Becoming Beside Ourselves

Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

Brian Rotman is Distinguished Humanities Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting; Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In; and Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero. Rotman has a doctorate in mathematics. Timothy Lenoir is the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair of New Technologies and Society at Duke University.