Becoming beside ourselves: the alphabet, ghosts, and distributed human being

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

100

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etiology-that their aberrance might serve, at least for now, as "the best paradigm we have for postmodern consciousness" (Shaviro 1995, r) and beyond that might illtm1inate a previously obscured but now inescapable multiplicity inside the 'individual' self. Thus, in at least one neurological accotmt of multiple personality the syndrome is merely a divergence from a normal psychic parallelism: The multiple parallel streams of conscious activity which are implied by the multiple personality data, are no different from those which are present in normal individuals . . . . The difference in the multiple per­ sonality case is that these processes can be attached to different self rep­ resentations, and so when re-represented are revealed as the thoughts of different individuals. When only one self representation is available to self-awareness all conscious process, covert or otherwise, is attributed to a single 'me?" (Oakley and Eames 1985, 237) According to this, then, multiples, while tmdeniably aberrant, are closer to all of us than we have ever, from the perspective of a 'natural' unfractured singularity, imagined. In fact, internally plural selves, psychic multiplicities seemingly para­ doxical to the introspecting monadic self, have neverrl1eless been rl1ought repeatedly within philosophical and literary psychology. But, along with multiple personality, such models of plural mentation have only been taken seriously by mainstream cognitive and neurological science in rl1e last two decades. Thus, Marvin Minsky's phrase "society of mind" (1987), an early and still cited metaphor for inside-rl1e-head cognitive parallelism, is in fact a rediscovery of past insistences on psychic plurality. A century before him, the idea was widespread. Willian1 James wrote of an inner mental multi­ plicity; Robert Louis Stevenson asserted: "Man is . . . truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will . . . outstrip me on rl1e same lines; I hazard the guess that man" (and he means individual humans not mankind) "will be ulti­ mately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and inde­ pendent denizens?' (1886/1979, 82). While for Nietzsche, "The asstm1ption of a single subject is perhaps mmecessary: perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects whose interaction and struggle is rl1e basis of our thought and our consciousness. . . . My hypothesis: The sub­ ject as multiplicity?' (1968, 260) More than a century before this, David Hume likened the mind to "a kind of theatre" and argued rl1at "rl1e true PARALLEL SELVES

101

idea of the human mind is to consider it as a system of different percep­ tions or existences, which are linked together . . . and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. . . . I cannot compare the soul more properly to anything than to a republic or conunonwealth, in which several members are w1ited by the reciprocal ties of government and sub­ ordination?' (1739-40/1951) These persistently collectivist figures for tl1e human psyche-society, polity, system of existences, conm10nwealtl1, theatre, republic-testify to a recurrent refusal to cognize the self as an undifferentiated and private sin­ gularity, insisting on it being akin to a public assemblage ofmultiple agen­ cies. The historian Hillel Schwartz, conunenting on multiple personas and doppelgangers and other doublings that emerged at tl1e ends of the eigh­ teentll and nineteenth centuries, sees the phenomenon as a response to social and economic dislocation, to "societal fears of tl1e loss of genera­ tional continuity, most acute at tl1e ends of centuries?' (1996, 81) Maybe, tl10ugh Hume wrote at mid-century, and at tl1e twentieth century's end the effect-whatever its relation to societal fears-occurred within a con­ vergence of neurology, robotics, and post-cognitivist theories of mind onto the notion that even simple mental activities, for example counting, are syntl1etic assemblages of heterogeneous actions, each in tl1emselves not intrinsic to tl1e activity tl1ey enable. (Dehaeane 1997, 13) Though external tedmological mediation such as computing and imag­ ing inculcate behaviors and induce forms of parallel cognition and percep­ tion, it is the preexistence of an internal 'multiplicity of subjects' that is vital to tl1e pluralized selves tl1at emerge. True, the contours tl1at paral­ lelist tedmologies carve out in tl1e informational landscape create new patlnvays for the psyche to follow, and hence originate new self-effects, but they do so in the presence of the inner multiplicities tl1at Hume and others identified. Their mediation is that of an external scaffold, a way of allowing these multiplicities to be recognized, to become choate, to crys­ tallize into social practices, and cohere into experientially real, stable, and iterable forms of psychic activity. There s i however ultin1ately no separation between interior and ex­ terior: i1mer experiential 'I'and outer collective 'tl1ey' fold into each otl1er. All thought, even tl1e most private and enclosed, is from outside itself, socially existing, being publicly mobilized, using and being used by tl1e media and teclmological apparatuses that surround us, constitutes our psyches-a phenomenon whose articulation demands an ecology of the self and psychic agency tl1at foregrow1ds the contemporary technologies 102

CHAI'TER FOUR

of the virtual. It is in this sense that one can agree with Merlin Donald's contention that the key principle of the biological and social evolution of individual cognition is its symbiosis with cognitive collectivities and ex­ ternal memory systems, a two-way traffic that allows new cultural forma­ tions and technologies of parallelism to reconfigure the thought diagran1s inside (as we still say) om heads.l6 It is no secret rl1at 'human nature; whatever tmchanging tmiversal that phrase so confidently referred to only a few decades ago, is melting, run­ tung off in new directions. But if we are indeed bio-techno-cultmal hy­ brids, if'natme' s i now inseparable from social artifice, and rl1e 'human' s i an ongoing, open-ended project of mediated self-construction with shift­ ing botmdaries and no identifiable tews, rl1en these directions are not arbi­ trary or tmconditioned. Nor do they promise, as many fantasize, a post­ human future wirl1out death in which digital technology will download minds and at last release psyches from rl1eir bodies to float and commune in a sea of disembodied information.17 Indeed, as we've seen, far from escaping embodiment, the action of technology-precisely in the in1plicit and tmconscious effects of its never absent materiality-is never separable from rl1e bodies of its users, which immediately makes any moving be­ yond, any attempted abandmm1ent of corporeality, incoherent. From the perspective here the antibody to rl1e illusions of rl1e post-human s i rl1e recognition of the 'para-human; since the condition in question is one of horizontal movement, not upwards or forwards but sideways; not linear or sequential but dispersive and parallel; not going beyond but an expan­ sion, a multiplication, and intensification of what was always there; a new realization of the past and its futures, and with this a recognition of the incipient plurality of a psyche in the process of beconling beside itself. But what is involved in beconling beside oneself? In experiencing plu­ rality? How does one accede to the para-human? The process is not to be identified with imitating, reproducing, splitting oneself; or identifying wirl1, or assimilating anorl1er; or being reborn as a new being (though it can couple wirl1 and be traversed by all these). It is rather a form of a­ temporal change, beconling party to a condition other than one's own, a question of self-difference, of standing to the side of the single, monadic 'I! Or, in terms of a meditational practice such as Zazen, of sitting beside oneself to attain a state of nlindful tm-self. It's easier perhaps to talk in attributes and processes: of an interactively emergent psyche, a self as­ sembled on rl1e neuro-cultural interface rl1at, as we've seen, is borl1 in­ ternally and externally collective, a self distributed and in excess of mlity. PARALLEL SELVES

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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 104

CHAPTER FOUR

only just starting to recognize and feel the need to narrate. There is surely no longer any doubt that something large and w1quantifiable is happen­ ing across the planet on the outside of our skins and inside our heads. A technologically mediated transformation of rl1e 'human'-global, all en­ compassing, and seemingly inescapable- s i being made by us to happen. Within this upheaval we are going parallel and starting to become beside ourselves, as I've tried in a very schematic way to indicate. vVe are living rl1rough tumultuous, dizzying times on the cusp of a new era; times span­ ning a seismic jump in rl1e matrix of human culture, which looks to be as momentous, epoch-making, and far reaching in its consequences as rl1e invention of alphabetic writing.

PARALLEL SELVES

10)

Five GHOST EFFECTS

A lady once asked me whether I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I an­ swered with tmth and simplicity: No madam! I have seen far too many myself. -Sanmel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend ( 1809) 1Ne're living in a supernatural world. . . . \!Ve're surrounded by ghosts. -Jennifer Egan,

The Keep (2oo6)

My concern here s i to ilitm1inate the way communicational media can facilitate new psychic entities and objects of belief. Such facilitation occurs when a new meditml confronts and absorbs its predecessor. 'What I have to say centers on the concept of self-reference as this occurs in rl1e enwl­ ciation of presence or agency most familiar as, but not confined to, the 'I' of speech, and interweaves two narratives: one about the virtual, the other about ghosts.

The

.:"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 108

CHAPTER FIVE

might or might not exist, or a self-annotmcing object. The long and tm­ troubled conflation ofspoken and written 'l's within the tradition in ques­ tion has masked the possibility that the medium in which the annotmcing of self-presence occurs might be ofimportance to its phenomenonological character, its status, to the effects open to it, and to its fate in relation to other media. This being so, a linguistics that fails to separate tl1e spoken from tl1e written 'I; one which treats lingua and ilie writing of lingua as interchangeable-"The so-called science of linguistics has studied writ­ ing, not speech" (Powell 2002, 123) -is in no position to elucidate tl1e medium-specific nature of the writing and written subject. If self-enunciation and tl1e production of subjectivity are indeed medium specific, tl1en it becomes obligatory to frame any accow1t of 'I' accordingly. To iliis end we can consider framing ilie project here by con­ sidering four media-gestura-haptic, speech, alphabetic writing, and digi­ tal networks-each wiili its particular mode of self-enunciation in a series involving three re-mediations: from a-linguistic gesture to speech, from speech to its alphabetic inscription, and from alphabetic writing to digital networks. 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 human speech involved neurological changes over iliousands of genera­ tions and was moreover responsible for an inherent feeling of ghostliness in ilie one who speaks 'I! The move is from an a-linguistic 'I' mediated gesturo-haptically, iliat is, a proprioceptively continuous 'me; experi­ enced and projected ilirough self-touching, posture, and visual signaling i ilie precursor to the 'I' of spoken language. The gestural medium here s of the cmrently observable human visual and communicational gestures which co-evolved with language and has filiations witl1 contemporary ges­ tural forms used by self-recognizing primates, dolphins, and elephants. In human language tl1e gestura-haptic body is localized wiiliin utterance to form tl1e vocal gestures of speech, manifest as prosody or tone of voice joined seanuessly within speech to tl1e words spoken. 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,

inaugurated Western culture. The remediation in question recalibrated

GHOST EFFECTS

109

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.

IIO

CHAPTER FIVE

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

GHOST EFFECTS

III

'human' itself-are increasingly revealed to be exogenous and multiply assembled from outside themselves. Each of these shifts by itself marks the site of a psychically dense, far­ reaching cluster of socio-cultural discontinuities. But they are intercon­ nected, and taken together in concert indicate the emergence of a large­ scale, radical transformation in the discursive and experiential fabric of ·western culture. How large? How radical? How might one frame a trans­ formation of tllis magnitude? ·what could be a comparable cultural disrup­ tion? Let me offer a provocation. Virtuality is ancient. Far from being tied to contemporary electronic technologies, its lineage long antedates its current technological matrLx. Its present manifestation, tl1e ubiquitous virtual X inundating contem­ porary life, is the tllird great wave of the phenomenon. The second wave came with the writing of speech. The first cannot be separated from the advent of human language itself. Further, each of the mediations-spo­ ken language, tl1e teclmology of speech-writing, contemporary digital and post-digital media-nlidwifes virtual effects into being at tl1e site of an ir­ ruption, a coming apart of a previously self-sufficient and seamless whole. The result in each case s i a dissociation which restructures consciousness to produce modes of presence, agency, and self-representation that were unavailable, or, even if available as imagined constructs, were unimple­ mentable in any stable, practical form. In particular and of principal interest here, contemporary technologies of tl1e virtual are detlumling the habits and protocols associated witl1 their alphabetic predecessors, whose authority and ubiquitous presence have dominated \iVestern culture since its inception. The resulting displace­ ment of concepts, practices, and psycllic entities that were maintained by reason of written mediation, transforms the latter into virtual forms of themselves creating nlilieus and operating within conceptual environ­ ments outside their horizons. I shall return to these horizons later, but my emphasis for the most part will be with the accomplislunents, tl1at is, tl1e mediological effects, of the teclmology of alphabetic writing rather tl1at1 its overconling, witl1 certain disembodied entities that emerge from written 'speech at a distance; from virtual speech, atld I shall look at tluee entities-God, Mind, and Infinity-each of which arises as a hypostatized agency, a ghost effect within tl1e matrLx of tl1is teclmology. But before tl1is a remru·k about the first wave of the virtual, natnely the ghost effect which emerges as a deep-rooted atld seemingly inevitable accompatliment of human speech. Il2

