaves in ways other than a gag: besides excluding or
silencing speech or marking its inability to articulate in sentences rl1e state
of being inside language, gesture co-originates with and accompanies spo
ken language asgesticulation, and on a deeper level is intrinsic to speech as
tone or prosody, the auditory gestures of the voice, without which htm1an
verbal utterance is impossible. Lastly, characterizing gesture in exclusively
metalogic terms, "what is relayed to human beings in gestures is . . . the
conummication of a commtmicability" (Agamben 2ooo, 58) masks the fact
rl1at gesture is also and always a medium ofno small in1portance in its own
right. To say more we need first to describe its gesticulatory and prosodic
forms of mediation.
Gesticulation
A casual look at conversation and storytelling shows verbal utterance ac
companied by fleeting, often barely discernible, seemingly idiosyncratic
and indefulite gestures of rl1e fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, and face.
Gestures that appear to be cotmected, although how is not clear, to rl1e
substance of what is being narrated. These gesticulatory movements are
not platmed or consciously produced; rl1ey are involwltary and sponta
20 CHAPTER ONE
neous and are for the most part tmnoticed and communicationally super
fluous. Certainly, blind people have no difficulty comprehending speech,
and people converse easily on the telephone, listen to recorded messages,
and fully understand speech on the radio, without registering too much
disturbance at the absence of any accompanying gestures. More than other
kinds of gesture, gesticulation seems an mmecessary addendum to utter
ance, an echo perhaps of a pre-intellectual, pre-verbal form of communi
cation, having little to do wirl1 the articulation or expression of rl1ought
in speech.
Empirical investigations of rl1e gesticulatory activity accompanying
verbal narration suggest orl1erwise. Far from being epiphenomenal, a
surface effect tmconnected to rl1e expression of thought, gesticulation re
lates to rl1e semantic, pragmatic, and discursive aspects of speech in non
trivial ways, embracing various kinds of gesture accomplishing distinct
semiotic tasks. There are iconographic gestures, for example outlining a
square shape depicting literally a 'window' or metaphorically indicating
a 'window of opportunity'; kinetographic gestmes, for example miming
handwriting to indicate 'writing' or a 'text' or 'literacy'; or bringing rl1e
hands togerl1er accompanying the expression 'an agreement was reached';
or gestures to mark an abstraction introduced into the narrative, for ex
ample cupped hands (rl1e container metaphor in Western cultme) when
narration jumps out of the story being told and refers to its genre. There
are also 'beat' gestures, brief on/off movements marking rl1e word rl1ey
accompany as significant not for its semantic content but for its discur
sive or pragmatic role, for exan1ple, a hand flick when a new character or
rl1eme or metalingual gloss is introduced into a story. Beside rl1ese self
contained or holistic gestures there are also contrastive pairs. For example,
a straight-line gesture indicating a direct somce of information against a
cmved one indicating information that is mediated; or evolution in time
by a series of looping gestures in contrast to a straight line for a succession
of stages having no element of transformation. And there is a class of ges
tures rl1at realizes experiential meanings, from self-pointing to specifying
times and places, rl1at correspond to deictic or indexical terms in speech
such as 'I:'you: 'here: 'now' which make essential reference to the physical
circumstances of rl1e speaker.8
Plainly, gesticulation (notwithstanding its conmmnicative redtmdancy
in most practical contexts) is linked to the words it accompanies at non
trivial levels of speech. Why and how this has come about is not as yet
m1derstood. One might attempt an explanation along rl1e lines that ges-
form, ultimately more significant for our purposes, tl1e audible body
22 CHAPTER ONE
movements which operate inside speech: gestures which constitute the
voice itself.
Speech involves systematic and interconnected movements of the lips,
tongue, cheeks, jaw, glottis, vocal chords, larynx, diaphragm-identifi
able and repeatable patterns of body parts-suggesting that it might be
usefully regarded as a species of gesture, auditory as distinct from visual,
but gestural nonetheless. Findings from research in phonetics and artificial
speech synthesis over the past two decades confirm this. They indicate that
it is precisely as a gestural system that the complex kinematics-the aural/
oral assemblage of movements rl1at make up rl1e human voice-are best
comprehended. Specifically, the task-dynamical, physiological models of
rl1e type describing the assemblage of movements and skeleto-muscular
organization of the body during walking have proved ideal for modeling
the dynamics of rl1e lips, tongue, larynx, and so on, during speech produc
tion.
Moreover, not only s
i rl1e production of speech gestural, but so it turns
out, somewhat Lmexpectedly, is its perception: "Surprisingly:' as the evolu
tionary neurologist Terrence Deacon finds himself saying, "auditory pro
cessing of speech sOLmds does not appear to be based on extracting basic
acoustic parameters of the signal, as a scientist might design a computer
to do, before mapping rl1em onto speech sounds. Speech analysis appears
designed instead to predict which oral-vocal movements produced them
and ignore rl1e rest?' (1997, 14) We listen, it seems, not to speech sOLmds as
such, not, rl1at s
i , as isolatable sonic entities, but to rl1e movements of the
body causing rl1em; we focus on what happens between the sOLmds, to the
dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings
away, and completions-the very features of gestures we attend when we
are perceiving them. In a certain sense, we listen to speech-sounds as signs
of their gestural origins, as a physician listens to the sOLmds a patient's
heart makes in order to analyze the movements causing them.
Linguists draw a fundan1ental division between two aspects of spo
ken utterance: they separate what s
i considered by them to be 'proper' to
language-what is actually said, the grammatically and syntactically gov
erned strings of phonemes, words, phrases, and so on, for example, "To be
or not to be"-from rl1e 'paralinguistic' manner of rl1eir saying, from how
what is said is said, for exan1ple in this case, the prosodically varied ways
such a line might be delivered by an actor playing Hamlet. Prosody s
i the
gestural dimension of the voice, its "grain" (Barthes): it comprises all the
24 CHAPTER ONE
Writi?W Speech
What if one could separate speech from the voice? Eliminate tl1e tone and
keep tl1e words? Alphabetic writing is a communicational medium, and
every medium disrupts what had been for its predecessor conceived as
a seanuess whole, an integrated assemblage. The process of remediation
involves a recalibration of space-time with consequent separations and
severings of what were spatial and temporal and physical and aural con
tiguities and a reconstitution of (a dimension of) the original content in
virtual form, which for writing is the text, speech being reconstituted in
virtual form as 'speech at a distance! Writing segments tl1e spoken stream
of sotmds into words (which tl1emselves owe tl1eir status as separate items
to the action of writing) from the time, place, circumstances, psychologi
cal wherewitl1al, and social contexts of its production and re-situates it
at another time, elsewhere, for otl1er purposes, in other circumstances,
in unknown contexts. It cuts speech loose from the voice, substituting
for tl1e individual, breathing, here-and-now agency of the one who utters
them by an abstract, invisible author, and replacing a unique event, tl1e
utterance which w1folds over time, by fixed, repeatable, atemporal alpha
betic inscriptions, inscriptions which necessarily fall short of representa
tion. "Speech:' Barry Powell observes, "is a wave:' and the alphabet's sepa
rate graphic marks "cam10t represent it!' (2002, 123) And, more salient
here, alphabetic writing eliminates all and any connection speech has to
the body's gestures. One might object tl1at handwritten alphabetic texts
evade this total disjtmction from gesture. ·written emphasis, uncertainty,
rhythm, discontinuity, stress, tailing off, and other scriptive traces of the
body, might be said to be the handwriting correlates to certain rudimen-
26 CHAPTER ONE
by alphabetic writing. Equating what writing omits with the content of
a conscious speech act only obscures the inexplicit, a-conscious effect of
dlis loss which, as we shall see, s
i key to the very construction of 'mind!
For the present we can observe that rl1e identification is perforce reduc
tive: it occludes rl1e corporeal underside of the alphabet's action. What
writing onlits from speech is rl1e body: rl1e feelings, moods, emotions,
attitudes, intuitions, embodied demands, declarations, expressions, and
desires located in ilie voice, rather ilian consciously formulated (writable)
rl1ought. What it onlits is rl1e entire field ofaffect conveyed and induced by
human vocality, through ilie voice's impulsions, inflections, and rhythms,
its aural texture and emotional dynamics. A vocal field bordered on one
side by song and on rl1e orl1er by ilie non-speech of sighs, moans, cries,
gnmts, screams, laughs, and so on, all iliat, in Roland Barthes's phrase,
surrounds a "language lined with flesh?' (1975, 66-67)
Notwiilistanding rl1is, it is still true rl1at the history of reading is rl1e !lis
tory of redressing what writing fails to represent. Or, rl1e same thing, rl1e
history of writing consists principally of attempts to find readable equiva
lents and alternatives to ilie vocal prosody necessarily absent from it. Lack
ing vocal gestme, writing was obliged to construct its own modes of force,
its own purely textual sources of affect, which it accomplished ilirough
two dialectically opposed-or better, co-evolutionary-principles of cre
ation: transduction (rl1e discourses of narrative prose) and min1esis (the
voices of poetic diction).
The poetic generation of affect is ilie more direct, iconic, and cor
poreally rooted one of mimetic retrieval: it seeks to recuperate vocalic
gestures, to reproduce the oralfamal achievements of an embodied voice
wirl1in ilie sound effects of speakable te-xts. Paul Zwnilior commenting
precisely on the performance and reception of oral poetry talks of "body
movements" being "integrated into a poetics;' and he notes rl1e "aston
ishing permanence rl1at associates gesture and utterance;' insisting rl1at
"a gestmal model s i part of ilie 'competence' of the interpreter and is pro
jected into performance?' (1990, 153) The impulse is to reproduce a kind
of sonically faithful sinmlacmm of rl1e work of rl1e voice: rl1rough words
chosen as much for ilieir amal/oral features as rl1eir significance, through
fusions and splittings of phrases, through rl1e deployment of textual ar
rangements-and ordering, jtLxtaposing, spacing, enjambment-which
minlic ilie gesture-based dynamics of toned speech.12
\Vim prose, retrieval gives way to textual reinvention. Here, alphabetic
writing brought into being an entire apparatus of its own for inscribing
28 CHAPTER ONE
Textual Brains
The two sides of human speech, syllables (self-contained, discrete) and
the tone (continuous and extended) of their delivery, are governed neuro
logically by the comparatively recent neocortex and rl1e ancient midbrain
or limbic area respectively. In speech-indeed as speech-they occur
simultaneously, are w1ited, coupled into a single meaningful sonic event.
Alphabetic writing disrupts dtis tmity. It splits ilie voice, selecting from
the stream of speech (what it defines as) words to notate, jettisons all trace
of their tone, and sets up its own neurological apparatus to handle rl1e
writing and reading of the resulting letter notations.
At rl1is point a nemological qualification is in order. Here and in what
follows I deliberately adopt a simplified topographic pictme of ilie ar
rangements of ilie brain's fw1ctions. In reality rl1ere seems to be not one
localized area of affect and feeling-the midbrain and limbic structmes
and one localized area of cognitive iliought-the neocortex-but a num
ber of separate, interconnected regions, distributed rl1roughout the brain,
each specific to types of emotion and cognitive processing. This is part of
an emerging consensus of the brain as "a collection of systems, sometimes
called modules, each wirl1 different fw1ctions?' (LeDoux 1996, ros) An
adequate neurological pictme of how affect and abstract iliought, tone
and 'what's said' are interrelated, then, would have to incorporate how rl1e
relevant modules are connected to and interact wirl1 each other. No such
account at present exists. In fact neurological interest in ilie topic of affect
is relatively recent and has yet to provide such a picture. However, for the
purpose of identifying the rudimentary, but highly significant neurologi
cal effects brought about by the practice of alphabetic writing and reading,
a crude first approxin1ation, framed as an opposition of cortical and mid
brain systems, is more than adequate.l3
'Learning one's alphabet: acquiring ilie ability to read and write alpha
betic inscriptions, is an intense cognitive business requiring a permanent
alteration of their brains that takes human children a protracted period of
repetition and practice to accomplish. Neurologically, ilie requirements
of literacy create in rl1e brain what we might call a 'literacy module: a
neural complex wirl1in the neocorte.,x dedicated to writing and reading
purely textual entities, rl1at is, handling ilie production and reception of
phonemic strings rl1at constitute written words shorn of rl1eir prosodic
content and associated affective fields, words decoupled from the moods,
feelings, desires, and regulatory activity routinely evinced (and induced)
30 CHAPTER ONE
and values of Western culture, might have their antecedents in an absent
better, disenfranchised and repressed-midbrain set against a consciously
present, inevitably foregrounded and dominating neocortex.
This means that on the one hand, writing's de-prosodized words ap
pear incorporeal, as if they issued from a disembodied and autonomous
source.l4 On the other hand, from its begim1i.ng, writing has effaced its
own role in constmcting the hierarchies of mind over body, thought over
feeling, and so on. By clain1ing (in writing) to re-present speech wirl1out
loss, by systematically identifying itself as a medium which transparently
inscribes speech, it masks the radical disjw1ction from speech rl1at enables
it to make such a claim.
Conflating virtual and actual speech has consequences of an ontologi
cal and metaphysical kind. Once the alphabetic body is in place, once rl1e
neuronal padnvays of literacy have been installed in the brains of its users
and becan1e automatic du-ough the repeated alphabetic writing of speech
and reading of lettered texts, that is, as soon as writing "invisiblizes" itself
as a medium, rl1e stage is set for rl1e coming into being of an entity-nec
essarily incorporeal-who is in1agined to write 'I.' Such a being or agency
'speaks' itself with a virtual voice and, in (undeclared and unexan1ined)
analogy to the spoken 'I: is imputed to be the source and origin of vir
tual speech. In chapter 5, we shall see how two such agencies-Mind and
God-exhibiting different modes of transcendental escape from corpo
reality can be w1derstood as medialogically engendered ghosts, spectral
quasi-presences which emerged out of the alphabetic writing of 'l.'
One can ask about rl1e 'speech' of such virtual beings. For exan1ple,
seeing that the cmmections essential to vocalic affect are routed rl1rough
the frontal lobes, imagine the suppression of rl1em as performing a kind
of orthographic version of a pre-frontal lobotomy: certainly, descriptions
of lobotomized speech, "in their words . . . no traces of affection could be
detected" (Amaral and Oliviero 2005), suggest how, if it were possible to
realize it, we might perceive de-prosodized words, speech emptied of all
affect; an idea I return to later.
Two
GESTURE AND NON-ALPHABETIC WRITING
-Ricardo Nemirovsky and Francesca Ferrara, New Avenues for the Micro
analysis ofJWathematics Learning: Connecting Talk) Gestttl·e) and Eye Motion
(2004)
34 CHAPTER T\'1'0
\
y
\
\
\
\ X
(442) And this is literally so: a 'hold' consists for him of the drawing and
perceiving gestures which determine any diagram, but which is never ex
hausted by them, since, as Merleau-Ponty points out, the gestures over
flow any particular diagranm1atic representation.
The standard geometrical proof that the angles of a triangle sum to 180
degrees goes as follows: a = a* and b = b*, since lines X and Y are parallel
and any transversal intersecting parallel line does so at equal angles. From
this we can conclude that a + b + c = a * + b* + c. But the right-hand side of
this equation is the angle subtended by a straight line, which by definition
is 180 degrees.
After presenting tllis demonstration Merleau-Ponty observes, "My per
ception of tl1e triangle was not . . . fixed and dead . . . it was traversed by
lines of force, and everywhere in it new directions, not traced out yet,
came to light. In so far as the triangle was in1plicated in my hold on the
world, it was bmsting with indefinite possibilities of which the constmc
tion actually drawn was merely one:'' (443)
More recently, the matl1ematician Gilles Chatelet elaborated a matlle
matically far-reaclling and more-sophisticated version of Merleau-Ponty's
36 CHAPTER TWO
body. Characterizing mathematics as an edifice of formal, set-theoretical
structures ignores the corporeality, the physical materiality (semiotic and
performative), as well as the contemplative/intuitive poles of mathemati
cal activity; and in so doing dismisses diagrams as mere psychological
props, providing perceptual help but contributing nothing of substance
to mathematical content.2 Against this, Chatelet explains their ubiquity
within mathematical practice by assigning a fundan1ental importance to
the work they do in the creation of'content': diagrams are more rl1an de
pictions or in1ages: they are frozen gestures, rl1ey "capture gestures mid
flight" and thus have a kinematic as well as a purely visual dimension. "A
diagram can transfix a gesture, bring it to rest, long before it curls up into
a sign;' which is why, he says, "modern geometers and cosmologists like
diagrams with rl1eir peremptory power of evocation?'( 10)
A crucial attribute of diagrams in Chatelet's tmderstanding is their after
life, their capacity to be re-activated, to not get used up or "exhausted?'
This separates rl1em from metaphors: they can "prolong themselves into an
operation which keeps them from being worn out?' True, like metaphors,
they can "leap out in order to create spaces and reduce gaps;' but tmlike a
metaphor, a diagran1 initiates another phase: when a diagram "inm10bi
lizes a gesture in order to set down an operation, it does so by sketching a
gesture rl1at then cuts out another?' Chatelet thus understands rl1e work of
diagrams as a relaying of gestures, as a "technique of allusions;' and speaks
of dynasties of rl1em, "fan1ilies of diagran1s of increasingly precise and an1
bitious allusions?' (ro) which extend through the historical development
of marl1ematics; rl1e recuperation of their lineage is one of rl1e principal
tools Chatelet uses to organize his genealogies.3 Diagrams are not repre
sentations of existing knowledge or already available content; rl1ey dis
till action and experience and "reveal rl1emselves capable of appropriating
and conveying 'all this talking wirl1 the hands' . . . of which physicists are
so proud?' Chatelet sees the appeal to and deployment of diagrams as a
pere1mial element of marl1ematical practice: "The diagran1 never goes out
of fashion: it is a project that aims to apply exclusively to what it sketches;
rl1is demand for autonomy makes it rl1e natural accomplice of d10ught
experin1ents?'4 (u)
Mathematics, rl1en, offers two modes of converting the "disciplined
mobility of rl1e body" into signs: transducing it via metaphors which
"shed their skin" to become symbolic operations such as adding numbers;
and capturing it, freezing mobility n
i mid-flight to form a diagran1. (Recall
38 CHAPTER TWO
Gestura-haptic Writing
The hand in the age of the image seems amputated, no longer able to cover
the eyes or the face, overwhelmed by the landscape of speed. Yet, this frenzy
of the surface provides the hand its cachet; touch has become synonymous
with the genuine, the real, the human. Touch, is nostalgic. Touch cannot be
least simplistic.
minds.
40 CHAPTER TWO
the alphabetic word to the point of its archaization. What Leroi-Gourhan
points to is not anorl1er move in an old battle between pictures and words
but a new medium: a conummicational teclmology which would operate
in a maimer related to rl1e fact that the alphabet writes rl1e movement of
42 CHAPTER TWO
Is there any reason-biological, physical, theoretical, or practical-why
movement could not similarly be recorded? Could there not be a form of
kinematic writing able to capture the perceptual feel of actual movements
in space? The answer is yes, there could be such a medium: digital tech
nology in fact offers rl1e possibility of a non-notational meditml capable
of reproducing rl1e kinesis of bodies, called, appropriately enough, motion
capture.
But before elaborating, it will help to gloss common and for our pur
poses not irrelevant uses of the term 'capture' connecting it to older forms
of mimesis. Thus, within traditional theatrical and ceremonial discourse
one talks of imitation, min1icry, copying, and quotation as modes of cap
ture, in which rl1e htm1an body and voice are used to capture movements,
postures, and sounds of humans (but also of animals and machines). But
these actions lack any trace or record of rl1emselves, and though they ftmc
tion as vital forms of capture within artistic performance are not a form
of writing as interpreted here-their impermanence, their lack of any iter
able trace, being precisely the point of rl1e epithet that theatre s
i 'written
on the wind! From rl1e opposite direction rl1ere are those media which do
indeed record and notate (unwittingly) a mimicked movement, though
rl1is aspect-which legitimates calling them written media-is not in
rl1eir accepted description foregrounded about them. Examples would be
painting, carving, calligraphy, pottery, sewing, embroidery, knitting, and
weaving, all of which achieve a certain freezing of actions by reproducing
traces of human movements (rather than the movements themselves) as
inextricable components of the pots, written messages, depicted images,
tapestries and textiles whose production is rl1eir primary ftmction.
