10/23: Alphabetic Bodies and Distributed Selves
October 16, 2007
- Rotman: Becoming Beside Oneself
- Rotman: Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing
- Rotman: Ghost Effects
- Rotman: Going Parallel
- Rotman: The Alphabetic Body
- Special Guest: Brian Rotman
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1.
Andrea J. Vought | October 24, 2007 at 2:08 am
Andrea Vought October 23, 2007
Bodies of Persuasion Response Week 8
I was particularly struck by Dr. Rotman’s argument in “Going Parallel,” mainly his discussion of the plasticity of our minds and how “the development of external memory and thinking devices” (74) has aided in the formation of “knowledge” by means of nonhuman entities. Dr. Rotman provides some key examples throughout this text and the others we read for this week, indeed, but I think there is much to be gained by looking back again towards the ancient Greeks in deciding how to understand this exo-knowledge and the creation of parallel selves.
But first, let me diverge for a brief moment. This external memory that Dr. Rotman discusses is quite obvious from a contemporary standpoint—our cell phones “remember” telephone numbers so that we don’t have to memorize them, our computer hard drives are equipped with—aptly named, of course—memory to store documents and files to eliminate clutter in our filing cabinets and our racing minds, cars can now parallel park themselves. Indeed, as a result of all of these things and so many more, our brains have become rewired. And too, as Dr. Rotman points out, we become less individualized, more collective; part of ourselves has been incorporated into these human-produced entities.
But it is not only these comparatively recent technological, human-made devices that contribute to the rearticulation of information across a different plane. The advent of writing out of the oral culture seems to have caused a similarly effect in ancient Greek culture as digital technology is having on our own. Dr. Rotman touches on this connection between the emergence of written and digital discourse briefly at the end of “Corporeal or Gesturo-Haptic Writing,” but I’d like to return to that for a deeper look.
First: external memory. As we saw in Debra Hawhee’s Bodily Arts and Susan Jarratt discussed in even more detail in Rereading the Sophists, the time that Plato and the Sophists were writing was a changing time, much like our own. The Sophists especially understood the dynamism of the world and could translate that into contingent and fluid knowledge, both produced in part by and articulated by the very written mechanisms that Both Hermogenes of Tarsus’ Peri Staseon on stasis theory and the Dissoi Logoi, literally translated to “different words,” attest to the relativism of arguments and the necessity to create multiple selves. Writing allowed these multiple selves to be captured and recreated in different situations and under different spatiotemporal and cultural constraints. Indeed, even looking to Plato’s work in The Sophist and The Gorgias will attest to the creation of multiple selves. Simultaneously, Plato is Plato-as-writer, Plato-as-Gorgias, Plato-as-Socrates. Much in the same way that we can Photoshop images of ourselves to erase blemishes (Andrea-with-zits and Andrea-without) or dub hip hop songs over children’s TV shows in time with lip movements (Barney-as-Barney, Barney-as-Soulja Boy), Plato uses the guise of dialectical conversation to create his own multitude of identities. And these identities (and thus too Plato himself) are formed and changed by this nonhuman form, the written
So, too, Dr. Rotman’s push for corporeal or gesturo-haptic writing hearkens back to the movement of the Sophists in Greece and the Second Sophistic movement many years later in Rome. Certainly, they did not have the digital cameras and methods of recording that we do today, but the practice of mimesis, both linguistically and physically in the style of delivery, seems to be capturable, too.
Briefly, too, I’d like to discuss the imagized image, which also shows itself in ancient rhetorical practice. Dr. Rotman defines an imagized image as “an image made of constituent images which variously overlap, juxtapose, underlap, penetrate, displace, obscure, truncate, and embed each other” (“Becoming”). Although first written about by Hermogenes, rhetorical exercises known as progymnasmata allowed young men, students of rhetoric planning eventually to enter a life in the polis. The foundational practices that students learned by practicing the progymnasmata, which ranged from writing fables and rewording arguments to creating narratives and refuting arguments of the masters. At the same time, these writing and declamatory exercises were supplemented with listening exercises. In this way, like gesturo-haptic writing, this training and writing exceeds the textual to encompass all of the senses. The consistent work with a wealth of different texts—even empirically “bad” ones—gave students a repertory of skills that could be recalled in any situation, but may would be recalled at once, naturally, some displacing or attenuating others. In this way they were not strict rules for action, but vehicles and tools to shape an argument. So, then, the bombardment of external texts, the rhetorical handbooks and the writings of the students themselves served as their own sort of images that could be used to juxtapose against one another.