CHAPTER FIVE

Bw-lingustic i Ghostliness

A concept for which there is no referent, no evidence, anywhere, any place, 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. Apparently, there is a powetful impulse witl1in htm1an imagination that flows inevitably to this tmwarranted fiction. -Mark Turner, "The Ghost of Anyone's Fatl1er" (2003)

To avoid misunderstanding, let me say at once that by 'ghost' I mean somerl1ing orl1er than the customary spirit of a deceased person and more abstract rllall "a social figme" signifying a hatmting (Gordon 1997). If in­ deed we al"e surrotmded by ghosts in a 'supernatmal world: it's because our psyches in iliis world are permeated by new media. The ghosts rl1at concern me here (which in fact al"e not normally designated as such) are media effects, invisible, technologically induced agencies iliat emerge, under appropriate circumstances, as autonomous self-enunciating entities. They are meditm1-specific, their character alld action being intrinsic to the medium in which their existence is manifest, and their efficacy as objects of belief alld material consequence derive from their tmacknowledgement­ their effacement-of rl1is very fact. Ghosts may be particularly postmod­ ern entities (I'll get to rl1at later); iliey're also allcient: in rl1e history of the West certain disembodied signifiers-ghosts ofwriting-have given birth, as we shall see, to theological, metaphysical, and marl1ematical thoughts alld beliefs. Though distinct from specters such as individual rtWenants demanding, like ilie ghost of Hamlet's farl1er, retribution, revenge, alld the righting of wrongs, or from identifiable sites ofsocial repression and invisibilization, media ghosts are noneilieless neither free of the supernatural nor the tm­ calmy affect inherent in their disembodied oilierness. In rl1at sense, iliey too might be said to haunt. But before we get to such iliings, what, we might ask, is all 'unwalTallted fiction'? A concept without a referent? How do rl1ings get to 'be'-to be nalned alld sustain beliefin their existence-with no apparent evidence for rl1em? In particulal·, how is it that lal1guage is able to refer to impossible actions alld nonexistent entities? The question is not one rl1e science of linguistics s i prompted to ask, since (following Saussure's structuralism) it takes rl1e structure of an abstractly conceived system oflal1guage (lange) as its object and brackets out (as parole) as all entirely orl1er matter issues beGHOST EFFECTS

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longing to the socio-ontological deployment of speech, that is, questions about the reality or otherwise of what language names, refers to, and talks about. ·whatever its merits for articulating and investigating the grammar, morphology, and syntax of reference terms, and however augmented by 'pragmatics; a structuralist framework offers no linguistic explanation or insight into how concepts with no referents might occur, and why their genealogy might be significant. By contrast, a recent neurobiological ac­ count of the evolution of language by Terrence Deacon, which rejects Saussure's division of langue and parole and its accotmt of reference, does just that. According to Deacon, reference, "the correspondence between words and objects;' is ''a secondary relationship, subordinate to a web of associative relationships of a quite different sort, which even allows us reference to impossible things?' (1997, 70) Deacon's accowlt of the evolutionary genesis of this web and its role in the formation of reference rests on a lengthy neuro-physiological and bio-cultural narrative too complex to reprise here. An abstract of it goes as follows. In normal usage 'reference' means symbolic reference, the use of a symbol for something, a capacity which Deacon tmderstands as emerging out of a double layer of two simpler kinds. First, and the sine qua non of any sensory activity, comes iconic reference: a similarity or, better, the lack of a perceived difference, between a sign and its referent;3 second, indexi­ cal reference: which Deacon w1derstands as a contiguity interpreted to exist between a sign and its referent. The hierarchy is completed by a third kind-symbolic reference-made up of representations of relations be­ tween indices. Whereas the first two are widely shared across species, all nervous systems exhibiting some form of iconic and indexical reference (albeit across a huge cognitive range), the last is confined to humans with only a rudimentary form learnable by some higher primates. The terms icon, index, and symbol are from Peirce's semiotics, and Deacon's deployment of them, though he ranks the triad in a way Peirce never did, adheres to Peirce's axiom that all ideas are essentially transmis­ sions of signs organized by a semiotic logic rl1at is the san1e for conununi­ cation processes inside and outside the brain. This means the deployment of icons and indices relies on inferential and predictive powers implicit in rl1eir underlying neural mechanisms, which "are not physically re­ presented but only virtually re-presented by producing . . . responses like those that would occur if they were present?' (1997, 78) Because it only Il4

CHAPTER FIVE

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 into every occasion of linguistically mediated auto-reference, might be GHOST EFFECTS

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the basis, Deacon suggests, for a biology of ghostliness, a natural origin for tl1e psychological salience and subjective reality of non-mortal, non­ natural entities: "The symbolic representation of self:' he says, "provides a perspective on that curious human intuition tl1at our minds are somehow independent of our bodies; an intuition . . . translated into beliefs about disembodied spirits and souls that persist beyond death!' (1997, 454) In the presence of the symbol, tl1en, all self-representation loops through the physically absent but virtually present social other. Split off and reified, tllis virtual component of auto-reference is externalized as a being-a ghost-spirit of tl1e self. In this sense, one can say that speech midwifes the first consciously perceivable out-of-body phenomenon, felt as the tmcanny physical experience of a body speaking itself. As such, it might be said to echo the evolutionarily older mpture (shared witl1 manl­ mals), nan1ely the out-of-the-womb experience of birth which delivers tl1e body itself into hominized life. Subsequent manifestations of the virtual, such as that associated witl1 writing, engender other disembodied entities, other forms of remote agency, with their own forms of ghost presence.

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

ll6

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spirits controlling their voices to produce trance speaking (phonograph, telephone). By providing real-time-live-conmllmication with remote, invisible, and tmknown persons, telegraphy allowed spirits of the dead to come to life, crystallizing, in the presence of socio-religious yearnings and an ob­ session witl1 mortality, a population of ghosts-remote, invisible, disem­ bodied agencies who, replacing electric by psychic power, conunw1icated in real time by (appropriately enough) Morse-code like taps tluough a human medium. Electrical and animal magnetism have never been more intimately cotmected and mysteriously interchangeable. Of course tl1is contacting of the dead didn't occur in a vacmun. "America;' Erik Davis observes, "already had Shakers channeling Native American heirophants and Stateside mesmerists interrogating spirits du·ough their zonked-out patients?' (1998, 6o) But it's hard to imagine spiritualist beliefs about the lives of the dead capturing the minds of a wide swatl1 of nineteentl1- and early twentietl1-century artistic and scientific intelligentsia-from Thomas Edison to Ardmr Conan Doyle-without tl1e ever-present telegraphic model of table rapping and its Ouija board elaborations. There was also the phonograph's direct connection to the dead. Thus Edison, in1pressed by the "startling possibility'' of tl1e phonograph preserving tl1e voices of the deceased and convinced of the survival of tl1e human personality after deatl1, attempted until he himself died, to increase the sensitivity of his machine to a point where it could pick up directly, witl1out the need for a human meditml, the faint vocal vibrations that emanated from tl1e dead.s Edison's project lives on in a contemporary format as research into Elec­ tronic Voice Phenomena and Instrumental Transcommtmication.6 As tl1e telegraph was propagating its ghost conunw1icators, initiating what Erik Davis calls "tl1e electromagnetic unheimlich" (1998, 68), tl1e photographic plate was revealing its own contributions to the tmca my: luminous body images, ghostly apparitions, and ectoplasmic traces of previously invisible and unsuspected pa�·a 1onnal forces. And in the tele­ graph's wake, each new teclmology of communication-phonograph, radio, gra nophone, telephone, X rays, film, radar, TV, computer net­ works-added its own spectral effects to tl1e layers of tmca my visitations, hatmtings, cha melings of the dead, and associated ghostly activities.? But all these modern media technologies a11d their ghosts ride on tl1e back of the much older primal a11d enabling technological mediwn of writing. Telegraphing is alphabetic writing in live time (whose contempo-

GHOST EFFECTS

II7

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 II8

CHAPTER FIVE

as s i known) independently of each other through the same mediological move of exploiting and being captured by the ghostly possibilities inher­ ent in the writing of 'l.'

TheJewish
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Sinai at which his covenant with the Israelites, foundational to the ethno­ theological narrative of Judaism and crucial to its transcendental claims and lmique religious identity, takes place. It is told in the book of Exodus twice. First, the deity inscribes his commandments, "And he gave lmto Moses . . . two tables of stone, written with the finger of God" (Exodus 32:16), then a few verses later, he speaks them, "And the Lord said lmto Moses: write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with tl1ee and witl1 Israel?' (Exodus 34:27). Which is it? Did God speak the commandments as a living utterance into Moses' ear? Or did He deliver them as an already finished written text? Is the question meaningful? The Hebrew Bible's self-ascription as an historical narrative of real events suggests that it is. However, tl10ugh framed as historical truth, pre­ sented as a continuous itinerary of the Jewish people fmmded by Abraham and lmderstood to be authored by Moses, chosen prophet of God's word, the five books of tl1e Pentateuch are notl1ing of the sort. Two centuries of biblical hermeneutics and more recent epigraphical, historical, and archeo­ logical scholarship have shown tl1e Hebrew bible to be a skillfully wrought assemblage of diverse and at times contradictory texts by different hands, in different milieus, with different agendas, dating from the tenth to the sixtl1 centuries BCE, rewritten and altered by priest-scribes during and after the Babylonian sixth century exile.10 According to this there are two 'Gods; one from circa 900 BCE, tl1e other from the period of tl1e Torah's priestly redaction some four centuries later. The earlier one is tl1e God of tl1e Israelites, a tribal appropriation of El-the chief Mesopotamian god (hence Isra-el, El-ohim, Gabri-el, etc.) -who promises to smite their enemies and jealously demanded that no gods be worshipped before hin1. Evidently the earlier God is not yet the one and only Jahweh : monolatry has not yet become monotheism. It is tl1e later God, tl1e one who writes the covenant, who is]ahweh, the monobeing for whom other gods are not merely inferior-"Thou shalt have no otl1er gods before me"-but false, nonexistent. This appropriation of the tribal God by the monobeing was rhetorically consolidated by the priestly insertion into the earlier book of Isaiah of tl1e hysterically reiterated "I an1 the lord, there is no otl1er . . . there is no god but me?' (Isaiah 43-45). As a political-theological instrument, the Bible, in Regis Debray's phrase, "magnificently fulfilled its role . . . by fabricating an origin in order to invent a destination?' (2004, 30) \iVhat, one must ask, was tl1e role of writing in tl1is fabrication? How exactly, by what specifically tex­ 120

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tual means, was the unique God of'the people of the book' fashioned for them within its alphabetic interior? How did the fact of his writing and being written constituteJahweh as a monobeing for the book's readers? From its inception until the Middle Ages reading for the most part meant reading aloud, voicing the text, decoding the groups of alphabetic letters by supplying the vocal gestures-the prosody or tone-necessarily omitted from the speech rl1ey transcribed, gestures indicating motive and intentions, conveying desire, and engendering affect. To read aloud (or in silent simulation), is to attempt (or to imagine) a retrieval, a serviceable approximation of a tone by relating the text to a social or cultural context of its production, by invoking prior knowledge of rl1e source and origin of its contents, by placing the text in relation to other sin1ilar texts, by tracing its historical provenance and rl1e aud10r's attitude to rl1e utterance, and so on. But if the context is mythically unrecoverable, if there is no prior knowledge, if the inscription is w1ique and tmrelated to any other, if rl1e author is singular and has no reality outside the text, then any such re­ trieval, whether spoken aloud or sub-vocalized in so-called silent reading, will be in1possible. Defined entirely within toneless writing, the 'voice' of such an author is its inscription. What would be rl1e attributes of such an agency, one who/which 'speaks' in a voice absent of all tone? Human speech s i predicated on a circuit of desiring and reciprocating agencies. Utterance projects-is directed to and is impossible without-an already-there embodied addressee, a like-minded, turn-taking other who listens. Tone, rl1e presence of the body in speech and vehicle of its desire and affect, is the means by which awareness of the presence of this ad­ dressee is conveyed. But how could a voice neutral in tone-flat, expres­ sionless, lacking all rhyrl1m, having zero affect-acknowledge or exhibit awareness of the presence of the orl1er? \iVould it not, on the contrary, evince total indifference to the very existence of a listener? And would not such a neutral voice, one rl1at does not recognize my being let alone desire me, induce an emptiness, an experience of absolute-that is, inhuman­ terror. Vocal gesture, a principal means of hominization, the route along i also one of the earliest means, which infants become speaking humans, s through prosodic differentiation, by which humans tell each other apart. If prosody is absent from a voice, rl1en rl1e bearer of such a voice is tm­ knowable in an auditory sense as an individual, as a speaking being among orl1ers. "Voice:' Italo Calvino says, "means that rl1ere is a living person . who sends into rl1in air this voice different from all other voices?' GHOST EFFECTS