Of rl1ese modes of tmintentional capture, painting by virtue of its cul
tural preeminence resulting from its representational usages is exemplary;
its recording of the artist's gestures through brushstrokes constitute what
is recognized to be an essential aspect of rl1e art, an aspect, however, dis
cursively downplayed and neglected when compared to painting's repre
sentational function. The art historian James Elkins, battling dlis neglect
of the sheer materiality of paint and arguing against the marginalization of
rl1e embodied action and painted gestures in favor of rl1e depicted content,
insists on rl1e paint-psyche connection, how paint "embeds thought;' how
it furnishes a "cast of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's
body and d10ughts?' Seen thus, paintings, particularly oil paintings, be
come records of a d10usand accunmlated strokes of rl1e brush, which
"preserve rl1e memory of tired bodies rl1at made them, rl1e quick jabs,
44 CHAPTER TWO
·whatever thought, affect, and feeling that painting was able to embed
directly (non-representationally) into tl1e painted surface via its pour
ings and brushstrokes had to be accomplished tl1rough these immobile
reducts, what Chatelet calls diagrams, of the gestures and movements of
the painter's body. Motion capture s
i able to escape from reducts and resi
dues by being able to deliver a form of kinematic writing not confined to
such stationary traces.
motion captured
One captures a body's motion7 tl1rough the use of tracking technology, by
attaching markers or sensors (responsive to visual or magnetic or aural or
inertial tracking technologies) to chosen points on tl1e body (of an animal,
machine, htm1an) and takes periodic readings, i.e., digitized san1ples, via
cameras, magnetic sensors, and so on, of where in space these sensors are
as the body moves. In fact, 'motion' as such is not essential; in the case of
hapticity, the body might move (as in stroking) but does not have to; even
potential movement, the propensity to move-pushes, pulls, in1pulsions,
graspings-which issues in pressure, tensions, and dynan1ic resistance can
be captured by force-feedback devices closely related to tracking sensors.
In both cases, the resulting data-set of sampled readings contains the in
formation needed to construct what can be perceived to be a reproduction
of the original actual or potential motion of the chosen aspects of tl1e body
in an muimited series of situations.
As tl1e phonogran1 and can1era enable the storage and production of
som1d and vision, motion-capture technology stores and reproduces kine
sis. Two differences however should be noted. The first concerns historical
development: muike the capture of sound and vision, which were origi
nally analog and only subsequent to tl1eir technical, cultmal, and artistic
establislm1ent becan1e digitized (allowing a contrast between the old ana
log content and its digitized form), motion capture leapfrogs this history
by producing digital files from the outset. The second difference is opera
tional: the haptic sense, muike the more passive recording of sotmd and
vision, has to be captured actively; observation is not enough. In order
for the sense of touch to be registered some degree of enactment or ma
nipulation must precede perception. But, notwitl1standing the complica
tions and creative facilitations these differences in1ply, there is a functional
analogy between digital sotmd, digital video, and digital capture of kine
sis, in that, like sound and video, the readings of motion-capture sensors
are raw data, a metonymic sampling of tl1eir target motions, as opposed
46 CHAPTER TWO
handling real and simulated molecules by research chemists to robotically
executed tele-surgery controlled through visually enhanced feedback loops
to cross-planetary arm-wrestling to the attempt to realize tele-dildonics
sex-at-a-distance which according to its adherents and would-be practi
tioners would allow a participant to feel his or her avatar sexing anotl1er's
avatar, or as they put it "computer-mediated sexual interaction between
the Virtual Reality presences of two humans?' (Hornsby 2001 ) Differently
and richer in the direction of more nuanced and interesting affectivity,
force capture would include the full haptic modalities-all tl1e numerous
forms of stroking, squeezing, and touching-tl1at organize the informal
and largely uncharted inter-actions and corporeal commtmings assembled
witl1in our everyday constructing and enacting of human embodiment.
Motion capture technology, then, allows the conmllmicational, instru
mental, and affective traffic of the body in all its movements, openings,
tensings, foldings, and rhythms into the orbit of 'writing? There is in this
no limit, at least in principle, to what about or of the body s
i capturable:
the locomoting, cavorting, dancing, strutting, gesturing body; the arm,
hand, torso, and head of tl1e Signing body; the ever-present gesticulating
body accompanying speech; facial expressions, transient twists, postur
ings, posings, and turns of the body in petformance; shrugs, eye blinks,
winks, barely perceptible tremors and nods of the socially conm1tmicating
head and face; and so on. And not only the signifying and a-signifying
moves and dynan1ics of people, but also of machines and anin1als and ob
jects: from a chimpanzee's grin or the throbbing of a massage chair, to
the movements of a musical conductor's baton, the swing of a golf club,
tl1e vibrations of a violinist's bow, and so on. Inversely, tl1ere will be ac
tions and kinematic patterns that will exist purely by virtue of being gen
erated and thus (until imitated) signifiable purely by virtue of this very
technology. All of this constitutes a gestura-haptic meditml of vast, un
realized, and as yet tmtl1eorized or critically narrativized potential.S
And what, to revert to our original question, does tltis imply for alpha
betic writing and for going beyond tl1e writing of speech? And would
not such in its turn go beyond the hegemony and auiliority (as tl1is is
presently constituted) of written discourse itself? Could motion capture
be about to induce a transformation as radical and far reaching for tl1e
body's gestural activities, for its skin and organs of grasping and touch
ing, as writing accomplished for the organs of speech? Could bringing (a
digitally objectified) gesture out from under the shadow of ilie spoken
word install a new order of body mediation? In such an installation it is
48 CHAPTER TWO
opposition between the gesturo-haptic and the linguistic in relation to
the means and protocols of theatrical performance was the overriding aes
thetic justification and moral force of his theatre of cmelty. For Artaud the
purpose of theatre was the induction of feeling, emotion, and affect, the
bringing about of a physical and hence spiritual and metaphysical trans
formation of the bodies of the audience, a corporeal upheaval in its recipi
ents whose effect on their subjectivity would be as discontinuous, violent,
far reaching, and tmignorable as rl1e plague. Speech, especially the speech
derived from a script, could not achieve this. Artaud, requiring his rl1eatre
to ftmction with a "pure theatrical language which does without words,
a language of signs, gestures, and attitudes . . . ;' knew that speech could
not but denigrate and marginalize gesture, whereas what was needed was
a reversal of the dominion of thought over the body: "gesture . . . instead
of serving as a decoration, an accompaniment of a thought, instead causes
its movement, directs it, destroys it, or changes it completely" (1958, 39).
Artaud's program of theatrical embodiment-his refusal to subordinate
the stage to the performance of writing, his insistence on the imperatives
and possibilities of screan1s, shouts, gestures, cries, primitive signals, in
choate utterances, and silences-did for modern theatre what Pollock's re
fusal of intentionality and conscious purpose and his insertion of the body
onto the canvas did for painting: it reestablished the gesturo-haptic at rl1e
expense of the depictive, the representational, the linguistic, the textual,
and the symbolic.
Becoming silent, acting mute is becoming infant, and as such is tmder
standable as part of a willed accession to the state of pre-speech, a kind of
return to or renegotiation of the past, except rl1at what is involved in such
a move is not a 'return' or any kind of regression, but a reconfiguration of
the present by altering its genesis, its supposedly necessary and irrevocable
linkage to rl1at past by re-originating itself. The result would be an alter
ation in the conditions for the possibility of being human, a quasi- or neo
primitiveness in which future humans partook of the characteristics of
(present-day) children. In tllis cultural neoteny whereby the adults come
to resemble the yotmg of rl1eir evolutionary forebears, speech would not
of course disappear, but on the contrary become reconfigured (as it was
once before when transformed by alphabetic writing), re-mediated and
transfigured into a more mobile, expressive, and affective apparatus by
the nascent gestura-haptic resources emerging from the teclmologies of
motion capture.
'writing'
Plainly the gestura-haptic achieves both departures from the alphabetic
inscription of the words spoken-jumping beyond notation and beyond
speech-suggested earlier: its capture of the moving human body (not
to mention animals and machines) far e.,xceeds rl1e alphabet's inscribing
of rl1e organs of speech. Nevertheless the gesturo-haptic presents itself as
a form of writing or 'visual notation' (Furniss 2006) that bears a ftmda
mental kinship with alphabetic writing by making available a set of effects
parallel to the virtualizing action performed on speech by rl1e alphabet.
It certainly extends to gestures the same kinds of conceptual and prag
matic mobility, spatia-temporal dislocation, freedom from the contexts
of their production, and analytic transparency as rl1e notational system of
alphabetic writing afforded human speech. For as we know, rl1e alphabet,
by allowing (insisting) that words become self-standing objects, discrete
items of awareness that could be isolated, studied, compared, replicated,
and systematized, gave rise to grammar, written discourse and literature,
and a science of linguistics. Likewise, gestures wirl1 respect to their digi
tally captured forms: they too are now being identified, individualized,
examined, replicated, and synrl1esized as discrete and autonomous objects
of conscious attention. The opportunity is thus opened for such newly
digitized and objectified gestures to emerge from the shadow of speech, to
be 'grammaticalized' and give rise to a gesturology, the theoretical inlpli
cations of which would extend to a re-thinking of the status of human cor
poreality. More practically, such a gesturology might serve as an enabling
semiotic frame allowing the gestura-haptic to ftmction as a medium for
Sign to possess what it has so far lacked-a stock of iterable gestural arti
facts constituting a 'literature? It might also do for the principled silences
and tmwords of the gestura-haptic body, not least rl1e production of rl1at
body's presence to itself and to others, what linguistics has done for spo
ken language on the level of positive knowledge, and what genealogies of
discourse have striven to do for the constitution of rl1e speaking subject.
But at rl1e same time rl1e gestura-haptic is a form of writing which
exceeds the textual, insofar as rl1e 'text' can never be separated from the
hermeneutic and the interpretative activities of deciphering. Its mode lies
outside the text, the gran1, or the trace of anything prior to its own per
formance, since it works through bodily enacted events and the necessity
of being experienced as these occur. In dlis sense it is profow1dly and in
escapably exo-textual, a mediating technology that escapes rl1e botmds of
coded sig11ification by operating within interactive, participatory, and in1-
50 CHAPTER TWO
technologized subjectivity
"Cultures:' Merlin Donald renlinds us, "restructure the mind, not only in
terms of its specific contents, which are obviously culture-bow1d, but also
52 CHAPTER TWO
both existent and yet to be created. In this expanded field, captmed body
movements become the means of creating subjectivity-selves, subjects,
and subject-positions-differently operative and differently somced from
those available witl1in alphabetic writing. By allowing gestura-haptic me
diation this kind of constitutive role, such a rewriting of tl1e corporeal
provides a particular-technologically specific-concretization of Gilles
Deleuze's paraphrase of Spinoza to the effect that «we do not know what
a body is capable of;' in tl1at it reveals tl1e body as both vehicle and recipi
ent of becoming, as tl1e site of a movement to and from the outside of the
human, whose contemporary teclmological facilitation can be seen in the
emergence of a bio-technic subject which is still in tl1e stage of being char
acterized-dispersed, plmalized, de-centered, distributed, etc.-as nega
tions of what it s
i in the process of superseding.
But however productive tllis sort of non-endogenous assemblage is, it
presents only one strand-the explicit and manifest aspect-of the exo
genesis brought about by technology. 1echnologies, as we've observed,
restmcture our neurology, to impinge on the body and its psycllic envel
ope along specific chatmels: conventionally either as prosthetic extensions
of physical, cognitive, and perceptual powers (tl1e usual effects of tools,
macllines, apparatuses) or, as media, tl1rough the corporeal chat1ges of af
fect atld subjectivity wrought by the cultmal products tl1ey make possible
(the usual effects of the arts, literature, film, and so on). But less obvious
atld no less interesting, more so perhaps because they operate invisibly,
are the non-explicit, unintentional, atld pre-cultmal corporeal effects of
technologies: tl1eir recalibration of tin1e and space, tl1eir facilitations of
new modalities of self, and tl1e work tl1ey do behind or beneatl1 or despite
the explicitly instnm1ental or signifying ftmctions they at·e known by and
are introduced to discharge.
This double technological restmctming operates at all levels from large
scale infrastmctural phenomena such as electricity distribution or com
puter technology to the most banal machinic device. Thus, a trivial but
paradigmatic exatnple of the latter: tl1e pop-up toaster is a tool invented
to prosthetically extend tl1e cooking body; less obviously, it contributes
to tl1e atonlization of attention, micro-periodization of temporality, and
intermittence of conscious awat·eness that are endenlic to subjectivities
operating in an electronically patterned infrastructme. Likewise, but in
a diffuse atld more indirect way, one we shall identify later, are the unin
tentional technologically driven changes in subjectivity associated with
computational and visualization technologies (chapter 4 ).
54 CHAPTER T\'1'0
INTERLUDE
Three
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS
58 CHAPTER THREE
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 59
is meant the domain of action, process, and operations from a single cal
culation, computation, or verification to an arbitrarily complex program
of instructions.
Mathematics can be understood as a vast and particular complex of
activities across these domains. The figure of the 'mathematician; the one
who carries out these activities, who knows and does mathematics, is on
this understanding an assemblage of agencies, each of which implements
the characteristic activity of a domain. So that, far from being a monolithic
or indivisible actor, the mathematician can be seen as a plurality of parallel
activities, a trio of different sources of action as follows.
The actor corresponding to the domain of the idea I call the Person.
This agency has extra-mathematical physical and cultural presence, is in1
mersed in natural language and the subjectivity it makes available, has in
sight and hw1ehes, provides motivation for and is the somce of intuitions
behind concepts and proofs. Abstracted from the Person is the agency
corresponding to the domain of the symbol, which I call the Subject. The
Subject is the somce of rl1e inter-subjectivity embedded in mathematical
languages, but is without rl1e Person's capacity of self-reference, since it is
circumscribed by languages which by definition lack indexical markers of
time and physical place. Finally, rl1ere is the Agent, the actor associated
wirl1 the domain of procedure who ftmctions as the delegate for the Person
duough rl1e mediation of the Subject; the Agent executes a mathemati
cally idealized version of rl1e actions in1agined by rl1e Person and it does so
formally since it lacks the Subject's access to meaning and significance.
The model presented here, then, comprehends the mathematician as a
tripartite being enacting certain kinds of inter-subjective thought experi
ments, imagined procedures conceived to take place in idealized times and
spaces. The Person in1agines an idea X associated with some procedure Y
rl1e intuitive idea of number and rl1e action of counting, for example. The
Subject thinks X and Y wirl1in marl1ematical signs-for example, via a
notation system which describes and determines what 'mm1ber' signifies
mathematically and presupposes what is meant by 'counting! The Agent,
for whom X and Y are formal symbols and procedures, without meaning
or significance, executes rl1e action in1agined by rl1e Person-for example,
rl1e Agent carries out a calculation or orl1er operation on a list of numerical
expresswns.
One of the activities performed by the Person is giving proofs of asser
tions. The Person makes a claim about an imagined task or procedme
60 CHAPTER THREE
cow1ting, inverting a matrLx, etc.-that the Agent will execute; the task is
articulated via an appropriate linguistic apparatus supplied by the Subject.
Then, by tracking the Agent via tl1is apparatus, tl1at is by shadowing tl1e
Subject, the Person is persuaded as to the trutl1 of the claim.
These three agencies are by no means absolute or fixed.This is obvious
in tl1e case of tl1e Person who is manifestly a cultural and historical prod
uct. But it is also true of the Subject and the Agent: tl1ey are constructs.
\Vhat constitutes them-the rules and protocols of legitimate sign usage,
permitted definitions, legitin1ate procedures, agreements about valid rea
soning and proof, and so on-have been shaped over time by innovation,
conceptual reconfiguration, philosophical criticism, explicit programs of
rigor, and the like. Having said this, however, one should note tl1eir rela
tive stability: they do not change easily, and when tl1ey do they are obliged
do so i n relation to each other in order to preserve the coherence of tl1e
mathematician they jointly facilitate.
The latter constraint implies that a major change in one of these agen
cies is likely to have significant consequences for the otl1ers, and hence for
tl1e character of the mathematician and mathematics as a whole. This in
deed looks to be the case at the present historical jw1cture.The computer
is providing an Agent of incomparable power and flexibility, able to carry
out procedures whose results were previously Lmsuspected.This frees up
tl1e Person to enlarge tl1e scope and imaginative possibilities of matlle
matical thought, which in turn demands a Subject together with a suitably
rich and powetful mathematical language for conumm icating between tl1e
Person and Agent.The result, as we shall see, is that a reconfigured triad
of agencies able to operate in new and complementary ways is being put
i n place.
'With tllis triadic model as fran1ework we can return to the digital com
puter's effect on classical mathematics. In order to focus the question on
essentials we shall restrict attention to what is essential and inescapable
about tl1e computer: it is a rule-governed machine; it is a digital as op
posed to an analog maclline; it is a material machine subject to and inl
pinging on physical reality.The machinic aspect will result in local effects
on mathematics involving reasoning and proof as well as the nature of it
eration. The digital aspect will impinge on the notion of continuity which,
in the form of tl1e linear continuum, is tl1e site where tl1e analog is tl1ought
witllin classical mathematics. The material aspect will impinge on the sup
posed purity of pme mathematics, that is, on its separation from what
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 61
mathematicians call the 'real world.' Since these notions form the corner
stone of post-Renaissance matl1ematics, it is likely tl1at any change in their
status will be significant.
The remarks about mathematics and computers tl1at follow fall into
two parts. The first is descriptive, outlining some of the varied ways the
computer is currently altering the logical status, content, practice, and
evolution of matl1ematics, the main tl1rust of which is a displacement of
the infinite and the continuous by the discrete and finite along with the
openings such displacement bring into play. The second part is more dis
cursive, examining a sense in which infinity might be a philosophical or
tl1eoretical problem for computer science. Specifically, I look at a con
tention by cryptographers that computer science's infinity-based idealiza
tion of a 'feasible' algoritlm1 is irrelevant to practical, real-world, real-time
computational tasks.
62 CHAPTER THREE
ics, there are those areas such as the investigation of symbolic systems,
formal and artificial languages, the theory of algorithms, and finite model
theory which, whilst not computer driven, relate naturally to the investi
gation of computational questions. Indeed, a subfield of one of these
that of algorithmic complexity-gave rise to the P = NP question, now
considered one of the major open problems of contemporary mathemat
ics. We shall examine an aspect of this problem below.
The local effects associated with the logical, metamathematical aspect
of computers are oriented not to content but to method: to questions
of reasoning and syntax, modes of marl1ematical argument, deduction,
inference, proof and validation, and the mechanics of formal systems.