This is certainly not to say that I am calling for a return to ancient rhetorical practices in a digital world, though I do think that the similarities in the transformation of memory and knowledge are telling. On the contrary, I agree with Dr. Rotman’s claim that we must “[reconfigure] … the present/future by altering its genesis” (433). Yet this turn back to the Sophists, at least for guidance and clarity, I think has some interesting possibilities for us in this digital/virtual/whatever-you-want-to-name-it world.
For Dr. Rotman: In “Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing,” you state that “it is necessary first to dumb the body, de-organize it, divest it of speech, silence it…” (433), how can we do that? Would this sort of radical change happen first in the Academy and trickle outward? What can we as graduate students and teachers do to make this happen?
Semi Postscript: I really appreciated Dr. Rotman’s comments on other responses, as the helped both to clarify and to bolster my thoughts presented above. I especially took to heart his comment to Mike’s response, in that humans have never been extricated from the machine, that what we call “virtual” is not a strictly electric phenomenon.
I’ll write more once others post their responses and questions.
2.
Crystal Starkey | October 24, 2007 at 3:28 am
The Primacy of Gesture as Opposed to Speech
Through my reading of Elaine Scarry and our class reading of Foucault, Burke and now Rotman, we understand the body as something not occurring naturally but rather, as Rotman writes”… a bio-cultural assemblage, constructed within discursive practices, interlocking social, cultural and historical matrices and the facilitations/impositions of an evolutionary past.” The body, then is an object formed through our expositions, experiences actions and perceived reactions. It is no wonder, then, the body is a source of endless philosophical research. For Lennard Davis, in “Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body” the body represents society’s obsession with an assumed state, yet the very principle of difference in/of the body lies within the principle of meaning. Meaning is gained by differing from each other. Davis’ area of expertise on the deaf and disabled bodies—terms which he believes are used to create rigid categories of existence: either one is disabled or one is not—furthers this idea of categorizing into disability in its presentation to ‘normal’ people. For Davis, these categories are function and appearance. The functional modality is defined as the inability to do something considered a standard movement (walk, talk, hear, see, manipulate, etc), while the appearance modality puts the disabled person in our field of vision, as being visualized as disabled. Disabled is seen as the person herself, rather than disability being a part of the person (11).
Like Rotman, Davis extends this discussion beyond just the body’s gesture into language when he writes: “If we look carefully, we can see that the aural/oral method of communicating, itself seen as totally natural, like all signifying practices, is not natural but based on sets of assumptions about the body, about reality, and of course about power” (16). Unfortunately, gesture continues to be thought of as atavistic, caveman grunts when in reality, gesture is unspoken because there are often no verbal words or language to define the gesture. An example? The wink. If we took the wink away, what might we verbally say that could so pointedly replace it? It would be like that long, drawn out joke that was over minutes ago. Rotman refers to gesture as one capacity and practice of the body. Rotman points out that gesture is often incorrectly interpreted as a convoluted action, a “primitive, non-intellectual expression of feeling, a rudimentary and not too important kind of communication”. Moreover, he shows that public opinion often demotes gesture to last place behind the spoken word and the visual image. Still, gesture is somewhat being re-evaluated and re-cognized despite this “primitivism”. An example of gesture’s come back is the source of the deaf’s community primary communication system, which relies solely on visual images and gestures. This hybrid dialect extends beyond shaping just the deaf culture, cognition and creativity and is, in some circles, considered superior to the auditory languages of human speech. Humans, it seems, are reconfiguring “established ideas of ‘language’ and communication.” Davis furthers this point in showing the ways in which different modes of communication erase different disabilities: Email erases deafness; telephones erase blindness, etc. Could we say then that gesture erases the auditory, which for me can be stumbling clumsily over spoken words?