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(quoted in Cavarero 2005, 1 ) 11 Thus it is with the alphabetic God who exists and 'speaks' only as a voiceless writer. Short of invoking a plurality of indistinguishable and interchangeable speakers (like identical atoms or mathematical units), a toneless voice can only invoke a singularity, a one-and-only, self-identical entity comparable to nothing outside itself; a monobeing who is not merely one of a kind, but is its kind.l2 Thus, two ofJahweh's principal features, a presence too terrifying "to behold" and his unique status, "There is no other . . . no God but me:' are (quite separate from the theological reasons subsequently adduced) media effects, the inevitable characteristics of a god revealed and knowable only in and through a written alphabetic text. The question remains: how did God come to have a presence inside d1e Torah? The writing of 'I' would seem to point to an agency-an 'I'-er, d1e person or dung who or which writes 'l' and exists outside-before­ dle act of writing. But there is no necessity for such prior authorial exis­ tence: muike its spoken version a written 'l' can be fictional, a possibility i the case of d1e Torah. On d1e contrary, might it not be not refutable n the case that d1e being who says (i.e., writes) 'I' s i no more or less d1an an autochthon of the alphabetic text itself? The being first appears to Moses through a sign (a burning bush) and

hails him: "Moses, Moses:' to which Moses responds: "Here, I am!' 13 (3:4) He introduces himself d1rough an obscure, enigmatic formula: "And God said unto Moses I Ai\1 THAT I AM!' Tllis doubled self-assertion is followed by a strange, contrary to gran1mar, self-designation. Asked by Moses how he-God-should be nan1ed as d1e author(ity) of d1e message Moses is to deliver to the errant Israelites, the being answers: "Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Ai\1 hath sent you!' (3: 14) The cryptic "I am d1at I am" and d1e name "I am" are not peculiar to English. In French, it's "Je suis celui qui suis:' followed by "Je suis"; in Luther's Bible "lch werde sein, der Ich sein werde:' followed by "lch werd's sein!' All three are from the Greek "ego einli ho on:' one of whose alternative English translations is "I am the one who is!' The Greek in turn is a translation of d1e Hebrew-Aramaic "ehyeh al1er ehyeh" which, besides "I am d1at I an1:' has been rendered, consistent with the view that the verb 'to be' existed in pre-exilic Hebrew and Aramaic muy in the future tense, as "I will be that I will be" as well as "I am the existent one, the one who goes on being!' Writing, by rescuing speech from oblivion-the fate of d1e all that is ephemeral and traceless-allows utterance to live beyond itself, thus in­ 122

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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 GHOST EFFECTS

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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 124

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the West's theologico-philosophical tradition of the kind of sensitivity to the relation of alphabetic writing to depiction and more particularly to its interdiction that might have led to rl1e posing of such a question. Thus, consider a telling (but representative) twentieth-century ex­ ample of ilie tradition's insensitivity: Edmtmd Husserl's celebrated essay "The Origin of Geometry?' Geometry, as rl1e study of spatial extension, is an inherently 'pictorial' domain of mailiematics, in that-regardless of its various algebraic representations and
The Greele
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fails to record the different registers and multitude of meanings, attitudes, and affects discharged by these vocal gestmes. Recognition of the gap between speech and its n i scription and re­ actions to the falling short in affect and intended meanings rl1at issued from it were an important vector in rl1e development of Greek literacy and in particular the writing of '1.' One of the earliest arenas in which rl1is shortfall was confronted was public speaking, when a speech was delivered from a text by someone other rl1an its aurl1or. Thus, for example, Gorgian rhetoric, concerned to redress the loss of prosody and transfer rl1e force and affect of figmes of speech to the written text, was born, according to Roland Barthes, when funeral panegyrics, originally composed in verse and spoken by bards, were "entrusted to statesmen . . . and if not written (in the modern sense of the word), at least memorized, i.e., in a certain fashion set?'

(1988, 18) And likewise in rl1eatrical petformance since, if, as

Derrick de Kerckhove and orl1ers have argued, "Lyric poetry registered rl1e first tratm1as of selfhood" ( 1981, 36), then it was perhaps inevitable that wirl1 rl1e birth of a theatre of individual characters speaking lines written by another, the written but declain1ed 'l' would turn on rl1e relation be­ tween lyric texts and rl1eir voiced delivery. In turn, questions of rhetoric and the persuasional possibilities and falsifications opened up by rl1eatrical mimesis provided a written narrative form and critical-anti-sophistic­ framework for Plato's writing down of Socrates's dialogues. Before writing, in Homer's epics, figmes attributed rl1eir actions to messages and commands received from the gods outside rl1emselves. In rl1e Odyssey, Penelope set up her loom to weave a robe "because some god breathed into my lungs that I should?' (quoted in Olson 1994, 239) Socra­ tes, he who did not (and perhaps could not) write but could hear writing's imprint inside rl1e commanding voice of his godlike daemon, was the last of such oralists. By Plato's time the oral and aural gods as sources of advice and commands to a speaking 'I' were all but silent, rl1eir messages and outpomings, expressed in writing, had become 'd10ughts' of a written 'I' originating from an invisible, disembodied 'mind?lS Media create rl1eir most powerful effects when rl1ey efface evidence of rl1eir activity. Writing is no exception, so rl1at no explicit-written-ac­ count of rl1e circumstances of such a ghost-agency's scriptive birth s i to be expected, but semantic change over rl1e period of writing's introduc­ tion indicates rl1at it took place. In oral Homer the words psyche or nous or thumos, all subsequently translated as 'mind' or 'soul' or 'spirit; had no such mentalist, unembodied, or spiritualist meanings, but "depended to a

126

CHAI'TER FIVE

large extent;' according to Bmno Snell, on an "analogy with the physical organs:' and soma denoted not a body opposed to a 'mind' but a corpse. ( 1960, 14) By the classical periodpsyche was for Plato an individual's mind­ soul, and nous for Aristotle was the thinking principle. Only then do tl1ese terms "come to be united;' as David Olson puts it, "in a general concept of mind as a mental organ in tl1e head, and only then does mind come to be seen as contrastive to, and in control of, tl1e body?' (Olson 1994, 239) There are two aspects of 'mind' here: its abstract status within Greek discourse as an incorporeal being in opposition to tl1e concrete palpability of embodied flesh; and its putative agency-the mind as initiator, the gen­ erative source of ratiocination and 'author' of an individual's ideas and thoughts. On the former, it is tmdoubtedly the case, as Eric Havelock, Marshall McCluhan, and many since have argued, that writing per se, the very na­ ture and action of it as a meditml, puts into play and maintains a cognitive leap in abstraction within which the concept of mind might make its ap­ pearance as an abstract entity. By extracting from speech the ftmdamental idea of a meaningless, monadic phoneme and segmenting the evanescent flow of spoken utterance into fixed, repeatable, examinable, theorizable, and context-free letter-strings notating phonemes, the apparatus of alpha­ betic writing and reading in itself, through the very conditions it imposes for its use as a medium, created tl1e semiotic frame, psychological where­ witllal, and conceptual matrix of Greek abstract thought. In addition, an­ other source of abstract thought was the Greek invention of circulating money in the mid-sixtl1 century in Lydia. Thus classicist Richard Seaford argues tl1at the monetization of Greek society played a cmcial role in the formation of pre-Socratic philosophy from Heraclitus onward by offering a material model for the division between objects of the senses and an ab­ stract mental reality and hence the Heraclitean idea of an inm1aterial soul and ultimately mind. "Botl1 monetary value and the mind are abstractions, embodied and yet in a sense invisible. Indeed each is a single controlling invisible entity uniting the multiplicity of which in a sense it consists?' (Seaford 2004, 242) For money the tmity is the interchangeability of all that can be assigned a monetary value; for mind it s i "tl1e formation of the tmitary self out of internal fragmentation" put in place by Heraclitean morusm. But, despite their evident explanatory power, neither a generic, writing­ induced abstract milieu nor a monetary-inspired abstract monism says anytl1ing about agency,l? about tl1e mind as an initiator of tl1ought 'inGHOST EFFECTS

127

side' a self, about the relation of self to the 'I'; and a fortiori about the specific emmciation that designates it. Once again the question of medium obtrudes: Is the 'I' spoken or written? For it is on this difference that the question of how mind, tmderstood either as psyche-soul or as nous, the mental organ of thought, might have come to be in opposition to and in control of the soma. How does it come about that the mind can be "embodied and yet in a sense invisible"? The question of an invisible body (the obverse of a disembodied ghosdy apparition) is ultimately a neuro­ physiological one. It asks: What does d1e alphabet require of the 'body' of its user? Better, how does d1e alphabet construct the kind of body/brain it needs in order to ftmction? The answer, explicated earlier, lies in the fact that by eliminating prosody, severing the voice's gestures from d1e uttered 'words' whose letter-strings are their textual representations, the alphabet puts in place-enacts-a neurological hierarchy: the limbic midbrain, site of vocal affect intrinsic to the speaking 'I: is subject to a cortical override. Its vocality is suppressed by d1e apparatus responsible for processing scrip­ tive abstraction-words-shorn of all prosody. At d1e level of d1e text this hierarchy is naturalized as ontological fact. In order for the discourse of alphabetic writing to imagine, as it does, d1at its texts convey thoughts about matters entirely external to itself, d1at texts are 'about' ideas and concepts tmaffected or tminflected by their alphabetical transcription, to assume (even in principle) that texts could be independent of the effects of the alphabet as a medium, one must nec­ essarily invoke d1e existence of a source, an origin of d1e thoughts it 'ex­ presses: situated outside d1e domain of the letter, an originating agency which writes but is not itself written. To write 'I' and to conceive what is involved in the process of doing so on the analogy of the 'I' of speech, as was (and is) the case, thus necessitated d1e putting into reality of an '1'-er which replaces speech's location in the speaking body by an invisible, non­ somatic agency. Conflating the spoken and written 'I: being tmaware of any necessity to separate d1em, is precisely the means by which the scrip­ tive coming into being of such thoughts is identified as the work of an in­ visible agency-nous-a disembodied ghost operating within d1e body of every thinking human being, a ghost infamously reimagined by Descartes at d1e onset of modern d1ought as res cogitans, as the author of his written 'utterance' cogito. The Greeks created the Hellenic alphabet from the Phoenician syllabary by adding letters for vowels and some consonants. Their motives and their initial deployment of alphabetic writing are a matter of scholarly dispute. 128

CHAPTER FIVE

\iVas it (as for the Phoenicians) technical and instnunental: to facilitate exchange and commercial activity? Or was it literary and artistic: in order to write down lyric and epic poetry?20 Supporting the former, one scholar observes that tl1e majority of the earliest inscriptions, from tl1e first half of tl1e eightl1 century

BCE,

are

about property, a prerequisite of exchange. The inscriptions are scratched directly on objects and "indicate ownership or the agent of manufacture" of the object on which tl1ey occur, either in the form of'I or this belongs to

x: or 'X made me; as in "I am the cup of Nestor;' or in the form of a curse "I am tl1e lekytl1os ofTateie-may whoever steals me be blind?' (Ragousi 2001,