One form dlis has taken has been the development of computer-generated
proofs, computer-aided reasoning, and theorem proving by machine. In
a sense there is nothing new to such an enterprise. Ever since Pascal's in
vention of a calculating machine and Leib11iz's celebrated call to replace all
disputation and rational argument by formal, symbolic means, there have
been numerous and varied efforts to mechanize reasoning. The contem
porary versions of these range from having the computer find new proofs
of existing theorems to the more in1pressive goal of generating proofs or
disproofs of open questions as part of efforts to rival traditional, entirely
symbolic methods of mathematical proofand deduction by computational
validation. Some of rl1ese have yielded positive results; one such theorem
proving procedure successfully settled a question, the so-called Robbins
conjecture about certain algebras that had been open for sLxty years. (Mc
Clure, 1997)
Less an1bitious is the use of machine reasoning to augment rather than
replace rl1e traditional symbolic modes of mathematical argmnent. The
main need for augmentation is the difficulty of managing large volumes
of data and information involved in the handling of cases, circumstances,
and effects so numerous and heterogeneous as to put rl1em beyond rl1e
capacity of an individual marl1ematician's cognitive wherewithal, not to
say lifetime, to examine. For example, the theorems tmderlying rl1e classi
fication of all sin1ple finite groups relies on a computer-compiled database
too massive and tmwieldy and internally complex for a single mathemati
cian to process. (Soloman, 1995) Though ostensibly more mundane rl1an
using computers to prove theorems outright, this augmentative approach
raises a fundamental issue as to the nature and assumed constitution of
'the mathematician! A fan10us example s
i the four-color problem which
asked wherl1er every map drawn in rl1e plane could be colored using only
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 63
four colors. This was settled positively by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang
Haken in 1976 by a proof which relied on a computer program to check
thousands of intricate map configurations too complex to be verified in
any other way. (Appel and Haken 1989) A different kind of departure from
traditional methods of logical validation made possible by the computer
occurs with so-called probabilistic proof procedures which rtlll a series of
spot checks on randomly selected fragments of long proofs and estimate
to a given degree of confidence the correctness of the whole. (Goldreich,
1995) The question raised by probabilistic proofs, by the example of fi
nite groups, and more pointedly by the Appel-Haken argtll11ent is sin1ple
and profow1d: what is or should count as a proof? Traditionally, a proof
had always been a persuasive argument, a logical narrative which could
be checked and assented to, step by step, by an (in principle, any) indi
vidual mathematician. Evidently, such is not possible for the collection of
all simple finite groups nor for the ensemble of maps that arise and need to
be exan1ined in relation to coloring. Plainly, these examples of augmented
proof call for tl1e idea of 'the matl1ematician' to be made explicit in a way
tl1is has not been necessary hitherto. Specifically, two issues arise: 'who' or
what are mathematical arguments addressed to? and how is tl1is addressee
to be 'persuaded' by a putative proof? In other words, what is or should
be the constitution of tl1e Subject, i.e., what cogt1itive capacities and
technologies of inscription and representation should be available to it?
How-according to what principles-might persuasion take place, once
it is mediated by a computer progran1 and so removed from the familiar
(but in truth largely tll1exan1ined) orbit of an individual assenting to logi
cal steps? Both these questions are about the couplings between the triad
of agencies constituting tl1e 'matl1ematician: witl1 the second requiring
tl1e idea of persuasion as a dynan1ic involving tl1e Person and Agent to be
made explicit. (Rotman 1993)
64 CHAPTER THREE
of contemporary technological and scientifico-mathematical practice and
is so widely operative and productive that it has been hailed as an entirely
new, rl1ird merl1od of scientific research, a twentieili-centmy, specifically
computational mode different from and not reducible to rl1e two existing
research modes-the experimental and observational iliat fOlmded science
in ilie seventeenili century and rl1e much older theoretical and deductive
mode basic to mathematical reasoning. (Kaufmann and Smarr 1993)
To describe ilie effects and scope of digital simulation it will be useful to
note mailiematics' relation to physics. From the time of Galileo tmtil well
into rl1e twentieili century ilie bulk of external problems and questions
put to mathematics came from the natural sciences, principally physics.
This coupled with assumptions wiiliin physics of the smoothness and con
tinuity of nature, n
i separable from ilie infinite divisibility of space and
time, legitimated and fostered a mathematics dominated by an infinite
continuum of real numbers, infinite series, and ilie differential equations
of calculus allied to rl1ese notions. But in order to operate at all, com
puters need to discretize calculus by converting rl1ese equations into finite
difference equations. But even without ilie effects of such discretization,
physics' employment of infinitary, continuum-based marl1ematics is no
longer secure. Well before ilie advent of ilie computer, quantum physics
was born on ilie overthrow of ilie assumption of infinite divisibility of the
quantity physicists call 'action' and its replacement by ilie formalism of
discrete quanta. Moreover, in empirical terms physics is not merely non
infinitistic but boundedly finite: such easily nan1ed quantities as 10-100
meters or 10-100 seconds or 10100 particles or 10 100 light years have no
physical meaning in rl1e wliverse we inhabit. Since rl1e introduction of
computational methods the move against continuum-based mailiematics
has strengthened: various projects over ilie past rl1ree decades have argued
why and how physics needs to be 'finitized! (Greenspan 1973; Feynman
1982; ·wheeler 1988; Landauer 1991). One of the most extreme and uncom
pronlising finitization projects is Edward Fredkin's hypoiliesis of "Finite
Natme;' according to wllich "at some scale, space and time are discrete and
that the number of possible states of every finite volume of space-time is
finite!' (Fredkin 1992) Along with dlis goes ilie insistence rl1at rl1e entire
physical tmiverse be tmderstood-somehow-as a single device, a digital
computing machine whose computations are rl1e processes of the universe
and whose software constitutes what we call the laws of physics.
\iVith rl1is in mind let us return to simulation-by which is meant a
digital mock-up or electronic model of a given physical or mathematical
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 65
process. To mimic a process by computation it is necessary to create a digi
tal version of a typical state of the process together with a rule for chang
ing states with the idea rl1at iterating the nile rl1rough repeated recmsion
will give a simulation of the original process. To witness the mimicry rl1e
resttlts are visualized, that is plotted, graphed, or displayed so they present
a pictmable world, a visual, on-screen image whose electronic behavior
can be software manipttlated. A simttlation s
i created, rl1en, in two phases,
discretization and visualization, which togerl1er constitute a virtual world
close enough to rl1e original one (physical or mathematical) to be a valu
able investigative and creative tool.
All of the above applies to marl1ematical as well as physical worlds.
However, in rl1e case of mathematics, where there is apparently no exter
nal world to be simulated and which si already in the business of creating,
representing, and studying virtual worlds, the importance and novelty of
the simulation mode is easily missed. One reason s i rl1at rl1e visualization
it offers seems merely an extension (enormously refined and powerfttl to
be sure) of time-honored med10ds of plotting and curve drawing which,
however usefttl as cognitive aids, are eliminable-adding norl1ing substan
tive to mathematics. Such a viewpoint, w1problematic for most mathema
ticians, s
i misleading for several reasons.
In the first place rl1e very premise rl1at diagram and cmve drawing in
madmnatics are epiphenomenal, of undoubted psychological and practi
cal value but ofno epistemological worth, is a mistaken restilt of programs
of rigor, such as logicism or that of Bourbaki's rewriting of mathematics
wirl1in a set theoretical fran1ework, that neither know nor are interested
in how mathematics is actually made or changes.t Secondly, plotting and
visualization techniques in the past were severely limited in scope and
epistemic importance by rl1e diffi.cttlty of performing more rl1an a small
number of rl1e relevant calculations, a fact which made it easy to natural
ize rl1eir results into a mere picturing of preexisting ideas, to be jettisoned
once rl1e idea had been symbolized. Quite to the contrary, the computer
creates complex topological smfaces, fractal ftmctions, and iteration-based
entities which were previously not only invisible but unimagined, Wlcon
ceived. The consequent increase in marl1ematical knowledge has been con
siderable, ranging from the discovery of new topological surfaces to rl1e
opening up of novel research topics. (Friedhoff and Benzon 1989; Hanson
et al. 1995) Clearly, it wottld be a reductive misapprehension to think of
simulation as 'mere' visualization. Thirdly, rl1e very focus on the visual
ization phase allows digital simttlation to be reduced to rl1e business of
66 CHAPTER THREE
picturing and so occludes the radically transformative changes set in train
by the prior phase of discretization and the real-time iteration of a rule it
facilitates-both of which engage the finite discretum and not the infinite
continuum.
But, leaving visualization aside, rl1e style and character of a simulation
inflected marl1ematical science-pragmatic, material, experimental
breaks with marl1ematics' traditional tmderstanding of itself as a pure
rl1eoretical and deductive science. The advent of an electronically modi
fied Agent destabilizes rl1e triadic assemblage of actors that has held rl1e
pure 'mathematician' in place since classical times. In the wake of rl1is em
pirical-that is, impure-Agent comes a digitally refigured Person who
can intuit, imagine, and recognize the new sorts of mathematical objects,
simulations, and iterations, delivered by computation; and at rl1e same
time a digitally refigured Subject is required with rl1e language and writing
system-rl1e appropriate mathematical 'software'-necessary to mediate
rl1e traffic between Person and Agent.
Traditional mathematics proves the existence of its abstract objects and
establishes claims about rl1em by constmcting logically controlled narra
tives of imagined procedures using an Agent who is an ideal, infinite possi
bility. Simulation mathematics substitutes empirical observation for logi
cal validation and exhibits rather rl1an proves rl1e existence of its material
objects via actual, real-time computations; its Agent is a material, finite
actuality.
\Vhat, then, are the consequences for future mathematics of this differ
ence? As we've already observed, there will be a change in practical merll
ods of mathematical enquiry: empirical marl1ematics frees rl1e Person of the
burden of proof and rl1ereby liberates other, previously tminteresting or
unrecognized ways of mathematical d10ught and activity. This has implica
tions for the different kinds of objects and processes that rl1e two styles can
engage. Essentially, marl1ematical assertions are predictions about what
will happen if certain specified operations are carried out. By insisting that
its assertions be logically proved, classical pure mathematics restricts itself
to investigating procedures whose outcomes, in principle at least, can be
predicted. It is not equipped to investigate the fate of w1compressible pro
cesses whose outcomes cannot be foretold; programs that have to be ntn
in order to reveal their final state; sequences of os and 1s which are only
specifiable by a mle equal in length to them. These are precisely rl1e sort of
mathematical object simulations empirical mathematics handles well. And
since rl1ere are in fact vastly more of such uncompressible processes and
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 67
irreducible sequences than the predictable kind, the territory of empirical
mathematics is potentially huge compared to that of the classical variety.
This is essentially the claim Stephen VVolfram makes for his "new science"
based on simulation methods (computational iteration of simple pro
grams such as cellular automata) which represents a "major generalization
of mathematics-with new ideas and methods, and a vast new areas to be
explored?' (2002) Finally, to put the matter ontologically, in terms of what
exists and is observable mathematically by virtue of the very materiality of
computation, we can note the importance of actual versus ideal cotmting
and iteration procedures: simulation mathematics achieves its difference
and power precisely because it has access to effects-tl1e actual results of
iterating real-world operation-tmavailable to the idealized, necessarily
internal, that is rigorously separate from the world, regularities of classical
reasornng.
68 CHAPTER THREE
once and return to his starting city. He has a table of all the intercity dis
tances and wants to calculate the length of the shortest circuit that will
accomplish this. How should he proceed? The problem seems ideal for
the mindless number-cnmching computers excel at: the salesman tells the
computer to find the length of every circuit in turn and output rl1e length
of rl1e shortest. But this involves an extravagant computational cost as
N increases. Thus, for small values, say N = 10, rl1e mll11ber of circuits
to check is (N - g ! or 362,880 circuits, a computational fleabite for
1)! =
present-day computers. For a slightly bigger value, say N 20, the num =
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 69
70 CHAPTER THREE
in fact the problem is an artifact of this definition, brought into being with
it and impossible to conceive without it. Secondly, its encapsulation ofthe
many thousands of diverse concrete instances, of which the Salesman's
problem is merely one, into a single meta-problem depends repeatedly
on the unbOlmded freedom that results from polynomial composition,
nan1ely if f( ) and g( ) are polynomial ftmctions then so is f(g( ) ). Last,
and by no means least, the formulation would make no sense in terms of
its thousands of motivating concrete instances, all of which are resolvable
by brute-exponential-search routines, were it not for the mathematical
fact that any polynomial function is smaller than any exponential func
tion.
But it is this last, quite crucial, fact that is precisely the site of a dis
satisfaction with complexity theory, the point at which its practical rele
vance has been challenged; and not coincidentally, as we shall now see, it
is where infinity enters the matl1ematical understanding of algoritlm1s put
in place by computer science.
asymptotic growth
Defining a feasible computation as one witl1 a polynomial rw1 time rests,
tl1en, on a basic inequality-tl1at polynomial functions are smaller tllall
exponential ones. The guaralltee behind tl1e inequality lies in an asymp
totic definition of 'smaller thall' which refers to behavior of fw1ctions 'at
infinity.' Specifically, a ftmction p( ) is (asymptotically) smaller thall a ftmc
tion q( ) if there exists some number M such that p(N) < q(N) for all
values ofN greater thall M. In otl1er words, tl1e definition refers, in a way
tl1at calmot be eliminated, to sufficiently large N. Thus, only in the limit,
as N goes to infinity, is the relative size of two ftmctions resolvable, so as
to make it tme that any polynomial ftmction p is smaller than any expo
nential fw1ction q.
But suppose allowing passage to the limit, that s,
i invoking sufficiently
large values of N, is ruled out? What if tl1e values of N are constrained to
lie below some fixed bound b? In that case, the guarantee va!lishes, how
ever large b is: one can, in otl1er words, no longer assume, in the presence
of a botmd, that polynomials are automatically smaller than exponentials.
In fact, under tl1e condition of boundedness, tl1e reverse Call always be
made to happen, polynomials can be larger tl1an exponentials: for all)' ex
ponential ftmction q( ), it is always possible to find a polynomial p( ) such
tl1at p(N) > q(N) for all N below b.
The definition of feasibility is supposed to ensure achievable compu-
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 71
tation times. But what, in the real, finite world where the demand for it
originates, s
i to be meant by achievable? For, on any presently conceivable
w1derstanding of physical reality tl1e existence of a botmd b is inescapable.
Tllis will follow from local limits, such as those imposed by computer
scientists not being able to wait for tmspecified periods for algoritl1111s to
ternlinate, to global ones, such as the universe we inhabit appearing not
to pernlit an arbitrarily large sequence of physical actions to be executed.
The existence of a botmd obviously disallows any appeal to an infinite
range of values of N and so prevents the tl1eory of complexity from oper
ating. Indeed, the presence of a bound brings into relief a clutch of ques
tions: What sense does it make for a science of computing to formulate
its ftmdamental concept of feasibility in terms of an infinitistic criterion
that necessarily appeals to numbers outside the reach of its computational
processes? Pragmatically, what is tl1e relevance of the P = NP question for
categorizing (let alone tmderstanding) the possibilities and linlits of com
putation? Why would its solution have anytlling to say about real feasi
bility, about the possibility of finding or not being able to find algoritlm1s
tl1at worked within tl1e lin1its and freedoms of tl1e real world rather tl1an
those of the idealized, botmdless tmiverse of infinitistic mathematics?
These questions are far from idle. In cryptography, for example, one
has to ensure that an encrypted message is safe from attack, tl1at no
metl1od of decryption with a practically achievable running time exists,
regardless of how such a metl1od might be matl1ematically characterized.
In such a context, equating 'practically achievable' with tl1e existence of
a polynomial-time algoritlun makes little sense, and tl1e entire P = NP
problematic begins to appear beside the point. Unsurprisingly, tllis is pre
cisely tl1e judgment voiced by many cryptographers and engineers more
concerned witl1 practicalities tl1an mathematical elegance. Thus, for ex
ample, about the central cryptograpllic task of finding the factors of an
integer, Steve Morgan observes, "Even if factoring is polynomial, it isn't
necessarily practical . . A polynomial algoritl1m of say tl1e order ofN20 is
. .
72 CHAPTER THREE
the order of 2<N/Kl would be tractable for all values ofN that could possibly
occur in practice.
These examples illustrate that not only is excluding exponential nm
t1ing times and identifying feasibility with polynomial time not to the
point, but the identification nms cotmter to the tmderlying intuition re
lating to 'smallness; namely that if (the input to) a problem s
i small, one
wants a feasible computation solving the problem to be small or at least
near small. But while 10, say, s
i by common agreement a small value ofN,
one could not claim that wzo (one htmdred billion billion), let alone to30,
is small or nearly so. These objections have been long known and long
shrugged off by complexity theorists as the price of doing (asymptotic)
business. If prodded the only response they can offer is that N20, though
w1deniably a polynomial fw1ction, is artificial, that in practice, most famil
iar algorithms are of the order Nn where n is possibly as large as 5 or 6 but
certainly a number much smaller than 20, and that likewise large constants
such ask instanced above are simply not natural. But this appeal is hardly
in good faith: rl1e concepts of'natural; and 'in practice; as well as a notion
of 'scale' or 'size; and rl1e opposition of 'small'/'large; are precisely what
have been expunged from the theory's asymptotic accow1t of feasibility.
In fact, the P = NP question, and along with it the entire apparatus of
algorithmic complexity and the asymptotic characterization of 'feasible'
rl1at engendered it, s
i not merely irrelevant to cryptography, but has been
deemed conceptually deceptive. For Arnold Reinhold, the apparatus is a
"naked emperor;' whose effect has been that "a whole generation of com
puter scientists wrongly believes that complexity theory illuminates com
putation and that rl1e P = NP problem is the missing link to a rl1eoretical
basis for cryptography?' (1995)
Nor is it rl1e case that cryptographers have special, ungeneralizable
needs. Their criticis m is sharpened perhaps by rl1e financial, security, and
military stakes involved in questions of decryption, but their overall ob
jection stems from unavoidable pragmatic demands; as such it arises in
any technological or engineering arena that looks to computer science for
algorithms to solve real-world numerical problems in real-world times.
The presence of a botmd, then, not only eliminates rl1e possibility of
any asymptotically based, and in particular polynomial, criterion of fea
sibility, but it offers a basis to start rethinking rl1e question of feasible
computation. Thus, as has been suggested by several researchers, one
can divide the integers into two separate regions, Ht and H2, below and
above b respectively, and work inside HI within a limited tmiverse of dis-
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 73
course situated far below b. Thus, Reinhold, for example, suggesting the
value 2"(2lOOO) for b, goes on to conunent that "the undue attention paid
to classical complexity rl1eory arises from an inclination to assume results
that are true in H2 must somehow be true in HI. But rl1ere is neither a
theoretical not practical basis for tllis belief?' (1995)
Indeed, rl1ere is not, and working below b takes a first step toward
rethinking the feasibility question. It achieves dlis by making explicit in
a directly practical way rl1e cow1terproductive nature of 'letting N go to
infinity.' Taking bas a dividing point induces a numerical scale or size into
the proceedings and hence ilie possibility of defining 'small' and 'large'
in relation to it. But as it stands rl1e approach is crude: ilie botmd b is
imposed from outside, and its value, chosen deliberately to be so large as
to be remote from any actualizable computation, s
i for tllis very reason
w1connected to anyrl1ing real or observable. Any scale ilius induced will
be extrinsic to such computations and their linlits and tmable to state (let
alone address) rl1e expectation, attached to rl1e intuitive notion of feasi
bility, iliat computational time ofa solution be of ilie same 'order of mag
nitude' ('league: 'ballpark: 'size: 'mm1erical reach') as the problem; iliat is,
the expectation rl1at for 'small' N ilie solution time of an N size problem
should also be small or nearly so but not in any event 'large.'
The irrelevance to cryptography of ilie P = NP question foregrotmds
a discotmect between an infinitistic mathematical concept of feasibility
and an intuitive, pragmatic one, a gulf between rl1e demands of real
world computation and the idealized model associated wirl1 ilie classical
sequence of integers. It will be obvious that the gulf is a re-occurrence,
posed in a particularly dramatic and focused form, of the rl1eoretical dif
ference between empirical and classical mathematics identified earlier. It
would seem natural, ilien, to attempt to tackle ilie question of feasibility
and hence perhaps rl1e P = NP problematic anew using ilie resources and
possibilities put into play by simulation methods. Whether this attempt
to use empirical mathematics can yield dividends s
i surely knowable only
by experin1ent, but it s
i not clear that rl1e attempt makes much sense as an
approach to the P = NP problem itself: the very status of dlis question as
a preeminent tmsolved problem of contemporary pure marl1ematics indi
cates how deeply folded it s
i wiiliin the worldview of classical mathemat
ics. In which case rl1e N = NP problem might be rl1e baby rl1at empirical
mathematics rl1rows out along wiili the infinitistic bath water.
