Rotman, Brian, Becoming Beside

Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts,

and Distributed Human Being, Duke
University Press, Durham, NC, 2008,
ISBN 9 7808 2234 2007, xxxiv+176 pp.,
US$21.95.

Until relatively recently, a mode of thought we now recognise as

‘humanist’ posited a radical ontological separation between the self and its
environment, mind and matter, the human and technology. The last three
decades have seen a concerted challenge to this world-view, emerging from
a number of fields ranging from evolutionary anthropology to cognitive
science, and from cultural studies to philosophy. Yet the language of
humanism is proving hard to shake off. It is still tempting to talk of the
‘effects’ of technology on forms of consciousness, as if technological forms
confronted an unchanging human subject that pre-exists and unfolds
outside of technological and material conditions.

We speak of technology ‘shaping’, ‘determining’, ‘producing’,

‘constituting’. We speak of technological forms being determined or
produced by socio-cultural forms or certain historical conditions. In this
book, Brian Rotman continues the line of inquiry inaugurated by Eric
Havelock, Walter Ong, Robert Logan and Marshall McLuhan. These
scholars, each in their own way, have focused on the critical technological
turn of alphabetic writing, and argued for its far-reaching effects on
Western culture, consciousness and subjectivity. This is the intellectual
lineage that Rotman revaluates and carries on. Becoming Beside Ourselves
focuses on the passage from alphabetic writing to digital modes of
expression and self-reflection.
Rotman’s original contribution is to bring to this line of argument a range
of novel theoretical developments that encompass post-humanism:
Deleuzian metaphysics, evolutionary psychology, phenomenology and
extended mind theory. Also, his training as a mathematician gives him a
solid background from which to delve into the phenomenology of
mathematical activity and the genesis of the concept of infinity.

Rotman is concerned with the body as the site of technological

transformation. The effect of technology on the subject, Rotman argues,
does not consist of ‘the action of something external introduced into a
“natural” psyche, one that was inner, private and secluded from
technological influence’ (p. 5). Rather, the action of technology manifests
itself at a presignifying and pre-theoretical level. The ‘alphabetic body’, the
departing point of Rotman’s exploration, operates through a ‘corporeal
axiomatic: it engages directly and inescapably with the bodies of its users.
It makes demands and has corporeal effects.’ (p. 15) From there, Rotman’s
argument weaves a rather twisted course through a range of topics, each of
which deserves much more elaboration and breathing space. The focus of
the last part is on the possibilities of self-enunciation opened up by
information and digital technologies, a site of emergence of a post-
alphabetic ‘I’ that, so the argument goes, announces a radically new form
of consciousness. The ‘hegemony, undisputed authority, and automatic
intellectual and spiritual preeminence of such a writing engendered monad
is diminishing, giving way to a para-self, a parallelist extension of the “I”
of alphabetic literacy that is crystallizing around us’ (p. 133).

The main problem with Rotman’s overall argument is that this alleged
transformation seems curiously disembodied and lacking in context
(historical, social and cultural). There seems to be an isomorphic and
unproblematic relationship between the ‘I-effects’ of technology and the
‘subject’ they produce. It seems that this transformation will be equal to
that wrought by the advent of language and writing. But how far reaching
are the effects of these technologies? The theories of Deleuze and Guattari
(which are cited frequently but relatively untapped) might have helped
redress this imbalance, drawing attention to processes of reterritorialisation
and capture, rather than those that tend towards virtualization and
disembodiment. Rotman raises some interesting questions, and some
aspects of this work (in particular his treatment of gesture as the corporeal
dimension remediated by alphabetic writing) are original and thought-
provoking. Yet the main thrust of the argument is steeped in the language
of radical historical rupture, and is based on a rather linear notion of
technological change. This sweeping journey might be better enjoyed as an
exploratory, non-linear path through a set of problems to do with how
writing has shaped subjectivity, and how to theorise the changes that
certain current technological developments might bring.
— Andrès Vaccari, Philosophy,
Macquarie University