6) Other examples of early (circa 750 BCE) alphabetic inscriptions,

funereal and commemorative texts inscribed on objects, such as "I am tl1e kylix of Korakos" and "I am the conunemoration of Glaukos;' reveal a use of tl1e written 'I' by inanimate objects concerned more with the question of memory and emmciation tl1an ownership of property and trade. What is striking about tl1ese very early Greek uses of the alphabet is the unexpected din1ension of writing tl1ey indicate. They reveal that at its begimung the medium was invoking tl1e extra-human, extending com­ municational agency and according reflexivity beyond human subjects to record-better, to institute-the 'speech' and claims of inanimate ob­ jects. Thus writing is not only virtual speech in tl1e sense of 'speech at a dis­ tance; 'speech outside the milieu of its production; but also virtual in the sense of 'speech removed from persons; 'speech outside tl1e human.' Obviously one can ask of these inscriptions, who spoke them? Certainly not tl1e objects on whose surface tl1ey occur and whose presence they an­ noLmce. Evidently "the words are real, someone wrote them, but beyond that the question doesn't even make sense;'21 in that whoever scratched the letters is of minor significance and irrelevant to the status of the self­ emmciation tl1ey contain. In a study devoted to the phenomenon of the inscribed 'I; Jesper Svenbro observes about such writings upon objects: "These inscriptions are not transcriptions of sometl1ing that could have been said . . . and subsequently transcribed upon the object. . . . Quite to the contrary: these statements are in some sense characteristic of writing, which allows written objects to designate themselves by the first-person pronoun, even though tl1ey are objects and not living, thinking beings?' (quoted in Heller-Roazen 2005, r6o) Indeed, as we have seen,Jahweh, an extra-human author of 'I; a postulated '1'-er who writes on a scroll of ani­ mal skin and declares Himself to exist witl1in it, which thereby becomes a GHOST EFFECTS

129

fetish for His invisible presence, operates precisely along self-designating lines. In stmm1ary, as hypostatizations of the '!'-effects that writing permits, Mind and God have fnnctioned since the beginning of alphabetic inscrip­ tion as disembodied, in1mortal, and invisible ghosts haunting thought about thinking and the nature of being in the \Vest from the moment of their birrl1.

The Infinite Mathematical Agent But let me move to a third ghost, one rl1at mathematicians invoke, though rl1ey don't describe it so, when they write 1, 2,

3,

. . . and rl1ink infinity.

A salient feature of ghosts is rl1eir mode of embodiment and disem­ bodiment. Before all else, their aberrant or quasi-physicality nnderlies their strangeness, rl1e spookiness of their presence, and inflects all infer­ ences about them. The medieval (Christian) king had, according to Ernst Kantorowicz, two bodies: a private and human one-his mortal, material body; and a divine, everlasting one. The monarch's presence, royal status, and exercise of power derived from rl1e institutional, theological, and rhetorically as­ sembled co-presence of rl1ese bodies. The mathematician has three bodies, or three material arenas ofoperation-a mortal Person, a virtual agent, and a semiotic Subject-likewise co-assembled. The marl1ematical person sub­ jectively situated in language is the one who imagines, makes judgments, tells stories, and has intuitions, htmches, and motives; the mathematical

agent, imagined by the

Person, is a formal constmct which executes ideal

actions and lacks any capacity to attach meaning to the signs which control its narratives; and mediating between rl1em as their interface, is the mathe­ matical sttbject, who embodies the materiality of the symbolic apparatus that writes and is written by mathematical rl1ought. One can view mathematics as a thought-experiment process of Peircean 'reflective observation' according to which the person imagines the agent performing an activity and observes the result of the activity via the sym­ bolic mediation of the subject. The agent is a proxy or surrogate of the per­ son, so that for the observation to be a convincing thought experiment the agent must resemble rl1e person. But the resemblance is necessarily partial: the agent s i invoked to execute an action-such as unlimited counting­ that goes beyond the person's temporal and/or material constraints. The agent is dms a person wid10ut a body, or rather a person with a virtual 130

CHAI'TER FIVE

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 132

CHAI'TER FIVE

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.

Networked
133

across its botmdaries; increasingly heterotopic-an assemblage of differ­ ent processes with their own histories, dynamics, and itineraries wlder­ stood collectively, conceived as "a type of world full of an infinity of crea­ tures?' (Deleu ze

1993, 109)

It is also, as we've seen, more recordable and

writable through new forms of body graphism such as technologies of motion capture which allow the gestural mobility of the body to be medi­ ated-detached, rerouted, and realized anew-in a widening array of in­ strumental, aesrl1etic, and artistic contexts from telesurgery to virtual rlle­ atre. Not coincidentally, at rl1e same time as rl1e body's tactility and visible movements are becoming digitally mediated, our modes of interface with commwlicational networks are being articulated, experienced, and per­ formed in gestura-haptic terms of touch, movement, and immersion. The "donlinant sense in rl1is world of pervasive proxinlity is no longer vision . . . [but] touch?' (Federman 2005, 8) And, as if to emphasize rl1e alphabet's attachment to visible letters and its aversion to gestme, Derrick de Kerck­ hove observes that the Internet "is not really amenable to sight as much as to touch. Navigating the web is a tactile affair?' (2oo6,) It would be smprising, given it is a metonym of and production by rl1e body, for rl1ere not to emerge a corresponding self, rl1e creation of an 'I' in tlme with and experientially appropriate to such embodiment. A psyche rl1at s i at once porous, heterotopic, distributed and pluralized, permeated by emergent collectivities, crisscrossed by networks of voices, messages, images, and virtltal effects, and confronted by avatars and simu­ lacra of itself. In short, apara-human agency which experiences itself as an 'l' becoming 'beside itself? Such an 'I' could in no way be an alphabetic

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

134

CHAPTER FIVE

the recent development of quantum-post-digital-computation. A core quantum phenomenon is superposition: the cotmterintuitive and seem­ ingly paradoxical feature of any quantum system to be in a multiplicity of different virtual states at the same time, a multiplicity which collapses to produce a single, actual state as soon as rl1e system is observed and/or measured. Though in its infancy as a practical source of parallel computa­ tion (and hence as a source of psychic parallelism), its phenomenological relevance to ilie emerging self rl1at I've been sketching is suggestive: a quantum self would be one that exists as a co-occurrence of virtual states, an 'l' which becomes actual or 'realized' and fixed as an experienced and 'objective' whole precisely when it is observed, subjected to psychic mea­ surement or social control, or orl1erwise called upon to act, respond, be affected, and project agency. Such an 'l' would be a mass of tendencies, an assemblage in a perpetual state of becoming, railier than a monolithic being, an identity "in perpetual formation and reformation at the moment of use?'24 (de Kerckhove 2006) But, metaphors and heraldings of it aside, a stable self-enw1Ciation­ robust, iterable, recognizable-appropriate to the contemporary scene, an 'I' proper to rl1e technologies of rl1e virtual, has yet to emerge. For rl1at to happen rl1e ongoing recalibration of space-time and reconfigura­ tion of agency by contemporary media must cease expanding rl1eir reach, cease altering rl1e conditions of their own use, requirements which would seem to in1ply a plateau, a terminus or culminating point to rl1eir techno­ cultural transformation. One possibility for such a limit is an internal ex­ haustion, ilie experience of diminishing returns coupled to global satura­ tion. Something along iliese lines is suggested by Bernhard Steigler: "The development of teclmologies of the virtual is intensifying and accelerating a process of de-territorealisation, displacement, de-realization and dis­ incarnation" effects which constitute, he says, "the ultimate stage toward rl1e unification of the planet?'(2001,

137).

Only rlm1, perhaps, when rl1e

network-induced perturbations of the space-time of ilieir users have sta­ bilized, can a unified, planetwide subject position, an electronically me­ diated enw1ciator able to refer to itself via rl1e tmified planetary network, become available. And then, in addition to rl1is, only when its mediation has become invisible can a network-induced ghost or ghosts appear. zs There is however norlllng inm1ediate, automatic, or predetermined in such a process. Recall iliat for rl1e meditml of alphabetic writing (in boili its Jewish and Greek forms), it was only after a protracted period of its use to write and read 'I: along radically different itineraries, that the reconfigu-

GHOST EFFECTS 135

rations of agency set in motion by written speech had become implicit, only when writing had ceased to modify the milieu in which it operated and could conceal its mediation, did the ghosts we know as God and Mind achieve a stable presence. A meditm1-enabled ghost-construct will not be­ come 'real: will not in other words induce belief that it 'exists' and does so independently of human activity, tmtil tl1e medium's role in its birth has been effaced. To finish, let me descend from speculation about future ghost effects to material history and return to God, as it were, to the purely physical substrate necessary for the writing of and believing in the Judea-Christian God, to what Regis Debray, who embeds tl1e issue in a more wide-ranging mediological account, designates as "theo-graphy?'26 One can identify three remediations decisive in the written development of the Judea­ Christian Being's presence and his worshipP First, inauguration of God's written presence: the switch from the ctmeiform incising of syllables on small, hand-sized clay tablets to writ­ ing alphabetic letters on skin, which allowed more extensive texts to be produced, ultimately the many-skinned

Torah

and the grand, linear nar­

rative its scrolled form demanded. Second, inauguration of Christianity: the switch from an enforced linear reading to the random access facilitated by bound codices, allowing one hand to hold the codex and the other to point elsewhere (something not possible with a scroll) and enabling the isolation, quotation, and rhetorical juxtaposition of passages essential to Christianity's construction as a proselytizing religion of the reported, transportable word. Third, the inauguration of Protestantism: the shift from the handwritten, error-prone copied codices to the mass-produced printed inerrant book-the Vulgate Bible-and the universal, directly ac­ cessible privatization of the word it made possible. And now the emergence of a fourth remediation in the move from the paper materiality of printed books to electronic writing on the net­ worked screens of digital media. The obvious question: What might be the accompanying discontinuity, the fourth media-induced break in the tradition of Judea-Christian monotl1eism? A remediation pertinent not just to Judea-Christianity, but to the status ofany religion authorizing its transcendental status by means of a holy alphabetic text, which would of course include Islamic monotheism. If such is tl1e case, if changes in the material base, in the writing and reading wherewithal of worship and belief practices, are cognate with changes in tl1e tl1eological and phenomenological superstructure, tl1en

136

CHAI'TER FIVE

one can read the rise and frenzied appeal of Bible-obsessed evangelism and the fw1damentalist surge in Jewish and Koranic literalism as reactions­ fearful and defensive-to a perceived threat, nothing less than the end of the writing-based era which gave birth to and has thereafter circumscribed them: the threat of a God in danger, a God displaced, a God about to be obsolesced by the heathen and secular presences that electronic tech­ nologies seem to be conjuring into existence. To say this is not to suggest fw1damentalists and Biblical literalists w1derstand the threat as linked to the fate of alphabetic writing. Neither rl1ey nor monorl1eists at large con­ cern themselves with rl1e status of rl1e alphabet or could entertain, even in rl1eory, a mediological origin of their God-to do so would not only w1dermine rl1eir faith and nullify the Biblical and Koranic justification for rl1eir long-standing support of patriarchal repression, but would confront them with rl1e inherent violence, inescapable and endemic, s i suing from rl1e clain1 rl1at their God-Jewish, Catholic, Islamic, Protestant, Mor­ mon-is the one, true monobeing. For nonbelievers in rl1e extra-human origin of the monobeing who are prepared to accept that alphabetic writing equipped Western cultme with its absent God and Mind-soul, it becomes possible to go beyond rl1e l10ri­ zon of these two disembodied hosts. It becomes possible to in1agine the end of the entire tradition of such writing-induced metaphysics, to per­ ceive rl1e archaism of rl1ese specters, rl1eir falling into disuse; possible to recognize we are approaching a particular moment in the history of ·west­ ern writing-the beginning of the end of the 'era of alphabetic graphism! It becomes possible, in orl1er words, to think rl1at the very concept, dis­ comse, reality, affect, and persuasive hold of such entities will not smvive rl1e ongoing dethronement of alphabetic cultme; possible to recognize rl1at a dead end has been reached; possible to feel that rl1e tin1es are bid­ ding us to shuck off these ancient, no longer helpful ghosts to make way for new ones, to make room for other less in1prisoning, more open-ended, diverse, ecophilic, and planet-mindful ontological and erl1ical horizons of the htmlan. Possible . . . but, meanwhile, here in rl1e alphabetic, all-too-archaic present, science in rl1e form of physics drean1s of a 'God particle' and pur­ sues a monadic Grand Theory of Everything; a God-saturated America in rl1rall to the Bible remains convinced of its exceptional and special relation to the monobeing; and Muslims fight holy wars against infidels who dare insult God's one true prophet.

