Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing

It is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds

—Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double ¹

The Curiously Archaic Present

Imagining a future in which alphabetic writing together with philosophy and literature as we know them will disappear, to be replaced by forms evolved from them, André Leroi-Gourhan assures us at the end of Gesture and Speech that the mentality and accomplishments of these artifacts will not be lost, since the "curiously archaic forms employed by thinking human beings during the period of alphabetic graphism will be preserved in print." ²

Leroi-Gourhan's belief in the eventual demise of alphabetic writing and its illustrious products is in part self-dissolving: because it is written—and prompts a response—in the very medium whose disappearance it heralds, any answer from the archaic present would be perforce obsolescent before its time. It also seems fantastical and infeasible—outside the weightless imaginings of speculative fiction—to imagine the disappearance of anything so deeply folded into our Western historical and religious being and cultural self-identity as alphabeticism. (Of course, from a nonalphabetic standpoint such as that of Chinese orthography, its demise might seem less impossible and more imaginable; but such a perception does not impinge on the question of archaization that prompts his prediction.) And yet is not the opposite belief to Leroi-Gourhan's just as outrageous? Can one really believe that alphabetic writing will never be archaic, will always be with us—that, in all possible, foreseeable, or imaginable futures of the human or posthuman extending our present technologized state, alphabetic inscription will go on being the principal cognitive tool and medium for recording, creating, and transmitting human knowledge, telling history, thinking philosophy, inscribing art and affect?

Leroi-Gourhan asks us to imagine our present, overwhelmingly alphabetic graphic practices as archaic. In an immediate empirical and manual sense that is not difficult: writing a text such as the present one by making a hundred thousand minutely different, attention-needing, and irksomely intricate finger movements on a keyboard is, in the scheme of practical things, hardly less archaic than laboriously incising cuneiform syllables one by one into wet clay. But this seems not to be in the direction of his prediction. One might, mindful of the alphabet's limitations in respect to rendering the prosodic elements of spoken utterances, invoke the mark-up language extensions to it that are being developed to remedy the situation. ³ These so-called languages are scripts along the lines of an extended HTML embedded in text files, only, instead of enabling a browser to display a hypertext page, they enable machines to read alphabetic texts aloud. Their purpose is to improve the machine-readability of such texts along affective dimensions by providing tags for certain standardized types of prosodic effect; by decoding these tags, text-recognition software and speaker can voice a passable version of these effects. But, however novel and effective, textual augmentation to improve machine vocality embeds us further in, rather than taking us out of, the archaic alphabetic present.

Of course, it is possible that existing graphic practices are in the process of rendering the alphabet archaic. Certainly the explosion of visual images brought about by digital technology, the so-called second computer revolution, has resulted in many of the traditional semiotic functions performed by alphabetic writing (notably but not exclusively the display, recording, manipulation, and transmission of information) being usurped by visual artifacts—icons, tables, graphs, arrays, diagrams, charts, and maps replacing words; and it has resulted in changes in subjectivity in directions quite distinct from that countenanced by alphabeticism and the textual protocols it furthers. But again, notwithstanding the threat to alphabetic inscription, this is not what seems intended by Leroi-Gourhan's prognostication, since visual practices that have long performed their own dance in relation to alphabetic writing are governed by an orthogonal relation to written texts rather than one of obsolescence or supersession...