Granting rl1is, is there a different mathematical framework for rl1inking
'feasibility: one which tries to navigate between the classical and empiri
74 CHAPTER THREE
cal routes? If there is, finding it would seem to entail overcoming a large
and difficult obstacle: how to effect a conceptual escape from the great
attractor of the classical integers. No easy matter, since it necessitates re
fusing the core belief of classical matl1ematics, the time-honored "Dogma
of Natural Ntm1bers" (Rashevskii 1973), namely ilieir 'naturality; their ob
jective, non-htm1an, existence as the 'given; 'true; and only idealization of
actual cow1ting and iteration.
The integers embody a formalism and an idea, a syntax and a seman
tics; one can identify two sorts of attempts to escape from tl1is dogma
depending on which aspect is given priority. The first makes questions of
significance and meaning subsidiary by starting from a symbolic apparatus
based on formal definitions and concepts able to be worked to produce
mathematical results, and only subsequently does it evaluate tl1e meanings
tl1ereby facilitated and imposed. The second reverses tl1e procedme and
insists on an intuition first, a convincing alternative picture of what cowlt
ing and iteration are to mean before any particular formalism is offered.
Examples of both can be fotmd. The first approach has been pursued by
Vladimir Sazonov who introduces the inequality loglog N < 10 as a formal
axiom constraining tl1e value of any N considered to be a feasible number,
and proves various metamatl1ematical theorems on the internal consis
tency of tl1e effect of such a definition (Sazonov 1995, 1998). The second
has been pursued by the present writer who focuses on the semiotics of
tl1e process of repetition inherent to tl1e integers to refuse their 'natmality;
and outlines an alternative, non-classical tmderstanding of counting and
aritl1metic (Rotman 1993, 1998). Whether either of iliese approaches will
succeed in overcoming the dogma of ilieir natmality remains to be seen;
evidently, ilie stakes in challenging ilie notion are high.
Conclusion
\iVill tl1e computer transform classical mailiematics? Surely tl1is is no
longer in question. And it is reasonable to predict tl1at it will do so along
tl1e san1e dimensions-machinic, digital, material-which have deter
mined the changes it has so far wrought. Let me sunm1arize.
The computer is a machine for investigating matl1ematical reality; it is
reconfiguring tl1e mailiematical imaginary and mathematical 'reasoning'
in relation to repetition as radically as ilie microscope and telescope re
configured vision and 'seeing' n
i relation to scale; n
i its wake mathematical
tl10ught will never be ilie same. Its machinic ability to recursively repeat
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 75
76 CHAPTER THREE
TECHNOLOGIZED MATHEMATICS 77
PART II
Four
PARALLEL SELVES
I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of
multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and }l1r. Hyde
(1886)
Technoid Subjects
Without question, an irrevocable change is happening to the individual
self: the thing thought to be fixed and definitional of htm1a11 identity is
becoming munoored as the technological upheaval trru1sforming the land
scape of ·western culture makes itself felt deep within our heads, within our
subjectivities, our personas, our psyches. Multiple networks of person
to-person connectivity, forms of disseminated and dispersed intelligence,
many-leveled mediation-enmeshed in a proliferation of virtual modes of
agency and deferred presence-ru·e installing a new psyche at the cultural
intersection of rl1ese teclmo-effects and our ancient en-brained bodies.
Raymond Barglow, posing rl1e question of'self' in terms of the "crisis"
engendered by rl1e "information age" asks: "But who is tl1is 'self' . . . and
why is it at rl1is particular juncture in rl1e l1istory of Western societies rl1e
very identity of the self becomes problematic!' (Barglow 1994, 1) But per
haps the first question to ask about rl1e psyche in a technologized milieu
is not really one of identity and persona, of 'who' the emergent self is,
but what a11d how is tl1is self. How is it assembled and trru1sformed by
machi11ic processes, ubiquitous mediation, and ever smarter, more inter
active techno-systems? How and by what meru1s do the technological
ecologies in which we are inunersed alter om consciousness and re-create
human psyches?
The tmderstanding that rl1ey do is not new. That media and their ecolo
gies restructure consciousness has been widely recogt1ized within many
different analyses of the role machinic systems, material practices, and
techno-apparatuses play in facilitating new forms of subjectivity and alter
ing human psyches.1 For Felix Guattari, for example, "Teclmological ma
chines of information and commtmication operate at the heart of human
subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its
sensibility, affects and nnconscious fantasms?' And, especially relevant
here, he singles out what he calls "a-signifying semiological dimensions"
of machinic change, effects wrought by teclmology rl1at escape a "strictly
linguistic axiomatics" (1995, 4); effects which bypass or operate beneaili
language and before signification.
Whatever their ultimate contribution to ilie signifying and discursive
action of a medium, rl1ese extra-lingual dimensions of machinic change
operate in rl1e first instance rl1rough the body of the one who uses and s
i
used by the medium in question. They include practices, routines, and
patterns of movement and gestures, as well as proprioceptive, haptic, ki
nematic, dynamic, and perceptual activities which are either mobilized as
part of mediation or are part of ilie backgronnd conditions for the possi
bilit)' of the meditml-activity in rl1e body of ilie user as a result of changes
brought about in order for mediation to take place. Thus, as we've seen for
alphabetic writing, rl1ese internal changes embrace an entire neurological
apparatus brought into being by the alphabet in order for it to function,
and with it a pleiliora of effects from ilie discretization of utterance into
separate 'words' and ilie analytic illusions of phonemic rl1ought conse
quent on it, to ilie linearization of expression and rl1e minutely dedicated
forms of attention and perception involved in rl1e act of reading.
We might see these a-signifying din1ensions of a teclmological medium
as lying beneaili rl1e medinn1's radar, as part of its tmconscious, giving
rise to effects not conveyed or represented by it, not wiiliin its manifest
content and declared purpose but rather as part of rl1e medium's operat
ing necessities, inculcated, in1plemented, facilitated, and mobilized by it.
The logic of rl1ese effects is not one of representation but of enactment:
rl1ey 'mean' not positively in themselves, nor relationally as elements of
a signifying code, but through ilieir execution, duough rl1e effects rl1at
ensue from rl1eir having taken place. By engaging dms with the bodies
of rl1eir users (if only by establishing the physical, neurological, percep
tual, and gestural wherewithal to ftmction), by facilitating new behaviors,
emphasizing some modes of performance and suppressing orl1ers, by en
gaging users in the repetition or avoidance of certain patterns of action,
82 CHAPTER FOUR
The Seral/Parallel
i Duo
A fundan1ental opposition: given two or more actions (events, behaviors,
processes, decisions), tl1ey can either occur successively, in serial order one
after the other (take one tablet twice a day) or they can happen at tl1e same
tin1e, simultaneously, in parallel (take two tablets once a day). The first
mode dominates narratives, routines, rituals, algorithms, melodies, and
timelines; the second, scenes, episodes, harmonies, contexts, atmospheres,
and images. Parallelism foregrounds co-presence, simultaneity, and co
occurrence and is exemplified in collaborating, displaying, and network
ing, while serialism foregrotmds linear order and sequence and occurs in
cow1ting, listing, lining up, and telling.
The opposition appears and reappears in many familiar places: music
(melody versus harmony), symbolic forms (text versus image), arithmetic
(ordinal versus cardinal numbers), film editing (Eisenstein versus intercut
montage), electrical circuits (series versus parallel), and, of particular inter
est here, serial as opposed to parallel computing.
The duo is frequently the site of larger cultural and technical battles.
Thus, consider the ancient competition between the verbal and the pic
torial as tl1e superior means to truth telling; a standoff that in ·western
culture has deep iconophobic roots in the biblical interdiction of graven
images and in the Platonic distrust of images for being, as sinmlacra of
simulacra, doubly tmtrustworthy. For William Mitchell the battle is on
going and fought on a wide terrain: "The dialectic of word and image
PARALLEL SELVES 83
seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves arOlmd
itself. What varies is the precise natme ofthe weave, the relation of warp to
woof. The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for
dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself
certain proprietary rights on a 'nature' to which only it has access?' The
dialectic is not a Hegelian one; there s
i no healing of the rift between rl1e
two through some overarching Lmification. Rather, rl1e struggle between
word and image has to be seen as carrying the "fLmdamental contradic
tions of our culture into the heart of theoretical discourse itself?' (1984,
529)
This conclusion is in ttme wirl1 Susan Langer's foregrounding of rl1e
opposition in rl1e form of discursive versus presentational communica
tion. The discursive, typified by language and rl1e use of mm1bers, shares
the character of words in having "a linear, discrete, successive order, . . .
strung together like beads in a rosary; beyond the very limited meanings
of inflections . . . we carmot talk in sinmltaneous bLmches of names?' (1951,
76) COlmterpoised to this is rl1e presentational mode, typified by pictures,
which are precisely not discursive: "They do not present rl1eir constitu
ents successively, but sinmltaneously, so rl1e relations determining a visual
structure are grasped in one act of vision?' (86) It is this capacity to be able
to cognize an idea, say, wirl1 internal parts, one which has relations inside
relations, which "cannot be 'projected' into discmsive form" rl1at is pecu
liar to presentational conm1lmication.3
Note here the inescapable reflexivity in any account of the two poles
and their inevitable intermingling. \iVhat gets told or shown-and rl1e
issue is already there in that alternative-will necessarily be organized seri
ally as a narrative and parallel as a presentation. The result is a reciprocity
of status and action between rl1e two modes, which, as we shall see, makes
for a widespread and fecw1d creative principle whereby the poles operate
togerl1er, in1pinging on each other as a combinatorial tool to produce new
entities across various humanistic, artistic, mathematical, technoscientific,
linguistic, and epistemological practices, as well as being a hard-wired bi
nary alternative within biological systems.
In his account of the development of hlmlan mentality, Merlin Donald
describes memory and knowledge storage as the fw1dan1ental agents of
change and structme. Thus, when he characterizes rl1e highest form of pre
linguistic mental achievement as that of apes-''lmreflective, concrete, and
situational"-rl1eir lives "lived entirely in the present, as a series of con
crete episodes" (1991, 149), he invokes a long-accepted binary wirl1in cog
84 CHAPTER FOUR
nitive psychology: contrasting the episodic memory of such lives with the
more archaic form of memory, the procedural, that preserves sequences of
actions.
In terms of hwnan semiosis, episodes and procedures correspond to
the opposition between the parallel co-occurrence of the information in a
scene and the sequential delivery of speech. The two forms, found in birds
as well as all manunals, employ entirely different neural mechanisms, are
morphologically distinct and functionally incompatible: "Whereas pro
cedural memories generalize across situations and events, episodic mem
ory stores specific details of situations and life events" (Donald 1991, 151).
However, rl1e opposition here does not exhaust the field of memory: with
rl1e advent of language a third, conceptual form of memory emerged. But
while rl1is adjoined, reorganized and in much of culture dominates rl1e
more primitive episodic and procedmal couple, it in no sense obliterated it
but rather allowed a new, linguistically mediated version of it to operate.
Mathematics is an entire subject organized arow1d and predicated on
rl1e serial/parallel opposition. As Tobias Dantzig, in his discussion of the
two conceptual moves needed to handle whole mm1bers observes: "Cor
respondence and succession, rl1e two principles which permeate all mathe
matics-nay, all realms of exact d10ught-are woven into rl1e fabric of our
munber system?' (1930/1985, 9) The first refers to the one-to-one corre
spondence whereby the elements of one collection are matched or tallied
wirl1 those of another; rl1e second refers to rl1e process of ordering rl1e
elements into a sequence as part ofcow1ting them. Thus, correspondence
allows one to judge which of two collections has more elements in the ab
sence of any need (or ability) to coLmt them; succession determines how
many elements are in a collection.
Nwnber is a serial/parallel construction. But, as Dantzig notes, the
opposition is implicated throughout marl1ematics and beyond. Certainly,
serial (succession) as against parallel (correspondence), in the form of de
pendence of one rl1ing on a given orl1er versus independence of two co
occurrent things, is fw1dan1ental to rl1e construction of post-Renaissance
marl1ematics from the coordinate geometrization of rl1e plane to algebraic
variables and rl1e notion of a function; it institutes rl1e separation of inde
pendent and dependent events and hence the idea of a random variable in
the theory of probability.4
A different kind of scientific e-xample comes from quantwn physics.
There is the well-known parallelist phenomenon of superposition in the
PARALLEL SELVES 85
tory states of a quantum system, ghost tendencies that Werner Heisenberg
called potentia, are simultaneously present but tmrealized. This is opposed
to actual or 'real' states of the system resulting from measurements (rl1e
so-called collapse of the wave fw1ction), which occm one after rl1e orl1er.
\iVhat can legitimately collapse the parallel into a serial; what, in other
words, constitutes a measurement-the so-called 'measurement prob
lem'-is a major mystery for such a view. Interestingly, rl1e main rival
model of quantum events, rl1e many-worlds interpretation, eschews super
posed parallel tendencies and so eliminates the measmement problem. But
by positing one totally determined, tm-ghosrly state at a time in each of a
multitude of 'simultaneously occurring' worlds, it replaces parallel tmreal
occurrences in one world with real occmrences in parallel unreal worlds.
Not only, as Dantzig observes, are the two principles "woven into the
fabric of om number system:' but they "permeate . . . all exact thought:'
and, one can add, also other conceptual domains, well outside the field of
mathematics or so-called exact thought, to form a ubiquitous and formi
dable constitutive principle. Thus, in language, for example, "The concur
renee of simultaneous entities and rl1e concatenation of successive entities
are the two ways speakers combine linguistic constituents" (Jakobson and
Halle 1971, 73), a mode of combination fw1ctioning at all levels of speech:
phoneme as simultaneous bw1dle ofdistinctive features, syllable as succes
sion of phonemes, the parallelism of intonation and the words it accompa
nies, rl1e combined linearity and simultaneous unity of utterance itself, and
so on. This principled an1alganution of serial and parallel modes gives rise
to an enormous idea machine, a combinatorial technology rl1at permits
rl1e signifying, patterning, imagining, constmcting, and discovering of an
apparently endless plenitude of entities, abstract objects whose viability
and creative potential arise precisely from the way rl1ey neutralize the very
difference between serial and parallel that allowed them to be brought into
existence and juxtaposed in rl1e first place.
By way of elaboration, I present three examples: rl1e code of Western
classical music, the language of traditional arirl1metic, and the mathemati
cal theory of infinite sets. In each case the objects produced-musical com
positions, integers, infinite mm1bers-are manufactured according to a
principle of interchangeability which ensmes rl1at-despite rl1e evident
opposition between rl1em upon which music, arirl1metic, and set theory
are founded-any parallel object is equivalent to a serial one and vice
versa.
In music rl1e parallel/serial opposition is that between harmony, the
86 CHAPTER FOUR
production of chords, constituting so-called «vertical music;' and the
"horizontal music" of melody and rhythm (Oxford Dictionary of Music).
In classical music, with its enormously rich, intensely specialized mass of
composition based on rl1e principle ofkey harmonies, rl1is folding of serial
and parallel into each other is correspondingly complex and detailed. At
bottom, however, it amounts to a vast algebra of musical objects combin
ing the two: compositions which arise from the different ways musicians
have formulated re-writing and arranging sequential progressions into
simultaneous chords and, inversely, of spilling harmonies over time to be
rl1e successive notes of arpeggios and the like.
In traditional aridunetic rl1e principle of ordinal and cardinal inter
changeability is so ingrained, and the proliferation of objects combining
them so effortless and 'natmal; that it is difficult to detach the principle
from the fan1iliar idea of 'whole number! Thus, any ordinal is obviously
a cardinal, since one can forget the counting and treat it as an Lmordered
magnitude. The reverse is perhaps less inm1ediate: it implies rl1at any col
lection, however named or described or defined as a cardinal magnitude
can always be 'cOLmted' into a sequence as an ordinal.
In rl1e rl1eory of infinite sets, where one has infinite ordinals, tllis last
characteristic is problematic. Certainly, ordinals, defined to be sets, auto
matically possess a cardinal magnitude. The reverse however is precisely
rl1e content of rl1e notorious axiom of choice, the axiomatic principle
needed to guarantee rl1at all sets can be well ordered, that is, coLmted.
"Unlike rl1e finite case, there is no guarantee of being able to order rl1e ele
ments of any nan1eable magnitude. It is no exaggeration to point out that
the possibility of tllis cardinal and ordinal interchange, as posited by rl1e
<Lxiom, is the enabling armatme of Cantor's infinite arithmetic. Certainly
wirl1out it neither rl1at aridunetic nor rl1e theory of sets as developed dur
ing rl1e twentieth centmy would have been possible.
If one looks more closely at the workings of the maclline interchanging
the serial and parallel modes, one can detect what might be called a hori
zon effect. In each case the technology of production, the means of cre
ating the plenitude of objects-musical compositions, numbers, linguistic
items, and so on-is subject to some form of internal linlitation, such as a
principle of exhaustion or a law of dinlinishing retmns or an Lmanswerable
question, whereby a horizon of the maclline is revealed.
For Western classical music composition the system of vertical-hori
wntal equivalences collapsed early in rl1e twentierl1 centmy, when rl1e
key-based harmonies which controlled rl1e chord/arpeggio trade-off were
PARALLEL SELVES 87
repudiated by a movement appropriately calling itself serialist. For set
theory the horizon of the machine was revealed through the proof in 1963
of the independence of the continuum hypothesis, which left tlllsolvable
and essentially tlllresolvable the question of the magnitude of the con
tinuum (as well as the independence of the axiom of choice that allowed
the question of rl1is magnitude to be posed). For rl1e classical integers and
rl1eir arirlm1etic, the horizon-less obvious and more speculative-arises
from the challenge to the orthodox accotlllt of rl1e endlessness of the so
called 'natural' numbers, in one form of which the separation between
ordinals and cardinals manifests in the infinite case reappears.s
These exan1ples, from cognitive ethology, ·western classical music,
marl1ematics, hwnan language, and quantmn physics exhibit rl1e paral
lel/serial duo as a creative and organizing principle across many terrains.
Furthermore, because of the dynamics it gives rise to and rl1e mutual en
folding of the two principles wirl1in specific cultural practices, changes of
status, scope, attributed importance, aesthetic worth, and semiotic trans
parence in one principle cannot but be accompanied by alterations of cor
responding depth and so on in the other. The changes we shall chart, rl1e
t\vo co-occurrent, synergistic moves to parallel and distributed computing
and digital imaging practices, are certainly central to rl1e contemporary
technological scene, and rl1e effects of this emergent parallelism are being
felt at every level from how we read, write, and see to the ways we under
stand ourselves as 'selves!
Computing Subjects
Computer architectures are ultimately abstractions of how we think about
reality.
-Norman Margolus
88 CHAPTER FOUR
can be fully autonomous computers wired together in local area networks
or in networks of networks-such as the Internet-that distribute activi
ties across the planet; they can be the stripped-down, central processing
tmits of computers hard-wired to each other to form ultrafast supercom
puters; they can be robotic mechanisms, rudimentary finite state ma
chines, whose behavior is governed by a list of simple, preset instmctions.
The last, when reproduced in virtual form, as cells in an array within rl1e
memory and workspace of a single computer, have proved to be a sur
prisingly powerful investigative scientific tool. The arrays, known as cel
lular automata, allow a huge variety of parallel processes to be simulated,
so much so rl1at simulation-essentially digital modeling-is, as we have
seen, a new, third, mode of scientific research, alongside the established
ones of theoretical and experin1ental investigation.