GHOST EFFECTS

137

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: I do not suggest that a disembodied thought acted to change the physical structure of our brains, as might a god in a mythical story, but I do suggest that the first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changed how natural selection processes have affected hominid brain evolution ever since. So in a very real sense I mean that the physical changes that make us htm1an are the incarnations, so to speak, of the process of using words. (1997, 322) 7 This position was originally championed by Lev Vygotsky in his work on mimesis in children in 1934 (see Vygotsky 1986). It has recently been reinvigo­ rated by the work of cognitive scientists such as Donald and McNeill.

Preface 1 In a "HyperMail" posting of 26 May 1999 in the

Math Anhives

(http://stul

site.utk.edujmath_archivesf.http/hypermail/historiajmay99/02IO.htinl), Wal­ ter Felscher of the University of Tuebingen believes that the earliest reference to Kronecker's dicttm1 was in Kronecker's necrologue by Heimich Weber in

Jahresberichte D.M. 2 (1893) 5-31. Intt·oduction 1 A sensory modality whose abstract status falsely s i olates it from the body re­ quiring that it be recom1ected, according to Gilles Deleu ze's reading of Berg­ son, with the body's movement and as a result supplemented by haptic and tactile fi.mctions (1988, 492-93). Compare Shaviro's (1993) implementation of these ideas to emphasize the visceral natltre of the cinematic linage, and Hansen's Bergson-inspired claim (2004) that it is only il1 the body's sense of movement, touch, and proprioception that 'seeing' can achieve its true corpo­ real dimension and so be tmderstood.

One. The Alphabetic Body 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

140

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

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. Two.

Gesture and Non-Alphabetic Writing

1 The model of mathematical learning and thinking indicated here is part of a larger and more diverse ecological framing of abstract thought. See Wise 2004

NOTES TO CHAPTER T\VO

141

for a series of contributions to what might be called the 'ecological turn' in cultural studies of science and technology. 2 See Rotman 2ooo, chap. 2, for a fuller accmmt and critique of this dismissal of diagrams as epiphenomenal or mere psychological props, supposedly elimi­ nable in principle from formally 'correct' and 'rigorous' mathematics. 3 In his introduction to Chatelet's essay, Kermeth Knoespel (2ooo) lists the major featmes Chatelet ascribes to diagrammatic operations as: Diagrams constitute tedmologies that mediate between other teclu1ologies of wtiting. Diagrams create space for mathematical intuition. Diagrams are not static but project virtuality onto the space they seek to represent. Diagrams represent a visual strategy for entailment. Diagrams are mediating vehicles, which means they cannot only be recovered but also rediscovered. See also Knoespel 2004 for an exploration of a possible 'diagranunatology; part of the "far more articulate anthropology of scientific discovery" opened up by Chatelet's essay. 4 Interestingly, if one examines mathematics from a semiotic perspective, then the experience of doing and writing mathematics as a symbolic activity can be encompassed within a thought-experiment model first sketched by C. S. Pierce. According to this model, assertions made by mathematicians are re­ vealed to be predictions, foretellings of the mathematician's future encom1ter with signs. A brief description of the model is given in chapter 3 · For a fuller accom1t, see Rotman

1993 and 2ooo, chap. r.

5 See \iVilson 2004, especially chap. s, for an extended e..xploration of what might constitute 'gut feelings' in terms of the cormection between neurology and af­ fect not subsumed by the central nervous system. For a comprehensive exami­ nation of the evolutionary backgrmmd of gut feelings and the non-conscious and/or pre-rational decision making allied to them within htm1an thought and action, see Gigerenzer 2007. For a popular accotmt of such decision making ar­ ticulated in terms of the particular method of'thin slicing; see Gladwel1 2oos. 6 Some examples of mousegrams can be fmmd at http://www.wideopenwest .com/

brian_rotman/mouse-display.html.

7 Or 'Performance animation' to use the term suggested in Furniss 2006 on the grounds that 'motion capture' places undue emphasis on the technology of the process as opposed to its fmKtioning as a medium. Other suggested names she cites for the medium (each with its own emphasis) are 'performance captme; 'virtual theater; 'digital puppetry; 'real-time animation; and, a favorite with designers apparently, 'devil's rotoscope.' In what follows I shall stick to 'motion capture.' 8 Two other forms of motion or gesture 'capture'-transductions from gestural to other media-deserve to be mentioned here. The musical instrument known as the Theremin, the first purely electronic instrument and the precursor of the Moog synthesizer, converts hand gestures in the neighborhood of its antermas into musical notes; and the design method of 'air sculpture' which uses three dimensional movements of the hands (monitored by can1eras) to create a vir­

142

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

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.

Three. Technologized Mathematics 1 For an extended treatment of this issue see Rotman 2ooo, chap. 2. 2 The difference here between testing and finding a solution or, what can be the same thing, recognizing and producing one, has correlates outside the field of mathematics and computing. In everyday life one often

can

recognize a phe­

nomenon when confronted with it-such as beauty or worth-without being able to explicitly characte1ize of define it. Similarly, St. Augustine knew what time was, he could recognize it when it was present to him but had no way of explaining it, no way of aniving at a characte1ization of i t tl1at would be com­ 1mmicable to others.

What then is time? Ifno one as/is of me, I /mow; ifI wish to

e;,v:plain to him who asks, I know not.

Four.

Par-allel Selves

1 For examples: Foucault's elaboration of self-scrutiny as an internalization of the confessional and more public technologies of panoptic surveillance; Mc­ Luhan's identification of tl1e psychic constrictions of print technology ( 1962); Jean-Louis Comolli's work on "machines of the visible" linking filmic ma­ teriality to audience perception (1980); Kittler's tracking of the triple usur­ pation of tl1e book as tl1e chief imagination machine of Western culture by the media of film, typewriter, and gramophone (1989 ); Havelock ( 1963), Ong (1982), Goody (1977), Harris (1995), Olson (1994), and Eisenstein (1983) on writing's and printing's restructuring of speech, cognition, and consciousness; Latour's tracing of nonhtm1an agency (1993); Lenoir and Sha's articulation of bio-medical subjectification (2002); Lyotard's self as "located at 'nodal points' of specific conmmnication circuits" (1984, 15); and many others. 2 This is particularly evident when the technology is seen primarily in semi­ otic terms as creating certain cognitive subjects-tl1ose who 'use' or 'practice' (i.e., master and are mastered by) pre-given codes. See Rotman 1987/1983 for an elaboration of tl1e phenomenon in the codes of a1ithmetic, painting, and finance in terms of tl1e repeated activities and routines pe1formed respectively by tl1e one-who-cmmts, the one-who-depicts, and tl1e one-who-transacts. 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.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

143

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.

144

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1 1 According to J'vlerlin Donald, the development of external memory and think­ ing devices central to the evolution of cognition achieves a radically new level in the case of humans: the sheer plasticity of our brains ensuring our immer­ sion in technology will constantly reconfigure our nemal connections, which means that, just as alphabetic writing reconfigures the brains of its users, so these visualization apparatuses, more than mere enabling devices, are rewiring the individual viewing brains and minds that-collectively-imagined them.

12 For example, work by the British artist and photographer Idris Kalm whose single-image composities of pre-digital photographs (by Karl Blossfeldt, the Bechers, Eduard Muybtidge), paintings (by Caravaggio), musical scores (by

Kamn, Freud's The Un­ canny, Sontag's On Photography, Bat"thes's Camera Lucida) offer a literal, direct, Bach, Mozart, Beethhoven), and entire books (the

and at times eetily arresting realization of a parallelist optic.

13 The personalities can be differently related to each otl1er: in some cases a domi­ nant and a variety of subsidiaries; in others, alternating dominants; most claim to be solo, but some are aware oftl1eir co-inhabitants; some are fully worked­ out personae, others personality fragments and genetic fLmctions, such

as

'the

Angry One; 'tl1e Innocent Child; etc.

14 For example, the expetience of Robert Oxnam as narrated in his memoir (2005)· 15 A response to tl1e disorder in accord with Hacking's iatrogenic approach claims that the sufferers have a condition tl1at is narrativized into existence by the present-day therapists who treat them (Acocella

1998).

16 Compare the claim by Pierre Levy (1997, 1) who urges that "toute Lme societe cosmopolite pense en nous" (the whole of a cosmopolitan society thinks witl1in us) and his Darwinian formulation of a psyche at once individual and collec­ tive: a "collective subject . . . multiple, heterogeneous, distributed, coopera­ tive/competitive and constantly engaged in self-organization or autopoeisis" ( 1998,

128).

17 See N. Katherine Hayles (1999) for a critique of the projection of the post­ hm11an based on tl1e idea of purely abstract, disincarnate information as pro­ viding the means for a longed-for escape from the situated and embodied ne­ cessities of human thought.

Five. Ghost Effects 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

(Phillips

mirror recognition of (in a yet to be determined sense) themselves.

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

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

145

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'

146

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

Eve?' Meanwhile, instead of the expected transmission what s i picked up are J'vlorse code transmissions between ships trying m1successfully to contact each other, resembling a "spritualistic seance . . . odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere?' Kipling's mirroring-the common presence of consumption, Keats's expetience as an apothecary, Fanny Brawne/Fanny Brand-sets up a psychic resonance, making a wireless-like transmission of the ghost of Keats possible, since "in conjm1ction with the mainstream of subconscious thought common to all mankind;' the assistant has temporatily experienced "an indu.ced

Keats?' See Lecerde (zoo2, 202-17) for an extended reading of"\Vireless." As indicated, Electronic Voice Phenomena, constitutes a contemporary recrude­ scence of radionic contact with the dead, enabled through the software analysis of background noise. 8 Among early writing, Henri-Jean J'vlartin observes, "'Ne can decipher funerary insctiptions everywhere [throughout J'vlesopotamia] in which the dead . . . ask that their names be pronom1ced or that an offering prayer containing their names be read aloud, almost as if that could make them live again." ( 1994, 102-3) As Friedtich Kittler remarks, "The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture?' (1999, 13) And there is the "Legend of frozen words;' already old in Roman times, as told by Plutarch: "In a certain city, words congealed with the cold the moment they were spoken, and later, as they thawed out, people heard them in the summer what they had said to one another in the winter." Douglas Kalm cites this tale within a discussion of"enduring speech cloaked in a phase of inaudibility" and treats it as a myth finally fulfilled by the ptinted book. But it is surely also an echo, a memory in fable form, of the first impact of writing's wondrous and magical power to make speech live again. (Kal111 1999, 204) 9 In A1oses and Monotheism Sigmm1d Freud constructs his narrative of the ori­ gin of monotheism and the c01mection between Akhenaten and a supposedly Egyptian J\•loses on historical data no longer accepted as correct. See DiCenso 1999, 79-80 for some expressions of this criticism. Contrariwise, Richard Gabriel (zooz) argues at length for a direct link between Akhenaten, Moses, and the Jewish monogod. 10 The contemporary formulation of this understanding of the Biblical text, known as the Documentist Hypothesis, holds that the Torah is composed of four different textual currents by four different authors or schools, with the most ancient dating from armmd 900 BCE. See Finkelstein and Silberman zoo1; Friedman 1987. 1 1 For Adriana Cavarero vocality and the tmiqueness of each hm11an voice is the fotmding principle for an entire anti-metaphysical project of ethical and politi­ cal ontology, starting from "The simple truth of the vocal, annmmced by voice without even the mediation of articulate speech, comnumicates the elementary givens of existence: tmiqueness, relationality, sexual difference, and age. . . ?' (zoos, 8)

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

147

12 This existential oneness is part of a cascade of co-occuning monoids: a single Aaronide priesthood victorious over the rival Mosaic faction; a single holy place, Jerusalem, instead of a plurality of sacrificial sites; a single Talmud told by a single author rather than a scattered archive of heterogeneous texts; a scroll whose beginning-to-end tmrolling delivers a linear 'history' of a single people. The result of this assemblage of singularities was a monomania of self­ hood and auto-individuation in which theJahweh and the Jewish people, tran­ scendentally exceptionalized through its everlasting covenants with Jahweh, simultaneously create each other. 13 For Louis Althusser this is a prime and extreme example of the mechanism of hailing or interpellation whereby ideological apparatuses produce a 'free' sub­ ject who is subjected, "stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission." "J\•Ioses, interpellated-called by his name, having recognized that it 'really' was he who was called by God, recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected to God." (1971, 179) The subjectivity here means that beside being created as a subject in God's image there is also the reverse pressure, recurrent in Judeo-Christian theology, to see God as needing mankind. 1 4 We

might note a secular parallel from mathematics to this existence by fiat.