The object of disability studies is to better understand the “set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body” (2). Rather than face the ragged image of a disabled body, critics turn to the “glossary of the body as text, the heteroglossia of the intertext, the glossolalia of the schizophrenic”. Yet, Rotman cites speech as being a systematic movements of the body (lips, teeth, tongue, cheek, jaw, glottis, vocal chords, larynx, chest, lungs, diaphragm), despite its repressions as gesticulation. For Rotman the contra-orality of the unspoken, gestured communication spans beyond the flow or articulated knowledge governed by speech in favor of silence. Here Nietzsche would agree this allows the closings of “’the doors and windows of consciousness a little quietness’ and thus plays a crucial role: far from a supplemental relation to speech, then, gesture here is oppositional and exclusionary.” In this state, then, speech and gesture enter into rigid distinct categories, giving meaning and definition to each other. So then, would Rotman say gesture’s re-emergence from the abyss of “rudimentary and not too important kind of communication” is defined and given meaning from the ways in which it differs from the now-regressing, limitations in speech? And, if so, how? Further, how does this new ‘difference’ (if we establish such) effect the deaf body?
Sorry I couldn’t stay late this evening. The 2.5 hour drive home is a killer. I hope you all had a good time.
Crystal
3.
Clay Walker | October 24, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Gestures and Emblems: Is there a “too blue” type cognitive excess in bodily expression?
In the following response, I focus on Brian Rotman’s “Going Parallel,” while acknowledging that the arguments here can also be articulated in many other places throughout the series of articles we read this week. Alas, with so much material and so little time, I chose one to focus on. To begin, a passage from “Going Parallel” –
This passage emphasizes the collective and experiential basis of cognition as a critique of the individualistic model of cognition that de-emphasizes context in favor of something like transcendental linguistic/epistemological structure wherein thinking happens in the mind/brain. By centering thinking within human contexts – that is systems of human relationships, relationships of bodies – thinking/cognition seems to take on the sort of characteristics of affects/emotions described by Tomkins where affects/emotions are rooted in the body, but happen in the context of other bodies – they are individual and social. Rotman restates the singular/collective dimension of human cognition as one of serial/parallel mechanical computation. His work in the remainder of the article is to ask “But however vital for computer science, and fundamenetal for cyberia, the serial/parallel difference … is ultimately no more than a choice between one technology and another … What could it have to do with human interiority and consciousness? How could it be linked with the self, subjectivity, I/we and the It/They that come(s) from the/a future?” (64-5).
To get a handle on this issue, Rotman turns to Merlin Donald, a frequent guest in the essays assigned for this week, to draw attention to Donald’s argument that “memory and knowedge-storage [are] the fundamental agent of change and structure” (65). This exogenitic process figures prominently in Rotman’s later arguments that the alphabet has changed the way we think in a way that excludes the body in that it does not itself reproduce prosodic elements of language. Rotman’s larger project is to work toward a space wherein digital technologies can reproduce nonlinguistic bodily expression. Locating the temporal and contextual gestural-haptic knowledges of the body into exterior structures is key if they are to become independent and available for future assemblages. At the root of such a theory of corporeal writing is the serial/parallel dimension manifested in mechanical computing technologies.
But before that, in the human body itself, it must be understood that “there is no separation here between interior and exterior: the experiential and the collective fold into each other. All thought, even the most private, individual and enclosed is social … [and thus] the key principle of the biological and social evolution of individual cognition is the symbiosis of cognitive collectivities and external memory systems, a linkage that allows new cultural formations and technologies to reconfigure the thought diagrams inside (as we still say) our heads” (77). That is, all human cognition is social and in fact individual cognition experiences a biological/social evolution dependent on the combination of two factors: collective cognition and external memory systems.