The well-known explanation of starling flocking comes from simula
tion by cellular automata: rl1e in-flight behavior of each starling is modeled
by an individual cell whose behavior is governed by a local mle: keep a
fLxed distance from neighboring cells. The resulting pattern of movement
by the array reproduces in digital form that of the flock. Similar examples
include the generation of artificial life forms in virtual habitats and eco
systems which simulate evolutionary possibilities open to rl1em, genetic
algorithms that evolve, refining their ability to solve a problem through
the feedback of rl1e results from repeated trials, and pattern recognition
and learning behavior within expert systems modeled as arrays. A quite
different example comes from fluid dynamics. The Navier-Stokes equation
in rl1at subject, a major triwnph of nineteenth-century partial differen
tial calculus, captures rl1e behavior of an incompressible fluid; its behavior
turns out to be simulatable by a hexagonal grid, each cell of which models
a single drop of fluid whose flow in and out of it along the six directions is
governed by a simple local rule.
The idea of computing in parallel s
i natural, obvious, and immediate as
soon as one looks at rl1e myriad forms of simultaneous action and collec
tive cognition that surround us. This was recognized at rl1e beginning of
parallel computation's rise to prominence by computer engineers.
PARALLEL SELVES 89
ing a variety of strategies of decomposition and coordination. Compu
tation in biological brains, especially in their sensory processors such
as vision systems, displays a high degree of distribution. There is sub
stantial evidence that higher cortical functions are also computed (and
controlled) in the brain in an essentially distributed mode. (Chandra
sekaran 1981, 1)
90 CHAPTER FOUR
computational moves, each of which was notated-matched what most
at the time assumed, and many still do asstm1e, to be the workings of our
minds performing a 'chain' of reasoning or reckoning.
This asstmlption has allowed it to serve, in Edwin Hutchins's descrip
tion, as "an origin myth of [a] cognitive science" committed to a com
putational, symbol-processing understanding of human thinking. Such a
science rides on a confusion concerning rl1e locus of computation: "\Vhen
rl1e symbols are in rl1e environment of the human, and rl1e human is ma
nipulating ilie symbols, ilie cognitive properties of rl1e human are not
rl1e same as rl1e properties of rl1e system iliat is made up of rl1e human in
interaction with rl1ese symbols. The properties of the human in interaction
wirl1 rl1e symbols produce some kind of computation. But iliat does not
mean that iliat computation is happening inside ilie person's head?' (1995,
361) The computational architecture fostered by rl1is misapprehension s
i
dms "not a model of individual cognition. It is a model of the operation
of a socio-cultural system from which the human actor has been removed?'
(363)
To elaborate: ilie conception of human intelligence and iliought em
bedded in contemporary developmental psychology, artificial intelligence,
and rl1e cognitive science Hutchins is critical of-'cognitivism'- s
i indi
vidualistic: it understands iliinking, primarily and exclusively, as some
rlling taking place inside the enclosed mind/brain of an isolated individual
thinker. In order to maintain rl1is perspective it has to assign to 'context'
all else relating to rl1e cognitive scene. According to such a methodology
the context plays no substantive and certainly no constitutive role in the
rl1inking process. This means rl1at cognitivism necessarily considers as
marginal to thought everything outside the individual, symbol-processing
brain, from ilie materio-cognitive means of iliinking (writing and orl1er
technologies) to the socio-cultural networks and collective envirorm1ents
in which individuals habitually operate. But cognitive edmographical re
search presents a different picture, one rl1at insists rl1at what is margin
alized into a vaguely defined and all embracing 'context' is, on rl1e con
trary, a crucial element in how humans think, and rl1at not only is rl1inking
always social, culturally situated, and technologically mediated, but iliat
only by being rl1ese dUngs can it happen in ilie first place. This is why it s
i
vitally necessary according to Hutchins to distinguish between "cognitive
properties of the socio-cultural system and rl1e cognitive properties of a
person who is manipulating the elements of that system"(362), if one is to
PARALLEL SELVES 91
w1derstand the relations between individual and collective forms of intel
ligence.
And, to retmn to om topic, it is precisely these relations between inter
nal self and external other rl1at parallel computing puts into fltL\:, since it
is a machinic implementation, not of individual linear thinking but of dis
tributed bio-social phenomena, of collective thought processes and emm
ciations rl1at cannot be articulated on ilie level of an isolated, individual
self. Its effects are to introduce into thought, into the self, into rl1e 'I' iliat
it facilitates, parallelist behavior, knowledge, and agency that complicate
and ultimately dissolve rl1e idea of a monoidal self. Where the technology
of alphabetic writing works to constmct a 'lettered self; a privately en
closed mind, serially structured by the linear protocols reading and writ
ing demand, the apparatuses of parallel computing work in ilie opposite
direction.
Wheilier ilirough cell phones interchanging private and public spaces;
duo ugh the plurally fractured linearity of so-called multi-tasking; through
rl1e manipulation of external avatars of ilie self in communally played com
puter games; rl1rough engaging in rl1e multifarious distributions ofagency,
intelligence, and presence iliat immersion in networked circuits put into
play; or rl1rough a still unfolding capacity to be in virtual contact any
where, at any time, with unknown human or machinic forms of agency
these computational affordances make the who, rl1e what, and the how of
the parallelist self radically different from its alphabetic predecessor. And
they do so in surprising ways, since rl1e effects and disruptions inherent in
parallel and distributed rl1inking are not easily predictable. This is because
collective cognition and collaborative iliought is open-ended, heteroge
neous, tl11-schematized, and emergenrly smprising compared to the more
transparent and predictable cause and effect logic of linear rl1ought.
It is necessary to observe, however, that rl1is tedmological porting of
parallelism into iliought and selfhood encounters a parallelism already
present, long before any engagement wirl1 machine computation, consist
ing of many layers of simultaneous activity of the body from ilie cellular
level to rl1e organization of ilie central nervous system. A parallelist psy
che, rl1en, will be as much an intensification of rl1ese existing parallelisms
as it is a computational planting into a self iliat knows norl1ing of such
rl1ings. I shall come back to this emerging para-self in the next chapter. But
I turn now to another medium, visual rather ilian computational, which
induces its own kind of parallelism into selves.
92 CHAPTER FOUR
rem ains bmmd to and by the world of print that it nonetheless calls into
PARALLEL SELVES 93
94 CHAPTER FOUR
literate selfis emerging, patterned not on the word-stable, integral, fixed,
discrete, enclosing a tmique, interior meaning, ordered, sequential-but
on the fluid and unordered multiplicities of the visual image. Early on in
this emergence artist Helen Chadwick, noting that "the solitary repressive
ego harnessed to language s i sovereign:' goes on to ask, "\Nhat if danger
ous fluids were to spill out, displacing logic, refuting a coherent narrative,
into a landscape on the brink of l?" The consequences for the self's con
tainment, as Chadwick avers-"Before I was bounded, now I've begun
to leak . . ?'-are likely to be dramatic and intense in their subversion of a
self-contained ego. (1989, 29).
Already, before Chadwick's recognition of rl1e Ego's fluidity, Jean Bau
dt·illard proclaimed the "liquifaction of all referentials" (1983, 4) at pre
cisely the point when data started to 'flow' in streams, and alphanumeric
solidity appeared to slide on and off the smface of rl1e liquid-crystal screen.
Since ilien have occurred "liquid television:' "liquid architecture:' "liquid
software:' "liquid typography:' and many orl1er meltings, in1age strean1S,
and flows. The ongoing vehicle for the liquifaction of ilie 'I' conjectured by
Chadwick is likely to be primarily technological rather ilian art practices
(notwirl1standing its multiple representations in her own paintings) in the
form of ilie informatic or pragmatic image, by which I mean information
bearing, instructional, explicatory, and oilierwise instrumentally oriented
images-maps, diagrams, tables, charts, graphs, schematics, figures, wire
frame renderings, simulations, models, arrays, scans, and so on. vVe are
in ilie midst of an explosion of such visual artifacts, whose sheer scope,
richness of content, heterogeneous means, stylization, subtlety, and com
municational depth prompted art theorist James Elkins to provoke ilie art
historical community wiili the iliesis rl1at such non-art in1ages "engage
rl1e central issues . . . and are [as] fully expressive and capable of great and
nuanced a range of meaning as any work of fine art?' (1995, 553) Elkins's
provocation is worth pursuing, and one can go farmer along ilie route it
opens up: just as alphabetic writing midwifed a certain self, so pragmatic
images, more systematically and wiili more economic and cultural impact
rl1an iliose of fine art, are now capturing ilie sites where selves are narra
tivized, shaped, and reproduced and are now opening up itineraries along
which new forms of visual subjectivity are emerging.
There are precursors: the pragmatic image has risen to semiotic power
twice before, riding each time on rl1e inadequacy of rl1e written word,
whose linear logic, sharp boundaries, and strict government by synt<Lx
seem too rigid, precise, foregone in meaning, to cope wirl1 a wave of
PARALLEL SELVES 95
novel, rapidly changing knowledge. First, in the mid-fifteenth century,
as a result of perspective drawing which produced, according to historian
Samuel Y. Edgerton, "a pictorial language that . . . could communicate
more information, more quickly, and to a potentially wider audience than
any verbal language in htm1an history?' (1980, 189). Second, in the latter
half of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the extraordinary image
fest unleashed by photography and numerous in1age producing and visual
recording instnunents, which led Jean-Louis Comolli to speak of a «frenzy
of the visible" (1980, 122), a phenomenon inseparable from the coming
into being of new forms of in1aged and imaging self.
A century or so later a third wave arrived which was immediately per
ceived as marking a significant disruption: «The means of production
of . . . visual imagery is undergoing a mutation as significant as the in
vention of photography?' (Willis 1990, 197) The mutation is inherent
in the now ubiquitous and familiar ability, enabled by digital software,
to endlessly manipulate, transform, and display an image. One result
post-photography-indexes an optical regin1e that breaks with that of
the photograph, borl1 destroying the traditional verisimilitude of photo
graphs and fostering a multi-image optic in place of a solitary, unitarily
conceived in1age at the center of itself.9
According to vValter Benjamin, a w1ique work of art emanates an aura,
an ineffable presence which is lost in a mechanically reproduced form of it
such as a photograph. It would seem that digital imaging repeats a simi
lar dynamic of loss on rl1e meditun of photography itself, replacing rl1e
chemical fixing of light, its presence at the scene depicted and the source of
rl1e photograph's authenticity, its inunediacy as a direct trace of rl1e real
which is its aura-by rl1e unlimited mediation and mutability of post
photography. As a result, rl1e chemical photograph becomes available to a
post-photographic aesthetic as a style effect, a way of citing rl1e pre-digital
real. And the camera's claim to verisimilitude s i displaced onto a 'truth
of a sort' representation, onto a choice between more or less 'objective'
digitized'facts: instituting what Willian1 Mitchell has called "an ontologi
cal aneurism . . . in the barrier separating fact and fancy?' (1994, 189) Of
course, 'truth of a sort' s
i what painting had always delivered before pho
tography upstaged it, so it s i perhaps appropriate rl1at one consequence
of «the exchange between the different arts . . . in the digital realm" is rl1at
photography «has become more painterly?' (Murphie and Potts 2003, 78)
A more abstract link between digitality and the era before photo
graphs, a connection between post-photographic subjects and rl1e pre
96 CHAPTER FOUR
photographic self, can be derived from a remark on the latter by Jonathan
Crary. According to tllis the notion of self-he says "visual observer"
inculcated by perspective and the camera obscura, a "privatized isolated
subject;' a ''tmitary consciousness detached from . . . the exterior" witl1 its
"metaphysic of interiority" (1988: 33), collapsed in tl1e early nineteenth
century lmder the onslaught of a physiological investigation of sight and a
consequent lmderstanding of vision, as physical, material, embodied. This
collapse was masked, however, by tl1e realistic claims made for photog
raphy and film as 'objective' and tmtl1-producing representational appa
ratuses. Adherence to tl1e mantra 'the can1era doesn't lie' served to cloak
the re-institution of the can1era obscura's model of the subject producing
what Crary calls a "nlirage" of tllis overtluown self. In this light tl1e post
photographic digital image dissolves the mirage and puts in its place a
dispersed, material optic wllich finally jettisons tl1e Renaissance perspecti
valism still clinging to the photographic image and its viewing self.
It can achieve tl1is dissolution because such a digitally enabled post
perspectival self results from a process that reaches down to the level of
the in1age's atonlic structure. As an optical regin1e, perspectivalism con
structs, and is constmcted upon an en-souled individual, a self with a
point of view that s
i a transcendentally specified location nlirroring tl1e
vanishing point. But digitization, substituting pixels for points, replaces
tl1e psycllic architecture and "metaphysic of interiority" of the Renaissance
individual by an architecture that, because it must be specified in relation
to the physiologically meaningful substrate of the pixelated image, cannot
transcend tl1e space it physically occupies, and so cannot enact a meta
physical dranu of viewing tl1e world from a position outside it. In Crary's
terms, tl1e invisible seeing soul has been finally restored to tl1e physiologi
cally sighted body.to
The freedom from chemical control enjoyed by imaging software, its
manipulation of code ratl1er tl1an imprints, has destabilized the idea of a
'single' image by allowing an image to be constituted in an endlessly varied
format: an in1age can overlap another, be added to, combined, composited
witl1, jlLXtaposed, superin1posed, interpenetrated, and merged witl1 any
other in1age to form just another image. Once, one would have identified
these constituted multi-image assemblages as montages or collages, differ
entiating them from the standard lmitarily conceived inuge of sometl1ing
presented as a single thing at the center of itself. Now such objects, imaged
images, have become a default contemporary visual paradigm which, by
presenting many images sinmltaneously within a single optical act, calls
PARALLEL SELVES 97
for a visual self engaged in a mode of parallel rather than serial seeing.
The result si a form of visual polyphony with sampled images as voices
whose influence extends across contemporary design aesthetics as well
as informatic imaging. Along with this are rl1e now ubiquitous devices
and apparatuses of visual parallelism which actively displace a linear optic:
Graphic User Interfaces that use mouse gestures to navigate multiple
screens viewed simultaneously; Picture In Picture television that permits
two or more separate image streams to be displayed and controlled simul
taneously; videowall arrays of separately progran1mable screens on which
several different but linked narratives can be nm and interpreted simulta
neously; and so on.H
Moreover, rl1e digitized in1age's ability to be copied endlessly wirl1out
degradation makes possible rl1e stacked or layered parallelist optic respon
sible for the GIS (Geographic Information Systems) revolution in map
making. As wirl1 rl1e post-photography rl1e shift s i from chemical traces
on paper-rl1e traditional map-to a digitally manipulable, interactively
queryable composite representation. GIS composites superimpose many
layers of information pertaining to rl1eir object onto the same spatial dia
granl to produce a class of maps emergently different from rl1eir paper pre
decessors. Such maps are no longer inert, static pictures of a world exterior
to it, but become dynamic, a proactive tool capable of being changed by
and in1pinging on the world it represents. GIS maps deliver a co-present
assemblage of images rl1at had previously to be viewed serially or side by
side. Such multi-seeing now dominates cartography from the architectural
(building interiors) and urban (distribution of roads, parl1s, sewer pipes,
and telegraph poles) to rl1egeophysical (satellite images of land use, coast
line change, troop movements), and the galactic (interstellar dust and star
charts).
Like post-photographic in1ages, then, GIS maps evade the fixity of rl1e
viewing subject by bypassing rl1e demands of perspectival viewing. They
promote a dynamic viewing body, one rl1at 'sees' precisely by refusing the
stationary outlook of a single cartographic projection and with it a claim
to capture rl1e 'truth' of a single visual scene. Interestingly tllis refusal of a
single viewpoint through the production of composites is beginning to be
deployed by photographers and artists in rl1e medium of digital photogra
phy as an aesthetic principle in its own right.l2
But, post-photography aside, widlin artistic practices such embodied
movement can of course be in1agined. Thus, David Hockney, speaking of
how, in contrast to the requirement of standing in the nliddle of a circular
98 CHAPTER FOUR
perspective of Versailles-"my body seemed to have been taken away;'
"reduced to a tiny mi mobile point"-was able to revel in the hours spent
"wandering up one street, down another, up another" in such a way that
"I still had my body;' as he viewed the stylized non-perspective of a Chi
nese scroll depiction of a city. (1993, 128). Or it can be actual movement,
rl1e viewing subject moving in relation to what is being viewed, as occurs
in video installations. Here, rl1e image is de-framed and becomes mobile,
dispersed, distributed in installations that routinely surrOLmd the viewer/
participant in space and require-like the peran1bulatory form of medieval
rl1eatre-to be navigated around, physically negotiated, and experienced
in place. Viewing becomes subordinated to an active engagement wirl1 the
installed objects and scenes smTotmding a moving eye. "Engulfed by the
assemblage of temporal parts, rl1e process of looking'' becomes, in Barbara
London's words, "as much about rl1e physical experience as the composite
memories that live on in the mind!' And so such installations "illustrate
rl1e dissolution of the seriality of time that characterizes rl1e late twentieth
century!' (1996, 14)
In terms of the subject this can be seen as the falling away from a one
dinlensional, singular consciousness into parallel, distributed co-presence.
What is being analogized and narrativized by such installations is thus an
other version of the self that is emerging in rl1e face of the imagized image.
Thus, in addition to the non-art informatic image wirl1 respect to which
such a self emerges, we have art practices in the form of dynamically or
interactively encOLmtered and immersively viewed installations.
PARALLEL SELVES 99
Am I, then, plural; are their two or more of me/us? Can I, you, some
one (some 'one'?) have more than a single identity? Be more than one
person?
Not a new question, but one posed most recently as a pathology,
known as Multiple Personality Disorder. In this, a person with one body
(though so differently presented and experienced as to problematize that
singularity) can have many identities or "alters" or personas which take
psychic control of the body.l3 Though akin to schizophrenia in its popu
lar understanding as 'split personality; multiple identity is quite differ
ent clinically and experientially. Moreover, tmlike schizophrenia, a clutch
of psychoses whose causes are unclear, Multiple Personality Disorder is
acknowledged to be a specific breakdown, a form of dissociation in the
normal fw1ctioning of psychic integration. Moreover, a majority of those
who treat it attribute it to childhood abuse: the abused self separating
off into different psychic compartments as a way of achieving a working
interior stability. There s
i no doubt trutl1 in this etiology, though it seems
to hanker after a transcendentally unified subject as tl1e condition for the
possibility of rational thought whereas, on tl1e contrary, multiples are by
no means incapable of reason or indeed of giving a rational appraisal of
their own condition.l4
Moreover, the abuse etiology of multiples has been directly challenged.
Thus, Ian Hacking, tracing what he considers to be its iatrogenic origins,
situates it within a history of memory, locating it in tl1e "conceptual space
for tl1e idea of multiplicity" (1995, 179) constmcted by French medicine
in the nineteenth century-a space in which patients describe their symp
toms which are then looped back through tl1e doctor-patient circuit into
confirmatory evidence of a disease. Though sharply argued and histori
cally focused, Hacking's analysis elides the issue of contemporaneity. Even
if, as he maintains, sufferers from the syndrome are creating and fitting
their symptoms to a pre-given diagnosis, we're still left with the question:
Why these symptoms now? Why the irruption of this kind of multiplicity
witl1in present-day culture?IS
If schizophrenics were the "town criers of modern consciousness . . .
existing not just as a product of but also a reaction against the prevailing
social order;' 'sensitives' too easily able to internalize tl1eir torn and dis
ordered times (Sass 1992, 372), then perhaps multiples are their succes
sors, more attuned to tl1e multiplex instabilities of twenty-first-century
psychic reality. Tllis s
i not to assert that multiples aren't aberrant and fre
quently traun1atized in their past, but ratl1er-leaving aside tl1eir disputed
But one can still ask: What does it mean, where does it go, how will it
feel, to be so? Can I, you, those yet to come, really not be what we have
(felt to have) been for so long in ·western culture, an 'l' tl1at is before all
else, as a condition for all else, an enclosed, individual, indivisible, opaque,
private, singularly rooted Me? Can tl1e self ftmction in ways other tl1a11
tl1is orgat1ized arborescence? Ca11 it mat1ifest ilie qualities of what Deleuze
a11d Guattat·i, in their all too generous vocabulary, call a rhizome? Ca11 it
be a network? And do we desire to be so, to become co-present, hetero
geneously connected to ourselves, pulled in different directions from the
future, always in the process of becoming multiple and pat·allel, beside our
selves witl1 glee and dissolution, intermittently present to ourselves, each
of us a para-self, a psyche on ilie edge ofits seat?