One says in mathematics that an object-mm1ber, point, relation, etc. -with a given property 'exists' if its definition is consistent, if, in other words, it is not contradictory for it to have the property in question. 15 Thus the tale in the Zohar of God, who having created the letters and Jived in their company for two thousand years, asked each letter to plead its case to be the instrument for the creation of the world, a competition won by the letter

beit which (therefore) is the first letter of the first word of the Torah. 16 One should perhaps set Husserl's blindness to images and his silence about it in a certain context: in all likelihood he opposed diagrams as 'tmrigorous' and indeed when he wrote his essay, a group of French mathematicians operating tmder the name Nicholas Boubaki was implementing a project, conceptualized (and known to Husser!) to rewrite the whole of mathematics in the formal language of first-order set theory. The result was thousands of pages of'words' made from a mathematical alphabet of a dozen or so symbolic 'letters' and governed by a linear synta..x, without a single diagram; an entire corpus, alpha­ betizing in the name of a Platonist-inspired structuralist program of fmmda­ tional rigor, the richest, most elaborated trans-alphabetic-ideo- and diagram­ matic-discourse yet created. 17 Of course, if, as Denida insists, 'text' is enlarged to ecriture to include all forms of 'writing' which in turn is intetpreted to mean any instance of the abstract category of'spacing; then his granullatological tmiversalization of the text and monadic, theory-of-everything, master-term di.ffemnce behind it will obliter­ ate the distinction between visual spacing, here mathematical diagrams, and alphabetic spacing,here his own text which is a writing about Husserl's writing

148

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

about mathematics, and so be indifferent to what the sustained, intentional but tmexamined absence of the former might signify in the texts of Western philosophy. 18 The psychological status of Socrates's daemon, as well as the entire phenome­ non of "voice hearers" and its modern pathologization in terms of aural hallu­ cination and/or as a symptom of psychosis, is explored at length in Leudar and Thomas 2000. i a larger issue here of the link between money and writing relevant to 19 There s Seaford's locating of pre-Socratic metaphysics, particularly its monism, in the monetization of Greek society. It is impossible to imagine a system of circu­ lating currency and exchange in the absence of a developed practice of writ­ ing-if only to stamp gold coins and record transactions. J\•1oney, as Seaford notes, oliginated in Lydia in 540 BCE. But, as I indicate here, alphabetic writ­ ing is already present in Greece some two centuries earlier, both for purposes of memorialization and the marking of property in the form of inscriptions on objects. This being so there s i no reason to refuse the idea that it was the institution and circulation of \\•liting and not currency that laid the grmmd for abstract thought, metaphysical and otherwise, as well as being the source of the monadism Seaford identifies in Heraclitus's wlitings; a monadism which, as I indicated in the previous chapter, is deeply embedded within alphabetic writ­ ing. One can also mention a link between money and the first person pronotm. An example s i the written 'I' which appears in the sixteenth century on bank­ notes whose mmaturalized precursor is in a sense the self-emmciating objects mentioned here, a transactional emmciation which I have discussed in relation to mathematical and pictorial forms of deix is. (Rotman 1987/1993) 20 Powell (2002) advances an extreme version ofthe latter, arguing that not only was the Greek alphabet created for the specific purpose of writing song and oral poetry, specifically to insc1ibe Homer's epic, but the feat was moreover accomplished by a single, historically identifiable individual. 21 <(What's real Danny? Is reality 1V real? Are confessions you read on the internet real? The words are real, sumeoue wrote them, but beyond that the question doesn't even make sense. Who are you talking to on your cell phone? In the end you have no fucking idea. \Ne're living in a supernatural world Danny. 1Ne're surrmmded by ghosts." (Egan 2006, 130) 22 There are several ways of accounting for characte1istics that ghosts might have that are compressed here. There is the evolution-based one of Boyer in terms of a violation of'natural' categories; Talmer's approach from linguistics, where the ghost literalizes metaphors ofmovement used to desclibe spatial e..xtension; and Taylor's cognitive science approach to the concept 'ghost' in terms of the theory of Blending. 23 This fate was anticipated and aided by an independent tendency within quan­ tum

physics toward the discrete and the quantized, culminating in Edward

Fredkin's hypothesis of a 'finite nature' where "at some scale, space and time

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

149

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.

150

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

References

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Media. Zmnthor, Paul. 1990. Oral Poetry: An Int1·oduction. Trans. Kathryn Murphy-Judy. Mitmeapolis: University of Mim1esota Press.

REFERENCES

161

Index Abacus, 58, 59 Abbe de I'Eppe, 16

of, 29; elimination of gesture by, 3 ;

Absence of signs, xv

140n2, 149n2o; inability of, to wtite

Abstract expressionism, 44

speech, 26; Phoenicia11, 14; psycho­

Abuse, 100

neurological effects of, 54; seriality

Action painting, 44

of, 93-94, 134; tl1e visual a11d, 124­

Adam, 123

25; virtualization of speech a11d, so

ghosts of, u8-19; Greek, 14, 125,

Adaptation, xviii, xi.x, xxi

Alphabetic body, tl1e, 13-31

Adlnfinitmn

Alphabetic culture, 93

.

.

.

(Rotman), xiv, xvi

Affect, 4, 5, 16, 24, 26, 27, 94, 104, 108, 133; alphabetic discourse and, 2, 3;

Alphabetic fetishism, 123 Alphabetic wtiting, 54, 105, 108; con­

in htm1an mind, 1 ; inscribing of, 39;

sequences of, 2; corporeal axiom­

location of, in brain, 29; in poetry,

atic of, 15; as creation of persons,

27; in prose, 28; in reasoning, 23; in

94; dethroning of, by virtual, 112;

speech, xxxiii, 121; technology and,

disruption of tmity of voice by, 29;

6; in theatre, 4; the virtual and, u1;

future of, 39; monotl1eism and, u9;

vocalic, 31, 126

neurophysiology of, 54, 57, 82; ob­

Agamben, Giorgio, 15, 20, us

solescence of, x.xxiv, 2, 4, 40, 54, 57,

Agency, xiv, xv, xvi, xxvii, x. xxi, 91,

137; lack of prosody in, 128; prose

u8, 127, 128, 135; collective, 102; of Jahweh, u9; in mathematics, 6o-61, 64; multiple sites of, 9; para-htmlail a11d, 134; speech and, 121; super­ natural, u8; through tedmology, 6; xiii' 4·) virtual ' through writing' xx. ..

l!I, u2; the virtual a11d, u6

a!ld, 28 Amaral, JUlio Rocha do, and Jorge Martins de Oliviero, 31 America11 Sign La11guage (ASL), x.w, !6 Analog, huma11 consciousness and perception as, xi

Aleph, 124

Analog thought in mathematics, 61

Algoritlm1s, x.wii, 36, 46, 62, 63, 69;

Animal commtmication, xviii, xi.x

feasibility a11d, 70, 72; seriality of, 83 Allusions, 37 Alphabet: x.w, xx. xi, x.xxiii, 13, 15,

i Animal minds, xx

Appel, Kenneth, a11d Wolfgang Haken, 64

28, 40, 41, 42, 57, 58, 82, 94, u6,

Aristotle, x.xxi-xx xii, 127, 131

124, 128, 129, 137, 140!11; binary,

Aritlunetic, x.wi, 33, 58, 62, 75, 83,

2; Bulwer's 16; childhood learning

86-88

Art, I9; aura of, 96

Brain-machine interfaces, I3911l

Artaud, Antonin, 4, 39, 48, 49, 104;

Brain size, xx, x.xvi

The Theat1·e and Its Double, 39

Brooks, Rodney, x

Artificial intelligence, 9I

Brosses, Charles de, I6

Artificial speech synthesis, 23

Brushstrokes, 42-45

Asymptotic growth, 7I-75

Bulwer, John, I6, I7; Chirologia, I6,

Attitude of the speaker, xxxiii, 26, 27,

I40n4; Panthomyotomia, I6

I26

"Aura" (prose poem), xxxviii

Calculus, 65, 89; linearity of, I44n6

Australopithecine, xvii

Calvino, Italo, I2I

Auto-hapticity, 38

Cantor, Georg, x.uii, I32; infinite

Avatars, 8, 46, I34; sex between, 47

aritlunetic of, 87

Cassell, Justine T., et al., 48

Babel, I6

Cavarero, Adriana, I2I-22, I47n11

Bacon, Francis, I6

Cellular automata, 62, 89

Bailey, James, 90

Chadwick, Helen, x.wiii, 95

Baldwin, James Mark, xviii

Chafe, \!Vallace, 22

Baldwinian evolution, 115

Chandrasekaran, B., 89-90

Barglow, Raymond, v, 8I

Chaos theory, 62

Barthes, Roland, 5, 23, 27, 126, I451112

Chatelet, Gilles, 35-38, 45, I4In3

Baudlillard, Jean, 95

Children's thinking, 34

Becoming, iv, 103

Chinese orthography, 39

Becoming beside omselves, 103, I04,

Chinese writing, I3, 94, I24

105, I34

Christianity, I36

Benjamin, \!Valter, 95

Chmch, Alonzo, xv

Benveniste, Emile, 107-8

City-states, I3

Benvenistian linguistics, Io8

Clark, Andy, xiii, I, 8

Benzon, William, and Richard Mark

Classical music, 86-88

Friedhofi 66

Beside, iv, 103

Co-evolution, x, xvi, xvii; of mathe­ matics and machines, 58-59, 62

Blind people, 2I

Cognitive etlu10graphy, 9I

Body, the, 4I, 53; alphabetic wlit­

Cognitive science, xvi

ing and, 4I; as exogenous, I33; as

Cognitivism, 9I

heterotopic, I34; as increasingly

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, I07

readable, I34; obsolescence of, 46;

Conmmndments, I2o, I24

as transparent, I33

Conm1oli, Jean-Louis, 96, I43111

Body practices, Io8; in religion, I50n27

Complexity theory, 7I, 73

Boolean logic, 69

Computability, xv

Borges, Jorge Luis, 94

Computational sciences, xiv, xvi

BOLmds, 70, 7I, 72, 73

Computer mouse, 44, 98, 110

'

Bourbaki, Nicolas, 66

Condillac, Etienne Bormot de, I6

Boyer, Pascal, I3I

Connes, Alain, 38

164

INDEX

Consciousness: postmodern, wo; of the self in Deacon, x.xii; through writing, 94

the subject in, 139n2; on writing as graphism, x..xiv Descartes, Rene, 128

Co-presence, 83, 98, 99, 104

Deus ex machina, 116-19

Corazza Eros' 115 ' Corporeal writing, x.x iv

Dewey classification, 94 Diagrams, 33-40, 58, 124, 125, 1411114,

Cortical function, 90, 128

142n2, 143n3, 148-491117; absence

Cortical migins, 24-25

from "The Oligin of Geometry;'

Cotmting, 87, 102, 131; as creation,

125, 1481116; as allusions, 37; as epi­

imagined, 76; with whole numbers,

phenomenal' 66' as 'frozen gestures' ' 37, 1o8; as more than representa­

85

tions, 37; in painting, 45; symbols

76; metaphysics and, xxxii; real vs.

