At the Limits of Alphabetic Thought

Becoming Besides Ourselves continues Brian Rotman's concern with God, mathematics, and minds in a sprawling case for the reality of the imminent reconfiguration of our selves and societies by networked, motion-capture media technologies. The book argues, based on the shaping of sentience by the media environment, that alphabetic-culture's coming-obsolescence will give way to newer, better, more holistic forms of being. It is a smart book, written by a scholar undaunted by hanging world-changing claims on theory-heavy and experimental evidence of shifts in subjectivity. Yet, I found myself frustrated with its conclusions.

Alphabetic writing has hard-wired into us an "alphabetic body", a cyborg-conception of those capable of thinking alphabetic-thought. As Rotman explains, "[t]he alphabet does this by imposing its own mediological needs on the body, from the evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write to the invisible, neurological transformations which it induces in order to function" (15). The medium is not only the message, nor even the inert material used. Media hardware are embodied by their users as well. Appropriately, Becoming cites its affiliation with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project, which "can be summarized as a meditation on 'the flesh that thinks'" (34).

Rotman thus walks us through gesticulation, movement, vocal affect, silences and other features that attend speech presentation in order to mark constrictions on the physiological gear used to "read" the meanings of embodied encounters - to speak, watch and hear. By contrast with embodied communication, like speech and sign-language, alphabetic language abstracts gesture, and, in particular, vocal gestures.

This argument works so well in part because the point of the alphabet is to be partial and metonymic of a putatively complete intended meaning. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, 'words are made for cutting.' This 'cutting' is the violent capacity of language to standardize communication and the point of entry of power into knowledge. Instead of pursuing Foucault's trajectory, Rotman uses the cutting-function of words as a foil for posing the possibilities of thought excised by alphabetic regimes. The same features that make the alphabet a handy analytical tool - its abstraction, serial linearity and compact form – also encourage the Western metaphysical prejudice for the mind over the body. This hierarchy holds abstract words over embodied gestures with the consequence of impoverishing communication, using the neocortex more than the midbrain, and constricting our conception of subjectivity to the unitary, individual. If "the moving around, visualizing, talking, scribbling, and gesturing involved in learning and communicating the subject" imprint physical selves, then, Rotman reasons, understanding and making one's self understood, done differently, will configure different selves (34). This, Rotman argues, can be an emancipative difference. By over-exercising parts and pathways that were made for communicating through alphabetic texts, the body itself became alphabetic. The stunted bodies of "lettered selves" derive from their focused ability to abstract meanings into words; a constricted capacities that Rotman contrasts with the expanded exercises of gesturo-haptic encounters. Modes of communication more attuned to the diversity of things that make up meaning, like prosody (the gestural dimension of voice), help us strain against being gathered together into alphabetic-selves.

Part of the richness of the gesturo-haptic is its capacity to convey silence; and, what is great about "becoming silent" is that we who have become accustomed to reading writing would, not regress, but "reoriginate," towards a state of pre-speech (49). Exploring the unspoken elements of communication will let us understand "how… language is able to refer to impossible actions and nonexistent entities" (113). Rotman's assertion that gesture, amongst other modes of sentience, is an extra-linguistic medium is underwritten by studies of language's neurological operations and evolution.

The evolutionary neurologist Terrence Deacon's account of linguistic evolution offers evidence of the intergenerational accumulation of physiological changes in human brains. As further evidence that alphabetic language is implanted in our bodies, Rotman cites the neurologist...