Is it, though, a question of desire a11d choice? Aren't we, ilie choosing
agents, being dragged, like it or not, into a world of ever more mmler
ous co-happenings? Aren't networks and tl1e relentless co-presencing and
distribution of tl1e psyche tl1ey facilitate already starting to control tl1e
sites where subjects are produced? Aren't parallel computations and multi
images a11d virtual agencies and a ubiquitous computing a11d ever smarter
a11d interactive digital environment already deeply embedded in commu
nicational, pragmatic, a11d art practices and in ilie heads of the subjects
who encounter tl1em? No doubt. And one doesn't have to be a technologi
cal determinist to be certain that more will follow. But ilie question can
be more interestingly put in aesthetico-ethical-political terms, in terms of
huma11 affect and drean1s a11d visions of our powers, a11d tl1en tl1e ques
tion could not be more real. Or more urgent. It asks whetl1er we wish to
embrace ilie para-huma11, to deploy ilie formidable resources of the digital
to embrace the other of a11d within tl1e hmna11, to become different from
tl1e isolated monads we were, or ramer have for so long thought we had to
be? An embrace not made in obeisa11ce to some transcendental authority
external to 'ilie hmna11; but one tl1at eschews a11y such, one iliat seeks, in
Antonin Artaud's words, to be done with the judgment of God. Or what
atnounts to tl1e satne thing here, to understa11d that tl1ere is no end of
tl1e world a11d no final judgment, but only humanly created agencies wiili
the magical-ghostly-ability to use machines and technological media in
order to look at the htm1an from outside ilie sphere of huma11 looking.
\Ve ca11, I believe, embrace ilie para-hmna11, to begin-haltingly, with
confusion, pain, wonder, inevitable resista11ce, nostalgia, feelings of loss
a11d dread, a11d moments of intense liberating pleasure, not to say joy a11d
surprise-to become plural 'l's able to be beside ourselves in ways we're
Five
GHOST EFFECTS
myself.
The <P
But before we begin, let me indicate certain obstacles put in place by rl1e
traditional linguistic approach to 'P The word 'I' belongs to a family of
words linguistic scholars call deictic elements or inde>.:"icals, on account
of rl1eir indexing or pointing in some manner to the context of rl1eir use,
and rl1ey characterize rl1em as linguistic expressions whose reference shifts
from utterance to utterance, major examples being personal pronouns
such as 'I; 'she; and 'you' as well as indicators such as 'here; 'now; 'today;
'yesterday; 'this; and 'that! Emile Benveniste, in his classic study of pro
notms in Indo-European languages provides a definition of 'I; the most
puzzling of them. "To what does 'l' refer? To something exclusively lin
guistic: 'I' refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is uttered,
and it designates its speaker?' (1971, 226)
Benveniste's definition, or more properly the written philosophical and
linguistic tradition in which it operates, s
i problematic with respect to the
project here on two counts. The first problem is with the clain1, implicit
in his definition, that the 'subject' is an exclusively linguistic, incarnate
construct, that subjectivity s
i divorced from and somehow independent of
embodied experience and affect: "However subjectivity might be posited
in phenomenology or psychology, it is but the emergence into being of
a fundamental property of language. He who says ego is 'ego"' (Ben
veniste 1971, 224). Once the subject's concrete embodiment is restored it
becomes questionable to insist that all subjectivity is based on, determined
by, originates in, or cannot exist in the absence of language. To do so ex
cludes forms of experience, self-aware sentience, and extra-lingual modes
of self-recognition and enunciation that permeate the speaking, '!'-saying
subject, most notably rl1ose associated wirl1 and delivered by the medium
of gesture.! Not only gesture in its triple relation to speech, but gesture
enshrined in geometrical diagrams, and the many codified and elaborated
gestural regimes that engender subjectivities in rhytlm1, music, song,
dance, and a host of devotional, sensual, athletic, aesrl1etic, and medita
tional body practices.
The second problem s
i rl1at the tradition suffers from a certain medium
blindness, an unawareness of rl1e effects of itselfas a medium, an opacity in
other words to the work that alphabetic writing cannot but perform on its
subject matter. Thus the divorce from the corporeal just noted is already a
consequence of the alphabet's handling of speech and can hardly serve as a
means of examining the mediological effects of alphabetic writing. In fact
Benvenistean linguistics, not to mention tl1e prevailing discourse of tl1e
subject (as exclusively a linguistic abstraction) it has influenced, attaches
no rl1eoretical importance to tl1e radical discontinuity between textual
and vocal emmciation, in particular between the spoken and the written
'I? Tllis, s
i despite rl1e fact that Benveniste's definition pernlits no exten
sion from voice to text, no analogous formulation of itself which would
capture the written '1': not only is rl1ere is no w1ique, identifiable "act of
individual discourse" of a textual 'l' to anchor tl1e definition (the putative
writer is absent, and an individual act of reading is not an emmciation),
but, tmlike tl1e one who speaks 'I; rl1e one who may have written 'I' or
(wllich is not necessarily rl1e same tl1ing) is designated by rl1e term, could
be a machine, an actor, or an imagined narrator in a fiction, an agency who
gesture speech
According to a recent accotmt of tl1e evolution of language (Deacon
1997), of which more presently, tl1e move from dtunb self-gesturing to
speech writing
The move from ilie medium of speech to its inscription was a tedmologi
cal innovation that transformed oral societies and, in its alphabetic form,
space and time and reconfigured the possibilities of agency and presence.
"Within the 'speech at a distance.' or virtual speech that emerged, vocality
was eliminated, and the conummicational and affective work of the voice's
gestural apparatus was retrieved and redefined through forms of written
prosody-mimetically in poetry and transductively tlu·ough the develop
ment of prose styles-at the san1e tin1e as the body of tl1e speaking '1' s
i
replaced by an incorporeal, floating agency of the text.
writing networks
The shift from the medium of alphabetically written texts to their vir
tualization inside digital networks indexes a contemporary and ongoing
upheaval of undetermined scope whose effects surround us. \iVithin it,
tl1e fate of the written '1' is to be subsmned-assimilated into, reposi
tioned, and overlaid-by digital forms of self-reference, by modes of self
emmciation intrinsic to, and only possible within, tl1e instantaneities of a
digitally recalibrated space-time and reconfigured agency/presence facili
tated by interactive and distributed electronic networks.
The tlu·ee remediations enact their recalibrations and reconfigurations
tluough the body, at every level from its neurological stmcture and modes
of perception to the shape of its semiotic envelope. The latter is dominated
by physical gesture, and we can observe gestmality tracing out a certain
itinerary along tl1e chain of remediations: from a dumb a-linguistic base
to its vocalization in speech to its eliminative transduction in tl1e text to
its reemergence as tl1e means of navigating the infosphere; tl1e latter ini
tiated by the computer mouse and continuing tl1rot1gh its gestmo-haptic
successors such as motion capture.
In what follows I shall touch briefly on tl1e first remediation and elabo
rate somewhat on tl1e tl1ird, but it is tl1e second, the effect of alphabetic
writing, tl1at will figme most. Thus, to return to om starting point, we
shall see that the metaphysical consequences of the West's alphabetic liter
acy in both its Hebrew and Greek forms rests precisely on the elision of the
mediational work performed by conflating the written 'l' with its spoken
predecessor, an elision cmcial to the creation of tl1e West's tlu·ee fotmding
ghost abstractions: namely, tl1e invisible God, tl1e un-embodied Mind,
and the Infinite mathematical agent. Or so I argue.
But before confronting tl1ese ghosts I want to introduce the otl1er nar
rative tlu·ead here-the phenomenon of the virtual.
Virtual X
The virtual names a powerful, pervasive operation of contemporary net
work technologies, an operation whereby an activity-seemingly any ac
tivity X-of contemporary culture is confronted by and interacts with a
virtual form of itself. Until barely three decades ago 'virtual' was an tlll
asswning modifier connoting something insubstantial, imaginary, not
quite real-"in essence or effect not in form" (Webster'sDictiona�y), a usage
encompassing certain scientific and mathematical instances referring to
thought experiment deployments of unreal or non-real entities, such as
virtual rays and foci in optics, and virtual forces and work in mechan
ics. Now, the virtual operates everywhere in the contemporary scene. Its
techno-scientific instances have mushroomed into virtual space, virtual
particles, virtual waves in quantum physics; virtual machines and virtual
memory in computer engineering; virtual organisms and enviromnents
in artificial life; virtual molecules in drug design. And beyond these tech
nical senses, virtual shopping, virtual books, virtual wuversities, virtual
bodies, virtual sex, virtual reality, virtual subjects, virtual history, virtual
keyboards, virtual watfare, and an expanding slew of virtual entities, pro
cesses, and forms of agency permeate social life.
These virtual Xs are plainly rl1e outcome of electronic technologies en
abled by digital computation, but one can question wherl1er rl1e phenome
non of virtuality rl1ey exhibit is itself electronic, wherl1er computation or
commtmicational networks are intrinsic to the virtual.2
Certainly, rl1e vectors of decomposition and reconstitution that in
habit rl1e virtual, whereby processes are wrenched free of their govern
ing temporalities and original milieus to be displaced, recontextualized,
and relocated in a virtual elsewhere, are in rl1emselves abstract, generic
effects of mediation wirl1 no necessary connection to specific tedmologi
cal regimes, electronic or orl1erwise. These vectors make rl1emselves felt
as a series of discontinuities, shifts in the familiar attributes of everyday
psycluc and social reality. Thus what was always predominantly serial and
linear-computations, texts, narratives, and vertical chains ofcommand
are being overtaken by parallel and horizontally structured forms; what
were assumed to be individual, private, and isolated-nund, subjectivity,
rl1ought-are increasingly public, distributed, and conmllmal; what were
always thought to have been interiorly and endogenously formed human
processes-the production of affect and desire, psychic development, the
Bw-lingustic
i Ghostliness
any time in the entire sweep of hm11an expetience, yet one that is vital in
many cultures and perhaps in every culture since the Upper Paleolithic Age.
ever handles representations of events and not events themselves, the brain
itself imposes no separation in principle between the hypothetical, the
possible, the impossible, and the actual-all are treated as representations
of representations.
Tllis allows Deacon to show how symbolic reference can arise from
the concrete, biologically constrained here-and-now world of icons and
indices via a process of Baldwinian co-evolution of physical and cultural
processes in which neurological structure and language ability, brain, and
the capacity for speech, interact: changes in the newborn's brain, manifest
in its cognitive abilities, exert a selective pressme on which featmes of lan
guage are learnable and wllich not, which in turn feeds back to influence
rl1e brain to change in certain ways, which furrl1er impacts rl1e granlmati
cal structures and semantic possibilities of spoken language available to
rl1e infant, and so it goes. The outcome, over thousands of generations,
is the emergence of htm1an language in which symbolic or virtual refer
ence, ilie ability to refer to iliat which is absent or unreal, emerges from
and is distributed among a web of evolutionarily older iconic and indexical
forms of reference.
The upshot is iliat hwnan speech, inhabiting language, "ilie impos
sible to state state of being-in-language" (Giorgio Agan1ben) is from rl1e
standpoint of evolutionary biology an impossible to separate entangle
ment of two modes of self-reference, experienced by all talking beings as
an ever-present doubling, an tmstable alternation between an 'actual; pre
linguistic indexicality, rl1e dumb haptic and gestmal self-pointing rl1at ex
tends proprioception, and a symbolic, 'virtual' indexicality in play as soon
as one speaks. Put differently, rl1e virtuality introduced by human speech
ruptures ilie pre-linguistic subjectivity, ilie gestmal umwelt, of an indi
vidual, and thereby allows an escape from what Merlin Donald calls rl1e
"mimetic stage" of cognitive development [ 1991, 1998) into the symbolic
domain of rl1e spoken 'I?
Thus, rl1e spoken 'I' cannot but fold wirl1in itself ilie w1exptmgeable in
vocation of other selves, not only rl1e 'you' to whom utterance is addressed
and wiiliout whose asstm1ed presence human speech is impossible, but also
rl1e generic 'they; rl1e other, reference to whom is always symbolic. On rl1e
viewpoint iliat human language evolved because we are social agents such
a conclusion is inevitable: "One caimot conceive of oneself as oneselfwith
out also conceiving orl1ers as self-directed, egocentric agents!'4 (Corazza
2004, 348) This interfolding of actual a11d virtual reference, which enters
Deus ex Machina
Ghosts cling to conunw1icational media. Sometimes a medium's connec
tion to ghosts will be immediately evident. In 1844 Sanmel Morse ushered
in the digital era by stringing a telegraph wire between Washington and
Baltimore, and his first official message was, "\Vhat hath God wrought!'
Within half a dozen years one answer to tl1is question emerged as htm
dreds of people in New York State and many thousands across America
took part in rapping sessions witl1 the dead. Women, functioning as me
diums between tl1is world and the next, put yes or no questions to a spirit
ascertained to be present. They would get two raps for yes and three for
no or a series of raps if the answer was a nun1ber or a letter of the alphabet.
Thus was spiritualism, a faitl1 which offered empirical-'scientific'-evi
dence of the in1mortality of the soul, wrought by the telegraph: those
who took part in seances called themselves scientific 'investigators' who
could observe 'demonstrations' carried out under 'test conditions'; tl1e
new religion nan1ed its newspaper The Spiritual Telegraph. Over the next
decades the telegraph model of spirit conunw1ication was augmented by
otl1er media and more accomplished mediums who experienced spirits
moving tl1eir hands to produce automatic writing (typewriter) and by
rary version is mobile phone texting). Millennia before electric there was
the ttnheimlich of the text induced by the psychic shock of speech from
elsewhere, disincarnate voices, silent speech miraculously and spookily
locked in scrolls of skin and papyrus waiting to be ventriloquized into
living speech. Long preceding the telegraphic tapping out of'I: the ability
to name and atmotmce oneself in writing across distat1ce and time was the
source of w1canny messages atld hatmtings from the grave.s
If, as suggested, the very ability to speak 'I' fomented belief in the exis
tence of a symbolic entity, an incorporeal spirit of the self separate from
the speaking body, might not the phenomenon be more general? Might
atl en-ghosting occur when any new conmmnicational medium-which
is always a re-mediation-takes hold atld is used reflexively? Spoken latl
guage is a remediation of the pre-linguistic system ofhumatl gestural com
munication, and the passage from a dumb haptic, self-pointing 'me' to
spoken 'I' is a shift from actual to virtual, from a proprioceptive self to its
symbolic form. If X is 'me: then virtual X is spoken 'I: and the belief in a
ghost spirit of the self hypothesized by Deacon arises from experiencing
the two self designations against each other. What then of rl1e remediation
of speech by writing? Like atly medium, writing projects ail at-bitrary or
universal user of itself. This mediological parallel to the indefinite pro
noun 'one' is a virtuality, ail abstract would-be figure distinct from atly
potential or actual reader or writer located in space and time. In rl1e writ
ing of'l' tllis figure, hypostatized as atl agency circumscribing all possible
referents of rl1e pronotm, catl, under appropriate conditions, become rl1e
putative, self-referring originator of the text containing it-ail invisible,
absent writing agency, detached from the voice, unmoored from any time
or place of origination, atld necessarily invisible and wid10ut physical pres
ence.
At the beginning of the alphabetic \iVest two figures inhabiting this
description emerged. Two quasi-human agencies, master ghosts of rl1e
alphabet, who/which have since constituted major horizons of \iVestern
religious rllottght atld intellectual discourse, came into being. One was
God orjahweh, the external monobeing conjured out of their tribal god by
rl1e Israelites; the orl1er Mind or psychejnous, rl1e internal orgatl of rllottght
conceived by the Greeks to exist as a non-somatic-'mental'-agency.
These two agencies could not have occurred in more different social,
historical, cultural, atld intellectual nillieus. Nonetheless, each of the He
brew atld Greek encounters with alphabetic writing gave rise in the sixth
century BCE to a supernatural, disembodied agency. They did so (as far
venting the idea of a perpetual, tmending future and the reality of an un
changing, interminable covenant. Tllis sense of writing-induced continua
tion, inherent in God's doubled declaration of existence, is enhanced by a
form of oral word magic transposed to writing. The invocation of an ob
ject or an agency created by uttering its name is a widespread and ancient
ontological principle deeply embedded in the 1o�·ah from its beginning:
"And the Lord said 'Let there be light' and there was light:' as well as in
Adan1's nanling of the animals into the world. Subsequently the principle
reappears transformed into an axiom of Christian tl1eology: Jesus Christ
as the word of God made flesh.
The principle, the nanling of an entity preceding and determining the
substance and existence of it, subverts tl1e supposed externality and in
dependence of language to tl1at which it describes.l4 Deployed here in
a supposedly realist or historical text, the principle allows the writing of
an event to bring it into existence under tl1e guise of a descriptive report.
Thus, not only does the writing of 'I' assume an 'I'-er who must have
preceded it, but the existential clain1 "I am that I am" (equally "I will be
that I will be") and the initial fragment of it, the name "I am" ("I will be")
become circularly related: each precedes the other. The effect is that of a re
cursion wllich, by using its output as a new input, is able to either define or
create something in terms of itself. A contemporary example of tllis man
ner of recursivity occurs in computing where the name of an operating
system, GNU, is an acronym for 'GNU Not Unix: a name which tl1ereby
precedes and enters into the defined meaning of itself. Likewise, "I am tlut
I am" enters and is determined by the meaning of "I an1?' Interestingly,
recursive operations witllin a computer program are described by software
engineers as tl1e progran1 "calling itself"-a locution wllich captures well
the autocthonic effect of the nanling formula operating within tl1e written
'I' here.
JahJVeh's self-birth from witl1in alphabetic writing at the site of tl1e writ
ten 'I' left in its wake an intense and lasting alphabetic fetishism within
Jewish mystical and philosophical thought. On the former, one has tl1e
written scroll of the Torah as a sacred fetish object, subject to ritual, re
vered as if anin1ated by a spirit, kept in an inner sanctum of the holy of
holies, guarded originally by winged warriors, and carried ceremoniously
into prayer; an originary relation of God to His alphabetic text trans
formed witllin Kabalistic writings into a narrative of God's employment
of the letters to make (write) the world into being.ts On the latter, a more
rationalist rabbinical strand celebrated tl1e alphabetic principle itself over
its function of writing down the sound of speech. Thus Daniel Heller
Roazen relates how Talmudic scholars, focusing on the delivery of the
commandments at Sinai, argued that only the two phrases following the
initial 'I' (anochai) of the first conm1andment, "I am the Lord thy God;'
were audible to the Israelites at the foot of the mountain. A millennium
later, Moses Maimonides reduced this furrl1er: only a sound, "a strong
voice" and not any intelligible words, was perceived by anybody at Sinai
other rl1an Moses. Further still, Hassidic scholars in rl1e eighteenrl1 cen
tury replaced rl1is sotmd by the single letter, aleph, which begins rl1e word
anochai. But aleph, essentially a glottal stop, is for Heller-Roazen strictly
speaking no longer a letter representing a sotmd, but the "blankness of
an absolute begirming . . . a mark;' not of speech, but "of silence at rl1e
inception of speech?' (2002, 103) Observe that this contracting series of
representations of God's word, each replaced by an initial section of itself,
mimics the acrophonic principle whereby the alphabet itself is held to have
arisen. One can rl1erefore see in rl1is converging onto a silent aleph, a long
drawn-out alphabetic distancing from the E l -component of]ahweh, a de
duoning by rl1e God who wrote 'I; of the older, speaking God. By rl1e
twentieth century the voice of God had disappeared entirely, only writing
remains: the triumph of rl1e letter finding its contemporary terminus in
gran1matology, "one of the postmodern branches;' according to \Tassilis
Lambropoulos, "of rl1e Science of Judaism" (1993, 26o); a triun1ph en
shrined in Jacques Derrida's voice-silencing and body-annihilating gran1
matological mantra "There is no outside to rl1e text?'