Crary, Jonathan, 97 Cryptography, 62, 69, 72, 73, 74;

·

m, 42 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, 52, 109, 114, 115, u6, uS, 139n6; on

Digitally produced images, 3, 40, 93·

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 Dehaene, Stanislaus, xxiii-xxiv, 52, 102 de Kerckhove, Derrick, 8, 126, 134, 135 Deleuze, Gilles, 53, 134, 140111, 145­

(Rashevskii), 75 Donald, J'v!erlin, x..xvi, 51, 84, 103, 115, 139n7, 145n11, 146n3. See also Dea­ con, Terence, and Merlin Donald Doyle, Arthur Conan, 117

ze, Gilles, and 46n2. See also Deleu Felix Guattari

Eames, Lesley, and David A. Oakley,

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, iv, . . 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;

101

Egan, Greg, 150n24

INDEX

165

Egan, }e1mifer, 107, 149n21

Finite combinatorics, 62

xi; fluidity Ego, 1o8; extinction of, xx

"Finite Nature" hypothesis, 65

of, xxviii, 95

Fischer, Steven, 28

Egyptians, 119

Fluid dynat11ics, 89

Eisenstein, Sergei, x.wi, 83

Force capture, 47

El, 120, 124

Foucault, Michel, xiv, 143111

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP ),

Four-color problem, 63-64

117, 146n6, 146-47n7

Elkins, James, 43-44, 95

xii, 130,131 Ellipses (' . . '. ),xx.

Emblem gestures, 17-20, 48, 141119; as

distinct from 'speech acts; 18

Embodied mind, the, xvi

Fractal geometry, 62

Fredkin, Edward, xiii, 65; "Finite Na­

ture" hypothesis of, 65, 149-50n23

Frege, Gottlob, xv

Friedhoff, Richard Mark, and William Benwn,66

Embodied reason, xv

Friend) The (Coleridge), 107

Embodiment: disembodiment of

Frontal-occipital lobes, 30; speech

alphabet and, 3; in mathematics, 38;

in a technoscientific world, xii, 103

Emergence, xvi

atld, 31

Ftmeral patlegyrics, 126

Furniss, Mauren, so

Emotional conditioning, 30

Empathy, 15

Gabriel, Richard, 119, 147n9

Enactment vs. representation, 82

Gag, 20

Ethology, x.xv, 145111; cognitive, 88

Galileo, 65, 132

Exodus, 120

Geometrization of space, 36

Exponential fi.mctions, 70, 71, 72, 73

Geometry, 34, 125; as embodied, 34

External world, xx i

Gesticulation, 20-22, 48

Evolution, 24, xix, x.x; of the brain,

Gestural comnllmication in mind­

139n6; co-evolution ofhtmlatls

with machines and, x, xiii, xvii; of

body teclmologies, 4

Gesture, x.xiii, x.xiv, 3, 57, 108, 109,

cognition, 103; cultural, xvii, x.wi;

11o; in Artaud's theatre of cruelty,

Darwinian selection at1d, xviii; of

49; becoming htm1an and, 15; with

lat1guage, xvii, xviii

computer mouse, 44; diagratns

Evolutionary ethology, xiii

at1d, 35, 36; as event, 19; in history,

Eye movements, 33, 34

16; non-alphabetic wtiting at1d, 34;

opposition of, to signs, 51; painting

Feasibility in computation, 69-74

at1d, 43; performance art and, 44;

Federmatl, J\•1ark, 134

political ontology and, 15; prosody

Ferrara, FratKesca, and Ricardo Nemi­

of, 51; seeming atavism of, 15-16;

rovsky, 33, 34; New Aventtesfor the

separation of, from signification in

Microanalysis ofJWathematics Leam­

mathematics, 36; speech as symp­

mg, 33

tom of, xx iv; temporal cmmection

Feynman, Richard P., 65

of, to speech, 22, 24; tie of, to

Film, xi, xiii, x.wi, 2, 4, 6, 42, 46, 53,

speech atld writing, 140n3; types of,

83, 93, 97

166

INDEX

21; utterance at1d, xxiv, 3, 20, 21

Gesttm and Speech (Leroi-Gourhan), 39

Gi.idel, Kurt, xv 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 bilities of, 54

135, 140n2, 149n20 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, 131; medium-specificity of, u3; network-induced, 135; postmodern­

Appel, 64 Halle, Morris, and Roman Jakobson, 86

ness of, u3; types of, 149n22; tlle

Hamlet, 23, !13

virtual and, 150n25

Hand, 39

GIS (Graphic Information System), 98 GIS map, x.xvii, x.xviii; Google Eartll,

Handshake, 51 Handwriting, 25

xxviii; parallel and serial seeing and,

Hansen, Mark, xvii, 6

XXV!ll

Hanson, Andrew ]., 66

Globalization as planetary network, 135

GNU, 123

Haptic feedback, xvi; virtual auto­ hapticity and, xxiv 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

How We Became Posthmnan (Hayles), xi HTML,

40

28,94 lllocution, 26 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

Gemnetry and, 125; lack of diagrams in, 125; The OriginofGeometl"j, 125 Hutchins, Edwin, 90

22 Imaginary money, xv, xx.. xi Imaging, 93-99 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

Islam, !19, 124, 136, 137; gestures in,

processing, xx i; simultaneity and

'

..

'

)

'

·

succession in, 86

140-4!!16 Israelites, 13-14, !19, 122

Language and evolution, xviii, xix LeDom:, Joseph, 29, 30

]ahweh, !!8; agency of, !!9; as I AM

THAT I AM, 122,

123; invisibility

Leibniz, Gottfiied, 63, 94 Leroi-Gomhan, Andre, x. xxiv, 4, 19,

of, 124; as monobeing, !19, 147n9,

39, 40, 41, 54; Gesture and Speech,

148n12; self-birth of, within alpha­

39

betic writing, 123; as terrifying and tmique, 122; in T�rrah, !!9, 120, 123,

Lettered psyche, declining hegemony of, 133

124, 136, 147; writtenness of, 122,

Lettered self xxvi x.uiv 1-9 92

129, 136. See also God

Limbic system, 24, 29; function of, 30

Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle, 86

'

.

'

'

'

Lingua, 109 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 Kendon, Adam, 18

London, Barbara, 99 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 Kmzweil, Ray, ix, x

sions of, 82 J'vlachinic operations, xiii J'vlaffesoli, Michel, 15

Laban notation, 42 Lakoff, George, and Rafael N(mez., 33

J'vlaps and mapmaking, xxvii, xxviii, 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 Language, xiii, xiv, xxxiii, 6, 8, 17, 18,

Rocha do Amaral, 31 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)

37; of media, xiii, xxv, 6; of paint,

43; of technology 5, 103

J'vlathematical agent, xv, x. xx i, 110,

J'vlerleau-Ponty, J'vlaurice, 34; triangle

of, 34-35

J'vletaconuntmication, 20

J'vletaphors, 42; in mathematics, 37-38

xxi,

J'vletaphysics, \Nestern, xv, xxiv, x.

130-33

Mathematical infinite, subjectivities

7, 92, 94, 137; alphabetic \\'titing

and, 2, 11o; in Den·ida, 139n2; ofthe

and, xx xi

Mathematician, 59, 6o, 61, 63, 64, 67,

infinite, xxx ii; metaphysical thought

in mathematics and, 38; ontotheo­

130

Mathematics: classical, 74, 75, 77;

computers and, 57-77; embodi­

logical, 9; Platonic, 38; I in, 99; the

voice and, 147n11

ment of, 33, 36-38; empi1ical (vs.

J'vletonymy and synecdoche, 42

classical), 68, 74; images in, xvi; as

J'vlidbrain, x.w, 24, 30, 31, 128

interplay of idea, symbol, and pro­

J'vlignone, Christo£, 39; "The Presti­

cedure, 59-6o; as near-experimental

' digitator: A Manual; 39

discipline' xvi' "new science" of' 68)·

J'vlimesis, 27, 28, 43

Person, Subject, and Agent in, 6o­

J'vlimicry, through media, 43

61, 64, 67, 76, 130; proofs in, 60-63;

J'vlind, 7, 26, 31, 110, 112, 118, 127, 130,

·

.

pure, 61; tigor of, 77; semiotics and,

xiv; simulation and, 57-58; teclmol­

136. See also Nous; Psyche J'vlind-body dualism: in preference for

ogization of, 58-62. See also Mathe­

writing over speech, 30-31; separa­

matician

tion of midbrain and neocortex and,

McClure, W., 63

xxv; sign language and, 17

McLuhan, Marshall, 54, 127, 143111

J'vlinsky, Marvin, 101

McNeill, David, 18, 22, 139n7, 141118

J'vlitchell, Vl'illiam, 83, 96; on "onto­

Meaning, sameness of, 19

Measurement problem in quannm1

physics, 86

Mechanical reproduction, 96

Media, ix, xii, xiii, xvii, xi..x, x.xiii, 5,

logical aneurism;' 96

J'vlonadology, 94

J'vlonetization of Greek society, 127,

1491119

Monotheisms, 119; consequences of

7, 20, 41, 57, 102, 104, 107, 109, 112,

digital media for, 136; monolatry

134-36, 143111, 144n8; captttre, 42;

vs., 12o; text-based, 40; \Nestern, 54

diminishing returns of, 135; ecolo­

Moravec, Hans, i..x

gies of, 8, 81; ghosts of, 113, 116,

Morgan, Steve, 72

117; memory, x.wi; network(ed),

Motphology, 114

xx xiii, 2, 5, 133; notational, 42; phi­

Morse, Samuel F. B., 116

losophers of, xiv, 93; regimes of,

Moses, 118-19, 122, 124, 147n9; inter­

xvi, xxvi; thought and, xxv; \\'Iitten,

pellation and, 1481113

J'vlotion captltre technology, 4, 43, 45,

53

Memory, 52, 84, 100, 133; conceptttal,

110, 134; commm1icative potentials

85; death and, 145n5; episodic vs.

of, 47; decontextttalization and, 46,

procedm·al, 85; evolution of cogni­

52; digital nature of, 45; muteness

tion and, 145n11; viewing and, 98

and, 49; other names for, 142n7;

170

INDEX

other teclmologies for, 142-43n8;

parallels of, to other forms of digi­

Nous, x.xxii, 7, 118, 126, 127, 128, 132; as

agent of endless reiteration, 132

tal recording, 45; potential of, for

Nm11ber sense, 52

movement, 45; sensors in, 45

Nt'u'iez, Rafael, 33; George Lakoff and,

J'vlousegrams, 142n6

33

J'vlultiple Personality Disorder, 100,

1451113

Multiplicative constants, 72

Oakley, David A., and Lesley Eames, 101

Multi -tasking, xxvii, 92

Olson, David, 26, 126, 127, 143111

Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts, 96

Ong, Vl'alter, 5, 94

Musical notation, 42

Optimization, 69

Muteness, potential of, 48, 49

Oralism, 30

My Moth{;P· Uifls a Computer (Hayles),

Oral-vocal apparatus, 40

X I

Orations, 3, 26, 27; body in, 27

Ordinals, 87; relation of, to cardinals,

Naming, 123

Nanotechnology, ix-x, xiii

87-88, 144ns Organs, xiii, x.xiii, 47, 127; artificial, x;

Narratives, xi, xii

of speech, xxv, 3, 41, 47, 48, so; of

Navier-Stokes equation, 89

touch, 47

'Natural mm1bers; x.xx ii, 131

Ouija board, 117

Natural selection, xviii

Ourselves, v, 103

Nemirovsky, Ricardo, and Francesca

Ferrara, 33, 34; New Avenuesfor the

Microanalysis oflviathematics Leam­

mg, 33

Painting, 43; action and, 44; corporeal

axiomatic of, 44; gestme in, 43

Papadimitrou, Christos H., 70

Neocortex, x.w, 29, 31; fi.mction of, 30

Papyri, 118

Neo-primitiveness, 49

Para-human, 104, 134; as alternative to

Networks, x, xx, x.xii, xxvii, 8, 57, 69,

81, 83, 90, 91, 92, 109; the body and,

post-hLm1an, 103; trepidation over,

104

134; the brain and, 52; the ghostly

Paralinguistic features of speech, 23

and, 117, 135; media, xx.xiii, 2, 5, 133;

Parallel and serial, xxvi-x.wiii, 3; aritl1­

of networks, 89; self as, 104; the

metic and, 87; in conummication

virtual and, 111; writing and, 110

modes, 84; dependence and inde­

Neurology, 102

pendence and, 85; as duo, 83-88;

Neuroscience, xiii

and how we see ourselves, 88; in in­

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101, 132, 1411111

finite sets, 87; music and, 86-87; as

Non-alphabetic writing, 33-54

organizing principle, 88; reciprocity

Nonbelievers, 13 7

in status and action and, 84; seeing

Non-linear dynamics, 62

and, 98; the virtual and, 84

Non-symbolic media, 42

Notation, 41-45; for electronic texts,

57

Non·e-Dame de Paris (Hugo), 93

Parallel computing, xvi, x.wi, xxvii,

xxix, 3, 57, 88-92, 104, 135; collec­

tive phenomena and, 90; obvious­

ness of, 89; setial computing vs., 83

INDEX

171

Parallelism, preexisting, 92

Proofs, 6o-61, 62, 63; probabilistic, 64

Parallel selves, 81-105

Proptioception, 38, 115, 140111

Para-selves, x..wiii xxix' )-' 9' 92' 104'

Prose, 3, 27; devices for cultivation of

..