Finally, rl1ere is the question of the visual in relation to rl1e alpha
bet. Of rl1e religions of the book, Judaism and Islam have been faid1ful
to the second conm1andinent interdicting all picturing of God or Allal1.
And despite Christianity's obvious abandonment of the commandment
made necessary in the face of a physical Christ, the tradition of Western
philosophical and theological discourse has been remarkably fairl1ful to
it, a fidelity manifest in a refusal, for rl1e most part in1plicit and w1exan1
ined, to cow1tenance images or other forms of visual semiosis within its
purely alphabetic texts. Unlike orl1er inscriptional systems such as Egyp
tian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters or Mayan glyphs or scientific and
mathematical symbols and diagrams, alphabetic writing lacks any visual
connection to what it represents. As a consequence, the tradition has failed
to raise the question of wherl1er]ahweh's (theologically explicated) invisi
bility might be connected to, more specifically might be an epiphenome
non of, His alphabetic origins. Certainly, there is litde evidence within
body that has a split character. On the one hand it lacks those featmes of
bodies that prevent the person carrying out the action. On the otl1er, any
feature not so excluded remains tmaffected and available to the agent.
Precisely this sort of specific exclusion and unlimited inclusion is, ac
cording to cognitive antl1ropologist Pascal Boyer, the characteristic of
ghosts that figure in religious settings. The matl1ematical agent and tl1e
inferences tl1at can be made about it parallel those of supernatural enti
ties and their inferences. In each case the governing logic arises from the
same double move: "Religious concepts violate certain expectations from
ontological categories [and] preserve other expectations- [namely,] all the
relevant default inferences except the ones that are explicitly barred by tl1e
cow1terintuitive element?' (Boyer 2001: 62, 73)
For Boyer, the ontological categories here have a biological genealogy.
They comprise natural, that is, pre-linguistic, evolutionarily determined,
unconsciously mobilized, and instantly available templates. There are a
small number of tl1ese-namely Person, Tool, Animal, Thing, Plant-each
the source of multiple, readily produced, and habitual expectations. The
double move he outlines results in concepts that are at once w1- or non- or
super-natmal-precisely tl1e result of the violation-and yet highly pro
ductive and stable on accotmt of their remaining un-interdicted wealtl1 of
default inferences. A traditional ghost, for example, might pass through
walls, thus enjoying what tl1e linguist Leonard Talmy identifies as "fic
tive motion" (Talmy 2ooo), but be able to see and hear with tmimpaired
human powers.22
For classical mathematics the ghost activity of interest is infinite cowlt
ing, and the relevant ontological category that is violated is that of person.
Expunged are all expectations and inferences tl1at spring from the per
son's physicality -fatigue, mortality, boredom, bow1ded inscriptional re
somces, imperfect repetition-which militate against any attempt to iter
ate indefinitely. However, as I've argued elsewhere (Rotman 1987/1993)
tl1e supernatural or ghost character of tl1e classical agent is not evident,
since it is masked by tl1e prior naturalization of the endless sequence
1, 2, 3, . . . of so-called natural numbers as an tmexamined given, "a gift
from God:' definitional of matl1ematical tl1m1ght itself.
Tllis prior naturalization is, in effect, built into tl1e logic Aristotle
wielded to discuss the natme of cow1ting. It presupposes the capacity
taken as tmquestioned, implicit, and obvious-to be able always to cotmt
one more time. As such it has since become the rhetorical and conceptual
basis for the potential infinite in mathematics. Potential, that is, against the
GHOST EFFECTS 13 1
paradoxical effects of the actual infinite threatened, in Aristotle's under
standing of them, by Zeno's paradoxes.
The agent of endless iteration, then, is nous, tl1e inm10rtal disembodied
tl1inking organ deployed as an active mathematical principle. An exten
sion of it, the repudiated actual infinite, re-entered matl1ematics in tl1e
sixteenth century within tl1e tl1eory of infinite series, and again more radi
cally in tl1e nineteenth century. At tl1e moment Friedrich Nietzsche was
am1ow1cing the death of God, Georg Cantor was transposing a version of
Him into a mathematical principle. The violation tllis time concerned tl1e
ontological category of Thing. The part-whole assumption about any col
lection of 'things'-the whole is always greater tl1an tl1e part-seenlingly
inherent to the very idea of a collection, an asstm1ption whose failure had
so troubled Galileo's reflection on the endless sequence of numbers, was
converted by Cantor into a defirlition. As a result what had been a hori
zon-the outer limit to nous-in1agined human counting-became an ob
ject of matl1ematical discourse. And tl1e frankly theological concept tl1at
Cantor called 'tl1e Absolute; witl1 its paradoxical and inaccessible set of all
sets, took tl1e place of this displaced lin1it. The result was an agent with the
capacity to enter into narratives about infinity itself.
Cantor's infinities, togetl1er witl1 tl1eir set-theory matrLx and supporting
Platonist tl1eology, exerted a hegemonic influence over the presentation
and much of the content of twentieth-century mathematics. Recent devel
opments, however, indicate that the days of its tmquestioned donlinance
are numbered. Digital mathematics-intrinsically antagmlistic to infuli
tary thought and already the basis of a new experimental mathematics of
computed objects-would appear to be its nemesis.23 Where traditional
mathematics works through proofs about imagined objects-tl1e narrative
actions of a weightless ghost-digital mathematics simulates these as real
time, material procedures of a maclline. This, as elaborated in chapter 3,
has various consequences for the content, form, and overall development
of mathematics, particularly in relation to the concept of infinity. In short,
the traditional syntax-driven matl1ematical discourse ofsymbols, notation
systems, and formulas tmderstood axiomatically and organized into linear
chains of logic reducible to pictureless first-order languages, is confronted
by a discourse that is performative and experimental and driven by digital,
screen-visualizable images for which proof and logical validation, while
by no means absent or unimportant, no longer dominate or have priority.
This is not to say that the classical, infirlitary agent will disappear, or be
legislated as 'invalid; or be repudiated as an illegitimate or illusory meta
physical concept, but rather its ideality, the supposed 'naturalness' of its
ghost ontology, catmot but be revealed and ineluctably reconceived when
confronted by the materializing, de-infinitizing action of digital compu
tation.
construct. Alphabetic letters, chained to the monad and rl1e line, never
escape rl1eir one-dimensional seriality, and so are intrinsically antagonistic
to parallel processes, not least to the captltre or representation of a sinml
taneity of heterogeneous events. Earlier we saw how, on rl1e contrary,
digital in1aging along with parallel computing were media able to present
and metaphorize a multiplicity of co-present actions. Parallel computing
is in a sense a subjecting to digital control of old and fan1iliar deep-seated
biological and social processes, from multi-cellularity to the division of
labor, and its effects on subjectivity are correspondingly profow1d. By dis
tributing an individual linear consciousness, a monadic rl1inking self, over
a collectivity, its action both pluralizes rl1e alphabetic 'l' behind tllis con
sciousness and correspondingly reconfigures the social multiplicity, rl1e
'they/we' against which it is defined.
A more specific computational metaphor for such an 'I' comes from
Notes
Fm·eword
1 For reports on the progress in the area of brain-machine interfaces, see the
special section ofNatltr·e, 442 (7099), 13 July 2006.
2 In many ways the argm11ent grows out of an extended, appreciative but ulti
mately critical dialogue with Den·ida's theses on wiiting and grammatology in
the formation of the (\iVestern) subject. While deconstructing notions of pres
ence and logocentrism at the fom1dations of Western metaphysics, Denida,
like most other major Western philosophical thinkers, has still left us with a
subject as disembodied, a floating signifier with no traction for agency.
3 Also see Nigel Thiift, "Electric Animals: New J'vlodels of Everyday Life?" Cttl
tuml Studies 18 (2/3), March/May 2004: 461-82.
4 For a discussion of "Baldwinian evolution" in relation to Darwinism, see
Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emewence of Evolutiunary Theories of lvfind
and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
5 1Ne are not just a species that uses symbols. The symbolic tmiverse has ensnared
us in an inescapable web. Like a "mind virus;' the symbolic adaptation has
infected us, and not by virtue of the irresistible urge it has instilled in us to
turn everything we encom1ter and everyone we meet into symbols, we have
become the means by which it tmceremoniously propagates itself throughout
the world.
6 Elsewhere, Deacon smnmarizes his point eloquently as:
Intt·oduction
1 Albeit different versions of'the' alphabet. See the excellent Onmiglot site www
.omniglot.com for examples and discussions of different alphabets, abjads, syl
labaiies, etc.
2 And will have different practical implications, particularly for the kinds of cog
nition and the conceptual affordances they facilitate. Thus for Barry Powell,
the crucial innovation of Greek writing was less the vowel/consonant question
than the cognitive and theoretical consequences of the very idea of a phoneme:
"The revolutionary feature of the Greek alphabet was not the introduction
of vowels, which are common in earlier wiitings, but the isolation of graphic
signs that represent phonemes in natltral language." (1994, 6)
3 My interest in gestlll'e here is chiefly its relations to speech and writing. For a
discussion of the il11portance of gesture and embodiment with respect to oral
poetics, see Z1m1thor 1990, especially chapter 10.
i Chirologia: or the Nattwatl Language
4 The full title of which s ofthe Hand. Com
posed of the Spealling Motiom and Discout·sing Gestut·es Thereof Whe1·eunto Is
Added Chironomia: at' The Art ofManttatl Rhetat·icke. Omsisting of the Natttmll
Expressions Digested by Art in the Hand as the Chiefest Instrument ofEloquence.
5 The claim tl1at the oiigin of syntax in spoken languages is to be found in the
inttinsic properties of a gestlll'al act s
i explored in Armstrong et al. 1995.
6 The point deserves considerable elaboration. Thus the obligatory gestlU'es and
body practices tl1at constitute Islamic worship and indeed define what it means
to be a Muslim are far more pronotmced than anytlling resembling tl1em in the
other Abrahamic religions and seem, in terms of the inculcation and mainte
nance of fervent, tmshakeable belief, to be correspondingly more effective.
7 The same claim, but not tied to religious expressivity, threads through the
word-image opposition insofar as this turns on the evocative and affective
power and belief-maintaining capacity of visual emblems-badges, logos,
flags, posters, insignia, icons-over texts.
8 I have taken these examples from various sources, principally McNeill 1992
and Martinec 2004. The latter contains a useful survey and elaboration of the
experiential dimension of gesticulatory gestures which, Martinec claims, con
trary to Kendon 1972 and McNeill, are compositional and not holistic.
9 Ofcourse, the body produces a wide range of acoustic events, such as gnmts,
squeals, chortles, sighs, screams, farts, cries, moans, sneezes, exclamations,
burps, whistles, boos, laughs, snorts, sniggers, and others, many of which are,
or are able to be, motivated with social meaning and semiotic content; content
that frequently duplicates or overlaps or on occasion subverts the regulatory,
expressive, and commm1icational fmKtions performed by speech and by em
blem gestures.
ro From a different direction, see Speer et a!. 1993 for an account of the crucial
role prosody plays in the memory and recognition of phrases, sentences, and
musical passages.
11 For an accmmt of the initial impact and significance of the typewriter on lit
erary practice, notably in the style of Friedrich Nietzsche's later writings and
Franz Kafka's letters, see Kittler 1999.
12 Tedlock 1983, chap. r, provides an extensive examination of the gap between
speech and its inscription, from an ethno-poetical perspective framed precisely
in terms of the elimination of vocal gesture and the body movements tl1at affect
VOICe.
13 The model in question is the so-called trim1e brain consisting of three, evo
lutionarily successive layers: the ancient reptilian brain stem, the mammalian
midbrain, and the more recent cortical (especially neocortical) uppermost
layer. See Wilson 2004, 84-87 for an elegant articulation of the utility of the
model despite its acknowledged oversimplification.
14 Mathematical ideograms constitute the most extreme development of such
cortical autonomy. The fact that matl1ematical languages are devoid of any
reference to an 'r; or to an oth{;P·, that is, to an embodied writer, listener, ad
dressee, or signee, and are at the same time the ur-site of a supremely abstract
and disembodied ontology, should not therefore be surprising. See Rotman
(2ooo, 15 and passim) for more.
tual object in model space which can then be formed into a real object whose
contours reproduce those carved out by the original gestures. Though neither
of these methods of capture constitutes writing in any narrow sense, they both
effect transductions from the medium of gesture to those of sotmd and shape
production which bear suggestive mediological compa1isons to the transduc
tion into text that writing pe1fonns on the medium of speech.
3 See Sterming (2002), especially chaps. 2 and 4, for a detailed jtLxtaposition and
analytic comparison of depictive ('diagrammatic') and textual ('sentential')
modes of thought from a cognitive science perspective.
4 Two remarks. One, the anecdote of the clocks: a man heard the clock strike two
times one day as he was falling asleep, and he coLmted: "One, one?' Then, real
izing how 1idiculous that was, observed, "The clock has gone crazy: it struck
one o'clock twice!" (quoted in Ifrah 1985, 24) Two, synthetic precedence:
Kuratowski's definition, crucial in the formal theory of sets, of the ordered
pair (a,b) constructed out of the Lmordered set {a,b} of two objects, and its
proptiety discussed by mathematical logicians.
5 Or so I argue (Rotman 1993) : the ordinal/cardinal split is articulated as the dif
ference between what I dub 'iterates; i.e., ordinals coLmted into being, and all
other mm1erical multiplicities, 'transiterates'-essentially cardinals that cannot
be SO COLU1ted.
6 This is not to say that there were not linear problematics that were in need of
solution, thereby consolidating the p1ior linearity of the conceptual apparatus.
Thus navigation and wa1fare gave the mathematics of celestial mechanics and
ballistics central place in the mathematical agenda of the seventeenth century.
And these mathematical concerns were amenable to being treated by sequences
of calculations that begat calculus; a cognitive technology that, notwithstand
ing its focus on change in space and its apparatus of diagrams that go with it,
is a linearizing mode of thought par excellence.
7 For more on linearity, especially in relation to the real mm1ber line, see Rotman
2000, 75-?8.
8 There are numerous works devoted to what are variously called the new or
digital media that provide useful analyses. Three of interest to the thematic
here are Manovich 2001, Stephens 1998, and Hayles 2005. The first is a sur
vey of specific effects and affects achieved and occluded by digital apparatuses
and their protocols across the entire media field; the second charts conceptual,
informational, and affective facilitations, antagonistic to p1int culture, which
a1ise from editing teclmiques deployed by the 'new' post-filmic video; the third
is a comprehensive analysis of media effects seen in terms of their production,
storage, and transmission capabilities elaborated and exemplified through close
readings of science fiction literature.
9 See Batchen 2001, chapter 6, for a collection of pronOLmcements of photogra
phy's death in the face of digitality, together with an analysis of the am:ieties
that drive them.
10 A similar anti-metaphysicallesson can be drawn from the use of digital imaging
tools in mathematics which foregrow1d the existential status of mathemati
cal entities by confronting mathematicians with the jmaaposition of two op
posed Lmderstandings of the objects they study. The classical, orthodox view
point: mathematical objects are transcendental, invisible, and imagined versus
the digital, understanding of them as materializable, variously idealizable, and
imagable. The difference s
i fundan1ental: the first describes, for exan1ple, a Eu
clidean point, contentless, infinitistic, and zero dimensional; the second, a ma
terial pixel with real, specifiable dimensions and variable information content.
1 And it ignores the growing awareness among animal ethologists that certain
mammals exhibit forms of a-linguistic thought such as metacognition-"the
capability to reflect upon sometl1ing that is mental not in tl1e environment"
as well as mirror recognition of (in a yet to be determined sense) themselves.
(Phillips 2006, 31)
2 At this point a terminological disclaimer s
i necessary in relation to a philo
sophical concept of the virtual elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. According to
this, and I tmavoidably simplify and perhaps traduce, the virtuality of a being
(which is always an assemblage in a process of becoming) concerns what is
or was actualizable or realizable in it, what its lines of flight could or might
have given rise to, the futures it could inflect or take part in. On this view,
unlike potentiality, which refers to determinations that are fixed but lack the
conditions to realize them, the virtual s
i not determinate; on the contrary, it
is inseparable from tensions, problems, sites of instability, and responses to
open questions always present in an assemblage. Accordingly, it would seem
that what is actual or 'real; or has been actualized or realized, is not, or can no
longer be considered as, virtual. But tlus conflicts with contemporary usage
the virtual X that figures here-wluch s
i tl1e basis for the concept I extract from
the term. Thus, tl1ough virtuality in this sense does indeed separate something
from the actual-from the X tl1at is virtualized-it nevertheless names a new,
indisputably actual and 'real' object, experience, or form of activity.
3 Compare the formulation by Merlin Donald: "The p1inciple of similarity that
links numetic actions and their referents is perceptual . . . best desc1ibed as
implementable action metaphor?' (1998, 61)
4 More fully: "The mastery of the first-person pronmm parallels tl1e 'construc
tion' of oneself as a self-conscious individual. . . . [One's) knowledge of oneself
is tl1e knowledge of oneself as a social agent." ( 177)
5 "If om personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to asstm1e
that it retains memory, intellect and other faculties and knowledge that we
acquire on this earth. Therefore if personality exists after what we call death,
it is reasonable to conclude that those who leave tl1is eartl1 would like to com
1mmicate with tl1ose they have left here . . . if we can evolve an instrument so
delicate as to be affected, or moved or manipulated . . . by our personality as
it smvives in the next life, such an instnm1ent when made available ought to
record sometl1ing?' Edison, quoted in Scientific American, October 1920.
6 "Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) concerns tmexpected voices fmmd in
recording media. It s
i a form of after deatl1 commmucation. ITC is a newer
term that includes all of the ways these tmexpected voices and images are col
lected through technology, including EVP?' American Association for Elec
tronic Voice Phenomena Web page at http://www.aaevp.com.
7 These effects were imagined in contemporary works by Rudyard Kipling,
Thomas Mann, Judge Schreber, Upton Sinclair, and many otl1ers. Kipling's
1902 story ''Wireless" (1994) s
i particularly explicit. In it he explains how the
"magic . . . of Hertzian waves" being then deployed by Marconi depends on
induction: the magnetism of an electtic current inducing a c mTent in a wire
tmcormected to it. The tale concerns a conung together across time and space
between a constm1ptive apothecary's assistant and the spi1it of Keats. \i\Taiting
for an incoming wireless transmission, tl1e narrator observes tl1e assistant (in a
drugged state) writing to his beloved Fanny Brand and then intoning and writ
ing fragments of prose and verse wluch converge on Keats' poem "St. Agnes'
are discrete;' and the tmiverse itself is theorized as a computer ticking itself
forward a quantum of time at a time. For some of the backgrotmd to physics'
antagonism to infinitary procedures, see Rotman 2ooo, chapter 3 ·
24 A fictional exploration of what possessing the subjectivity of a quantlml self
might be like and some of the social effects it could encotmter are the themes
of Greg Egan's science fiction novel QJtarantine ( 1992). See Hayles 2005 for an
extensive reading of Egan's work.
25 A ghost fostered by technologies of the virtual would be under no necessity to
be a monad (as opposed to a collective or multiplicity); or to be conscious in a
hm11an sense; or understandable as a god or goddess or within any of the cate
gories we have hitherto imposed on (what we have taken to be) extra-hm11an
sentience; and tmder no necessity to know or love us or even notice humans as
isolated, conscious individuals. A ghost or 'intelligence' or some form of sen
tience and/or agency emerging from networked computers is a much worked
theme in science fiction literature of the last three decades. An early and para
noid example is John Varley's Press Enter·, where the emergent agency elimi
nates humans who seek to come into contact with it. (Varley 1984)
26 Debray 2004 works out an e..xtended and richly illustrated discussion and justi
fication of the mediological approach to the birth and transmogrification of the
Judeo-Christian divinity. A brief, nonspecialized review of tllis essay is given in
Rotman 2005.
27 I give short shtift here to tl1e important corporeal practices wllich surrotmd
and are seemingly essential to the statlts and dissemination of the religious
text. Only by exanlining the mm1erous and interrelated embodied practices
and habits associated with the uptak
e and continued inculcation of the holy
word-ways of praying, chanting, laying of hands, fingering of iconic objects,
pilgtimages, prostrating, baptizing, self-touching, fasting, singing, davetming,
genuflecting, and so on-do tl1e mediological effects of these shifts become
properly evident.
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Index
Artificial intelligence, 9I
Brosses, Charles de, I6
I26
Australopithecine, xvii
Calvino, Italo, I2I
Auto-hapticity, 38
Cantor, Georg, x.uii, I32; infinite
Avatars, 8, 46, I34; sex between, 47
aritlunetic of, 87
Bacon, Francis, I6
Cellular automata, 62, 89
Bailey, James, 90
Chadwick, Helen, x.wiii, 95
Barglow, Raymond, v, 8I
Chaos theory, 62
Baudlillard, Jean, 95
Children's thinking, 34
Becoming beside omselves, 103, I04, Chinese writing, I3, 94, I24
Benjamin, \!Valter, 95
Chmch, Alonzo, xv
Friedhofi 66
Co-evolution, x, xvi, xvii; of mathe
Beside, iv, 103
matics and machines, 58-59, 62
Blind people, 2I
Cognitive etlu10graphy, 9I
as transparent, I33
Conm1oli, Jean-Louis, 96, I43111
Boolean logic, 69
Computability, xv
'
Bourbaki, Nicolas, 66
Condillac, Etienne Bormot de, I6
Boyer, Pascal, I3I
Connes, Alain, 38
164 INDEX
imagined, 76; with whole numbers, 37, 1o8; as more than representa
85 tions, 37; in painting, 45; symbols
Crary, Jonathan, 97 m, 42
Cryptography, 62, 69, 72, 73, 74; Diaries, 94
achievability of decryption and, 71; Digital binary code, 2
pragmatic concerns and, 73 Digital computer, 59; antagonism
Culture, 51-52 of, to the analog, 76; effect of, on
Cyborgs, xiii, xvii, 1 mathematicians, 61; effect of, on
mathematics 59, 75-77; recursive
Dantzig, Tobias, 85, 86 capacity of, 75-76; testing and solu
Davis, Erik, 117 tion and, 143n2
Deacon, Terence, xxii, xxv, 23, 24, 30, Digitally produced images, 3, 40, 93·
52, 109, 114, 115, u6, uS, 139n6; on See also Images
symbolic web, 114. See also Deacon, Digital mathematics, 132
Terence, and Merlin Donald Digital media, 144n8; consequences
Deacon, Terence, and Merlin Donald, of, for monotheism, 136
xvii, xx; Homo Symbolict�s, xvii, xx; Discretization, 65-66
on language as life form, xviii Discursive cotmmmication, 84
Deafness, 16 Distributed cognition, xv
Debray, Regis, 120, 136, 150n26 "Dogma of Natural Nm11bers"
Deconstructionist discourse, 42 (Rashevskii), 75
Dehaene, Stanislaus, xxiii-xxiv, 52, Donald, J'v!erlin, x..xvi, 51, 84, 103, 115,
102 139n7, 145n11, 146n3. See also Dea
de Kerckhove, Derrick, 8, 126, 134, 135 con, Terence, and Merlin Donald
Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 134, 140111, 145 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 117
46n2. See also Deleu
ze, Gilles, and
Felix Guattari Eames, Lesley, and David A. Oakley,
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, iv, 101
. .
Xlll, XIV, XXlll, XXVI, 104, 119 Edgerton, Samuel Y., 95
De-prosodized speech, 31 Edison, Thomas, 117
Den·ida, Jacques, xiv, x..xiv, 124, 139n2, Efron, David, 18
148-491117; OfGrammatology, xv; Egan, Greg, 150n24
INDEX 165
Egan, }e1mifer, 107, 149n21 Finite combinatorics, 62
of, xxviii, 95
Fischer, Steven, 28
Egyptians, 119
Fluid dynat11ics, 89
Embodiment: disembodiment of
Frontal-occipital lobes, 30; speech
Emergence, xvi
Furniss, Mauren, so
Emotional conditioning, 30
Empathy, 15
Gabriel, Richard, 119, 147n9
Enactment vs. representation, 82
Gag, 20
Exodus, 120
Geometrization of space, 36
External world, xx
i
Gesticulation, 20-22, 48
mg, 33
tom of, xx
iv; temporal cmmection
83, 93, 97
21; utterance at1d, xxiv, 3, 20, 21
166 INDEX
Gesttm and Speech (Leroi-Gourhan), Gi.idel, Kurt, xv
39 God particle, 137
Gestura-haptic, the, so; difference Goldreich, Oded, 64
between textual writing and, 51; in Gordon, Avery F., !13
theatre, 49; as 'visual notation; 50 Gorgian rhetoric, 3, 126
Gestura-haptic body, so, 109 GPS, 8
Gestura-haptic mediation, 51, 53 Grammar, 4, 28, so, !14
Gestura-haptic writing, 39-54; conse Graphic User Interface, 44, 98
quences of, for writing and speech, Graph theory, 62, 69
47; exo-textuality of, so; gestura Greek/Hellenic alphabet, 125, 128-29,
haptic meditml and, 47, 109; possi 135, 140n2, 149n20
bilities of, 54 Greeks, 13-14, u8
Gesturology, 4, 16, so Greenspan, Donald, 65
Ghost effect, xiii, 7, 8, 107-37; from Guattari, Felix: on intimacy of tech
human speech, !12. See also God; nology and subjectivity 5, 82. See also
Infinity; Mind Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari
Ghostliness, bio-linguistic, u3-16
Ghostliness, biology of, u6 HI and H 2 regions, 73
"Ghost of Anyone's Father, The;' !13 Hacking, Ian, 1oo, 145!1!5
Ghosts, 107; comnumicational media Haken, Wolfgang, and Kenneth
and, u6; definition of, u3; fictive, Appel, 64
131; medium-specificity of, u3; Halle, Morris, and Roman Jakobson,
network-induced, 135; postmodern 86
ness of, u3; types of, 149n22; tlle Hamlet, 23, !13
virtual and, 150n25 Hand, 39
GIS (Graphic Information System), 98 Handshake, 51
GIS map, x.xvii, x.xviii; Google Eartll, Handwriting, 25
xxviii; parallel and serial seeing and, Hansen, Mark, xvii, 6
XXV!ll Hanson, Andrew ]., 66
Globalization as planetary network, Haptic feedback, xvi; virtual auto
135 hapticity and, xxiv
GNU, 123 Haraway, Donna, xvii; "Companion
God, 8, 9, 54, u2, u6, u8, 130, 131, Species Manifesto;' xvii
132, 136, 148m3; alphabetic, 122; Havelock, Eric, 127, 143!1!
freedom from judgment of, 104; Hayles, Katllerine, xi, xii, xvii, 144n8,
as 'I-effect; 130; inside and outside 145!1!7, 150n24
of mathematics, xx.xii; invisible, Hebrew language, 14, uo, 122
uo, u9; mathematics and, xx.xii; as Hebrews, u8
media-effect of the alphabet, xx.xiii; Hegelian spiral, 84, 93
obsolescence of, 136; shared origins Heisenberg, Werner, 86
of, witll the 'mind; xx.xii; spoken Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 124, 129
word of, 26; wliting and, 7, 124. See Heraclitus, 127, 149!1!9
also]ahweh Hilbert, David, xv
INDEX I67
History, 39 Idea tmits, 22
Hockney, David, 98-99 Ideograms. See Diagrams
Homer, 126, 149n20 'I-er; 122, 123, 128, 129
Horizon effect, 87 lllich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders, 2, 14,
Hornsby, Roy, 47 28,94
How We Became Posthmnan (Hayles), xi lllocution, 26
HTML, 40 Imaged images, 97-98
Hugo, Victor, 93; in Ouaknin, 13 Imaged subjects, 93-99
Hm11an assemblages, xiii, xiv Images, xvi, xxiii, x..xiv, x..xvi, x..wii,
Hm11an cognition, flexibility of, xxii xxviii, 2, 3, 42, 43; digital or post
'Hm11an computers; 90 photographic, x..wiii, 3, 40, 93; flat,
Hm11anities, use of empirical data in, 44; imaged, 97-98; instnm1ental;
XXIII 95; in Mignone, 39; on-screen,
Hm11an mind, 1 66; as parallel, 83; singularity or
Hm11an nature, 103 multiplicity of, 97; tension of, with
Hm11e, David, 101-2 words, 83-84; usurpation of alpha
Husser!, Ed!mmd, 125, 1481116, 148 betic writing by, 40; visuo-kinetic,
491117; Den·ida on The Origin of 22
Gemnetry and, 125; lack of diagrams Imaginary money, xv, xx..
xi
in, 125; The OriginofGeometl"j, 125 Imaging, 93-99
Hutchins, Edwin, 90 Imagology, 93
Imagologies (Taylor and Saarinen), 93
I, x..u
iii, 4; bleeding outward of, 99 Index, xx, x..xi, xxii, 21, 24, 114
100; evolution of language and, 109; Infants, xviii, 49, 115, 121
ghost spirit of, 118; Greek, 125-30; Infinite Mathematical Agent, 110,
"I am the Lord Thy God" and, 7, 130-33
24; inunersive or gesturo-haptic, 8; Infinite sets, 86-88, 132
Jewish, 119-25; lack of separation Infinity, 7, 68-77, 112, 130, 132; algo
between inner and outer, 102; as titlm1s and, 71; computer science
medimn-specific, 109; networked, and, 68-75; displacement of, in
8, 133-37; plural, 104, 134; property mathematics, 62, 67; as ideal, 77;
and, 129, 1491119; reading, 135; as mathematical Person and, 77; oppo
reading/wtiting agent, 4; shift away sition of computers to, 76; physics
from the monoidal and, 83, 92, 103; and, 65
spoken and wtitten, 108, 110, 128; Information, as embodied, xv
third, 8; in the Torah, 122; virtual, Installation art, 44
xx
xiv; as Western 'Me; 104; writing, Instnm1ental Transcommunication
7, 31, 126; written vs. signed, xx..
xiii (nc), 117, 146n6
I I Self I Other, 99-105 Instnm1ental view of tedmologies, 5-6
I, The, 107-10; linguistic character of, Intetface design, 48
107 Integers, xx..
xii, 68, 74
Icon, xx, x..xi, x..xii, 3, 114, 115 Intermediation, xii
Iconophobia, 40, 83 Internet, ix, xxvi, 46, 89; as tactile, 134
168 INDEX
Intuition: as cotmection to the body, !15, 123, 130; being-in-language
38; feasibility and, 74; in mathemat (Agamben) and, 20, !15; as commu
ics, 36, 38, 58; about smallness of a nication system, xix; evolution of,
problem, 73 xvii, xviii, xix, 16, 24, 28, 109, !15;
Isaiah, 120 ideolog)' and xi· origins of xxiii
' ' ) '
..
·
129, 136. See also God Limbic system, 24, 29; function of, 30
Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle, Lingua, 109
86 Linguistics, so, 52, 108, 109, !13
James, \iVilliam, 101 Lip reading, 16
Japanese writing, 13 "Liquefication of all referentials;' 95
Jerome, Saint, 28 Literacy, 2, 4, 21, 26, 54, 93; Greek, 3,
Jesus Christ, 123, 124 13, 125
Literary module, 29
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 130 Lobotomized speech, 31
Kaufma m, William J., III, and Logicism, 66
Larry L. Smarr, 65 London, Barbara, 99
Kendon, Adam, 18 Lyric poetry, 126, 129
Keep , The (Egan), 107
Keyboard, 40 Machines, 58, 62
Kittler, Friediich, xiii, 143111 Machinic change, extra-lingual dimen
Kronecker, Leopold, xxxii, 140!11 sions of, 82
Kmzweil, Ray, ix, x J'vlachinic operations, xiii
J'vlaffesoli, Michel, 15
Laban notation, 42 J'vlaps and mapmaking, xxvii, xxviii,
Lakoff, George, and Rafael N(mez., 33 40, 57, 64, 93,95,98
Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 124 J'vlargolis, Norman, 88
Landauer, Rolf, 65 J'vlartin, Henii-Jean, 13
Lange, !!3, !14 J'vlartins de Oliviero, Jorge, and J(Iiio
Langer, Susan, 84 Rocha do Amaral, 31
Language, xiii, xiv, xxxiii, 6, 8, 17, 18, J'vlateiiality: of computation in mathe
19, 23, 27, 30, 48, 51, 52, 59, 6o, 67, matics, 68; of the computer, 76; of
77, 82, 85, 86, 88, 95, 1o8, H3, H4, ghosts, !13; of matl1ematical activity,
INDEX I69
Mate1iality (continued)
J'vlerleau-Ponty, J'vlaurice, 34; triangle
130-33
xxi,
and, xx
xi
and, 2, 11o; in Den·ida, 139n2; ofthe
130
in mathematics and, 38; ontotheo
.
·
J'vlimesis, 27, 28, 43
matician
tion of midbrain and neocortex and,
McClure, W., 63
xxv; sign language and, 17
physics, 86
J'vlonetization of Greek society, 127,
Mechanical reproduction, 96
1491119
xx
xiii, 2, 5, 133; notational, 42; phi
Morse, Samuel F. B., 116
53
J'vlotion captltre technology, 4, 43, 45,
170 INDEX
other teclmologies for, 142-43n8;
Nous, x.xxii, 7, 118, 126, 127, 128, 132; as
J'vlousegrams, 142n6 33
J'vlultiple Personality Disorder, 100,
1451113
Oakley, David A., and Lesley Eames,
Multiplicative constants, 72
101
Musical notation, 42
Optimization, 69
X
I Orations, 3, 26, 27; body in, 27
Navier-Stokes equation, 89
touch, 47
mg, 33
Papadimitrou, Christos H., 70
Neo-primitiveness, 49
Para-human, 104, 134; as alternative to
Neurology, 102
pendence and, 85; as duo, 83-88;
Neuroscience, xiii
and how we see ourselves, 88; in in
Nonbelievers, 13 7
in status and action and, 84; seeing
Non-linear dynamics, 62
and, 98; the virtual and, 84
Non-symbolic media, 42
Parallel computing, xvi, x.wi, xxvii,
57
tive phenomena and, 90; obvious
INDEX 171
172 INDEX
Reinhold, Arnold, 72, 73, 74
Self, 28; changing conceptions of, 81;
Representation, 2, s, 6, 9, 25, 34, 35,
quantum, 135, 150n24; symbolic
4 1, 43, 46, 49, 51, 64; absence of, in
representation of, u6; temporality
motion capture, 46; consciousness
of, 94
bolic, xxi, xx
ii, 46, u6; 'truth' and,
visual, 124
Responsibility, 19
94, 134
Revenants, 113
Shaviro, Steven, 2, 6, 100, 140n1
IUuzome, 104
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 17
Robbins conjecture, 63
Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of
Roco, Mihail, x
Silencing, 19
I)On26
human, xi; tonelessness and, 122
Sazonov, Vladimir, 75
Speech, 52, 109, 112, 113, 122; as con
Scientific method, 65
Speech-act theory, 26
Seeing, 97-98
Spiritualism, u6
INDEX 173
Stellarc, 46; transposed corporeality Symbols, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, x_xii, 51, 59,
of, 46 114, 116, I32, 139n5; in mathemat
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 81, 101 ics, 6o, 124; musical, 42; symbol
Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr·. Hyde) processing brain, x_wii, 9I; visual, I9
The (Stevenson), 81 Syntax, 18, z8, 41, 42, 63, 75, 94, 95,
Stroking, 45, 46, 47 114, 140n5
Subject, xxvi, xiii, xiv, 5, 83, too-toz, Synthetic assemblage, 52, 102
104, 139n2; Althusser and, 1481113;
analog and digital, xii; bio-technic, Talmud, 13; interpretation of, 26;
53, computing, 88-92, ghostly, xvi, scholars of, I24
'!'-saying, to8; imaged, 93-99; as Talmy, Leonard, I 31
linguistic abstraction, to8; mathe Taylor, Mark, atld Esa Saarinen, 93
matical, 6o-6t, 64, 67, 130; parallel Technesis, 6
ist, 40; post-hLmlan, xxiv; speaking, Technics, xiii
)-o ' viewing' xxvii·) virtual' 111
·
4
Teclmoid subjects, 81-83
Subject formation, xii, xiii, x_x, x_xi Technologized mathematics, 57-77
Subjectivity, xii, xiii, xiv, xxxi, X-'Lxiii, Teclmologized subjectivity, 51-54
15, 111, 148m3; through the gesturo Technology, ix, xvii, xix, xxv, 1, z,
haptic, 51, 52; hLm1at1 mind at1d, 4, 39, 4I, 46, 57, 58, 65, 73, SI, 88,
1; through images, 40; outside of 102, 111, 112, 117, 133; corporeal
lat1guage atld signification, 8z, to8; axiomatic of, 51; embodiment of, 6;
as mediLml-specific, 109; parallel materiality of, 4; as more thatl dis
computing at1d, 134; Person as, 6o; cursive process, 6; multitasking at1d,
pre-linguistic, 115; reference to I xxvii; neurological alterations of,
at1d, to8; quannm1, 15onz4; second 53; as prosthesis, xiii, 5, 53; psyche
ary, xv; techno-apparatltses at1d, 8z; in, 8I, 83; social atld cognitive con
technologized, 51-54; teclmology sequences of, I; subject and, x_xxv, 5,
atld, s; tlleatre atld, 49; visual, 95 5I-54; time and space and, 53
Superposition, 85, 134 Tele-dildonics, 47
Surveillat1ce, 8 Telegraphs, 7, 116; the dead and, 117;
Svenbro, Jesper, 129 writing and, 117
Syllables, 86; as governed by neocor Telephone, 6, 21, 117
tex, 29 Tele-surgery, 47
Symbolic communication: in Deacon, Television, 2, 93, 95, 117; picture in
24; in Deacon atld Donald, xvii, picture, 98
xviii; as extrabiological, x_xiii Texts, x_wi, 3, 4, 6, 26; affect in 27;
Symbolic reference, xix, 114, 115, electronic, 28; outside of, 124; post
139n6; as efficient, xx; as interpreter humatl machine md, xii; prosody
independent' x_xii·) as shared' x_xii
4
·' as of, 11o; pmely textual entities and,
specifically human, n; subject for 29
mation and, n; as virtual, n, x_xi Textual brains, 29-31
174 INDEX
Textualization of thought, 2
Video and computer games, xxvii, 46,
Theatre of cruelty, 49
Virtual, the, uo-12; ancientness of,
"Theo-graphy;' 136
112; ghosts and, 15onzs; meaning of
m1ages, 22
Virtual reality, xvi
Thought, 26
Virtual speech, 129
Thmnos, 126
Virtual technologies and the self,
poetry 27
and, 53; cognition and, xviii, 145nu;
as political-theological instrument,
xviii, 53, 58, 67
Trace, 42, 50
Transcendence, 41
Walking, 23
Transduction, 27, 28
\iVeb of words and objects, 114-116
Typographic man, 54
Word and image in dialectic, 83-84
'Word magic; 18
Uncatminess of commtmicational
\i\Triting, 50-51, 109, 112, 117, 127-30,
media, 7
136, 137, 140n3, 142-43n8, i46
Unconsciousness of a technological
47n7; the Bible and, 12o; brain
meditm1, 82
ftmctions and, 30; consciousness
INDEX 175
Writing (amtintted)
Zazen, 103
176 INDEX
Rotman, B. (Brian)
i g I Brian Rotman ;
and distributed human ben
p. em.
1. Science-Philosophy. I. Title.
QI75.R5655 2008
501-dc22 2007044861