'

133; incompatibility of, with meta­

physics, 9

Parole, 113, 114

affect in, 28 Proselytizing, 136-137 Prosody, xxxiii, 3, 20, 22-25, 40, 48,

Pascal, Blaise, 63

109, uo, 121, 125, 126, 128, 1411110;

Peirce, Charles Sanders, xiv, xv, xx, 51,

elimination of, in alphabet, 3, 125,

114, 130, 142n4

128; as gesture of the voice, 121; in

P=NP, 63, 68-75

gestures, 51; hm11an recognition

Petformance art, 44; body in, 44

and, 121; as index of importance, 24;

Perspective, 97; drawing and perspec­

omission of, 26

tival art and, xv; the self and, xxviii,

Protestantism, 136

97

Pseudo-masturbation, 46

Phenomenology, 34, 108, 109, 136

Psyche, xxxiii, 103, u8, 126, 127, 134;

Phonetics, xxv, 23, 125

alphabetized, xxviii; as Greek'r;

Photography, 2, 42, 57, 95, 144n9; ghosts and, 117

125-30; collectivist, 102; coming apart of, 133; co-presence and, 104;

Physics, 65, 68, 76

housing of, in soma, 7; intimacy

Pictograms, 40

of, with techne, 5; painting and, 43;

Plato, 126

technology and, 81-83

Plural selves, IOO-IOI, 102 Poetic diction, 3, 27

Psychic restructming toward the parallel, 83

Pollock, Jackson, 44, 49

Psychology, xiii, 108

Polynomials, 70; as relative to expo­

Psychophysiology of use of tech­

nentials, 71; polynomial time and,

nology, 6

Pttissance, 15

71 Pop-up toaster, 53 Porush, David, 14

Punctuation, 28; for electronic texts, 28

Post-htm1an, x, xxv; concern over, ix; future, 103; singulatity of, xi Post-literacy, 93

Post-literate self, 94-95 Post-photographic subjects, 96-97

Quantum physics, 85-86, 111, 149­ son23

Quantum (post-digital) computation, 135

Post-photography, 96

Potentia, 86

Radio, 21

Potts, John, and Andrew J'vlurphie, 96

Ragousi, Eirene, 129

Powell, Ba rry, 25, 109, 140n2, 149n2o

Random variable, 85

Presentational cotmmmication, 84

Rashevskii, Petr K., 75

Ptimate calls, 24, 31

Reading, xxvi, x..wiii, 3, 26; aloud, 121;

Ptinting, 26

history of, 27; practices of, 14

Probability, 85

Real, 41-42

Pronotms, 107-8

'Reflective observation; 130

172

INDEX

Reinhold, Arnold, 72, 73, 74

Representation, 2, s, 6, 9, 25, 34, 35,

4 1, 43, 46, 49, 51, 64; absence of, in

motion capture, 46; consciousness

as,

xxi; enactment vs., 82; in figura­

tive art, 44; gesture-word nexus and,

22; gesturo-haptic's replacement of,

Self, 28; changing conceptions of, 81; quantum, 135, 150n24; symbolic representation of, u6; temporality of, 94

Self-effects, 102

Self-emmciation, 108, 133, 135; as

medium-specific, xxx iii

49; mathematical, xvi; in painting,

Self-reference, 107

43; of representations, us; sym­

Semiosis: human, 85; notation in, 42;

bolic, xxi, xx ii, 46, u6; 'truth' and,

97; writing as, 41

Responsibility, 19

visual, 124

Setiality, xxvi-xxviii, 99; of letters, 3,

94, 134

Revenants, 113

Shaviro, Steven, 2, 6, 100, 140n1

IUuzome, 104

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 17

IU1ythm, 3, 23, 24, 25, 27, 108, 125

Sign language, 3, 48; gesturology and,

Richards, Robert, xviii

so; motion capture and, 47; reemer­

Ritual, 16, 19

gence of, 17; suppression of 16

Robo Sapiens, xii

Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of

Zero (Rotman), xiv, xv, xvi, xxxi

Robots, x, 46, 47, 89, 102

Silence, 48, so, 125

Roco, Mihail, x

Silencing, 19

Rotman, Btian, xiv, xxxvii, 64, 75, 131,

Simulation, 57-58; scientific method

Robbins conjecture, 63

141!114, 142n2, 142n4, 143111, 143n2,

144ns, 144n7, 1491119, 149-son23,

I)On26

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, xviii

and, 64-68

Singularity: human, xiii, xvii, xx; post-

human, xi; tonelessness and, 122

Sipser, Michael, 68

Smallness of a problem, 73, 74

Saarinen, Esa, and Mark Taylor, 93

Saccade gestures, 34

Sanders, Barry, and I van Illich, 2, 14,

28,94

Smarr, Larry L., and William J. Kauf­ malm III, 65

Socrates, 126, 1491118

Soloman, Ron, 63

Sass, Louis, 100

Snell, Bnmo, 126-27

Saussure, Ferdinand de, xv, 51, 113, 114

Spacing, 42, 148-491117

Sazonov, Vladimir, 75

Speech, 52, 109, 112, 113, 122; as con­

Scale: in computation, 73, 74; in see­ mg, 75

sequence of physical processes, 23; as

consequence of visual processes,

Schizophrenia, 100

xxiv; ghostliness of, 109; uncarmi­

Schlovsky, Victor, 28

ness of, 116, uS; as wave, 25

Schwartz, Hillel, 102

Speech acts, 18, 19, 20, 27

Scientific method, 65

Speech-act theory, 26

Seaford, Richard, 127, 1491119

Speech areas, 30

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, iv

Spinoza, Baruch, 53

Seeing, 97-98

Spiritualism, u6

INDEX

173

Starlings, 89

Symbolic relationships, xix, ni; be­

Steigler, Bernhard, 135 Stellarc, 46; transposed corporeality of, 46

tween tokens ni )

Symbols, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, x_xii, 51, 59, 114, 116, I32, 139n5; in mathemat­

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 81, 101

Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr·. Hyde) The (Stevenson), 81 Stroking, 45, 46, 47 Subject, xxvi, xiii, xiv, 5, 83, too-toz,

ics, 6o, 124; musical, 42; symbol­ processing brain, x_wii, 9I; visual, I9 Syntax, 18, z8, 41, 42, 63, 75, 94, 95, 114, 140n5 Synthetic assemblage, 52, 102

104, 139n2; Althusser and, 1481113; analog and digital, xii; bio-technic, 53, computing, 88-92, ghostly, xvi,

Talmud, 13; interpretation of, 26; 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, )-o ' viewing' xxvii·) virtual' 111

Technics, xiii

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 Syllables, 86; as governed by neocor­ tex, 29 Symbolic communication: in Deacon, 24; in Deacon atld Donald, xvii, xviii; as extrabiological, x_xiii Symbolic reference, xix, 114, 115,

writing and, 117 Telephone, 6, 21, 117 Tele-surgery, 47 Television, 2, 93, 95, 117; picture in picture, 98 Texts, x_wi, 3, 4, 6, 26; affect in 27; electronic, 28; outside of, 124; post­

139n6; as efficient, xx; as interpreter­

humatl machine md, xii; prosody

independent' x_xii·) as shared' x_xii ·' as 4

of, 11o; pmely textual entities and,

specifically human, n; subject for­

29

mation and, n; as virtual, n, x_xi

174

INDEX

Textual brains, 29-31

Textualization of thought, 2

Theatre, 126; ephemerality of, 43

Theatre of cruelty, 49

Video and computer games, xxvii, 46,

92

Virtual, the, uo-12; ancientness of,

"Theo-graphy;' 136

112; ghosts and, 15onzs; meaning of

'They; us; they/we and, 134

term, 111, 145-46n2

Thinking, relation of, to visuo-kinetic

m1ages, 22

Virtuality in media, 7

Virtual reality, xvi

Thought, 26

Virtual speech, 129

Thmnos, 126

Virtual technologies and the self,

Tone, 2, zo, 24, 25, 121; absence of,

102-3

in alphabet, xxxiii, 125; governance

Virtual theatre, 4, 46

of, by midbrain or limbic system,

Virtual user, xiii, 6

29; individuality and, xxxiv; loss

Virtual voice and speech, 31

of, in writing, 25-27; ptmctuation

Visual, the, and the alphabet, 124-25

in prose and, 28; recapture of, in

Visualization: changes in subjectivity

poetry 27

Torah, 119, 123, 136, 1471110; 'I' in, 122;

multiplicity of Gods in, 120, 124;

as

political-theological instrument,

12o; role of writing in, 120-21

Touch, 8, 39, 134

"Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics" (Rotman), xv, xvi

and, 53; cognition and, xviii, 145nu;

phui-dimensional, 3, 57; in simu­

lation, 65-66; technologies of, xvi,

xviii, 53, 58, 67

Voice, 17, 108, 121; anti-metaphysics

and, 147nu; authotial, 121

Voice-synthesizing machines, 28, 40

Vowels, 14, 52

Trace, 42, 50

Transcendence, 41

Walking, 23

Transduction, 27, 28

\iVeb of words and objects, 114-116

Traveling Salesman Problem, 68-71

1Neyl, Hermarm, xx.xi; on ego extinc­

Truth, 9, 133

tion in mathematics, xx xi

Tsu, Lao, xxi

Wheeler, ]. H., 65

Turing, Alan, xv, xvi, 90

Vl'hole mm1bers, 85, 87

Turing machine, 59; as abstract ideal,

Willis, Anne-Marie, 96

76, 90; sequential nature of, 90

Vl'ilson, Elizabeth, 1411113, 142n5

Turner, Mark, 113

\i\To)fram, Steven, xiii, 68

Typewtiting, 26, u6, 1411111

\i\Tomen, 116

Typographic man, 54

Word and image in dialectic, 83-84

'Word magic; 18

Uncatminess of commtmicational

media, 7

Unconsciousness of a technological

meditm1, 82

\i\Triting, 50-51, 109, 112, 117, 127-30,

136, 137, 140n3, 142-43n8, i46­ 47n7; the Bible and, 12o; brain

ftmctions and, 30; consciousness

and, 94; hierarchy of, over speech,

Vanishing point, xv, x.xxi

30; linear protocols of, 92; as "mind

Video, xxvii, 42, 45, 93

upgrade;' t; privileging of mind

INDEX 175

Writing (amtintted)

over body in, 31; as re-mediation, 6;

as

spacing, 42; supernatural agency

and, 14; vi rtual entities and, 6

Writing speech, 25-28; elimination of

embodied gestures in, 25-27; rein­

vigorating speech and, 147n8; res­

cuing speech and, 122-23, temporal

dimension of, 25, 118

176

INDEX

Zazen, 103

Zero, xiv, xxxi, xx.xii; as absence and

origin, xxxi; consequences of, xiv-

XV

os and 1s sequences, 67

Zmnthor, Paul, 27, 140n3

Brian Rotman is a professor of comparative smdies i the author of several at Ohio State University. He s

books, including lvlathematics as Sign: Writill!J>

Imagining, Counti1l!J and Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics ofZero. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rotman, B. (Brian) Becoming beside ourselves : the alphabet, ghosts, i g I Brian Rotman ; and distributed human ben

foreword by Timothy Lenoir. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN·J3: 978-o-8223-+183-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN·J3: 978-0-8223-4200-7 (pbk. : aJk. paper) 1. Science-Philosophy. I. Title. QI75.R5655 2008 501-dc22

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