Back to Tomkins: he argues* that affective responses are independent of other psychological processes, like cognition. Affects are internal, but always happen in relation to something exterior – another person, thing. Always contextualized in relationships, affects are both interior and exterior. Another basis for thinking about collective affective states would be Heidegger’s stimung – but I will leave stimmung with Heidegger for now. However, the other half of the formula – the exteriorization of knowledge in external memory systems – does not seem to be as apparent as collective emotions. Tomkins talks about some universal physical expressions of emotion (smiling, crying) but we have little control over some of these, and they are not external to the body. Rotman talks about motion capture as a system that externalizes body movement into raw data that may be continually reproduced and possibly re-combined into new and unpredictable assemblages; assemblages that would impact our notions of subjectivity, self, epistemology, consciousness, space and time. Is the only potential for actual externalization of corporeal affective expressions within digital cyberia? Brian Massumi’s notion of “too blue”** reveals an excess of expression within the cognitive linguistic structure – the figure “too blue” in Massumi’s argument reveals what amounts to an affective expression that shades the cognitive expression with personal and perhaps emotional resonances. Without going too deep into the already complicated Massumi text, I want to lift the template of “too blue” and ask if the converse is true for gestures/emblems. That is, if “too blue” reveals an excess of affect that ekes out under the cover of what might otherwise be considered the cognitive-linguistic structural sign “too” – if this is true, can we also locate a similar yet converse gesture/emblem that, like “too”, is an excess of cognition that makes its way out attached to what is otherwise an embodied, affective expression of self? This proposition assumes that gestures/emblems are affective expressions – at the least they are certainly embodied – but I would also argue that they are affective expressions: Is it not the case that all emotional/affective responses/expressions make their way out – that is express – through bodily conduits like gestures and emblems, but also such movements as smiles, cries, gasps, shudders, hunches, screams, and nods?
Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader Ed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1995.
** Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC & London: Duke U P, 2002.
4.
Kim Lacey | October 24, 2007 at 1:00 pm
You know you are reading a great article when you run across the following passage: “[…] force-feedback devices are enabling varied forms of haptic actions at a distance. These range from the simulated handling of molecules by research chemists and telesurgery effected through visually enhanced feedback loops, to cross-planetary arm wrestling, and the inevitable attempt to realize sex-at-a-distance, or teledildonics (“Corporeal” 431). Not only did this shake me from my research haze, but I also recalled our private/”new” public conversation from a few weeks back. If ‘avatars sexing other avatars’ enables an actual feeling, how are the lines of private and public redistributed? And further, is there a private self anymore if public actions (i.e. the sexing avatars’ deeds) are responsive to and received by the lone, haptic recipients? As Brian Rotman notes earlier in “Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing,” this results in “a form of transposed physicality,” where we can be both ‘here’ and ‘there’ simultaneously (430). Although because ‘sex- and arm-wrestling-at-a-distance happens’ here and there, the haptic response seems to suggests that there is no ‘there,’ anything that is being felt is only happening ‘here.’ To explain, even though I might be tele-arm-wrestling someone else across the globe, the only sensation I am feeling is their presence back on me. The action is only taking place for me ‘here’; I am exerting strength, but I don’t feel it there (where my opponent is ‘located’). There is a supposed ‘there’ (with which I am supposedly interacting), but since I do not feel my actions, the only ones that ‘count’ are the ones being received. The tele-arm-wrestling is transpiring in two separate places, and the same event is identical and separate.
To add to this, Rotman says in “Going Parallel” that “the I/me unit is disintegrating, the one who says ‘I’ is no longer singular, but multiple: a shifting plurality of disbursed, distributed and fragmented personae” (60). To return to the above example, the tele-arm-wrestling “I” materializes in two locations at once, creating two copies of the same action. The idea of “copies” is an interesting thread, as the transported self is not necessarily a reproduction, but is the same action And, MMOGs such as Second Life foster this distribution and fragmentation of the individual—there (in Second Life’s virtual world), one can be both “serial” and “parallel”; behind the computer is one “operator” with the ability to create multiple selves “doing many things at once” (“Going” 57). In this life (and I am not referring to reincarnation here, but distinguishing our lives from virtual ones), one can be a starving grad student, while at the same time have enough Linden Dollars to consistently devote to groceries in Second Life. Also in Second Life, we are able to foster our “alters” by creating various personae; there we can create “The Angry One” and “The Innocent Child” while we, “The Actual One” maintains control over all of them. What I find most interesting about MMOGs such as Second Life is that they still require an actual person to foster action. They are not, to borrow Varela’s term, “selfless selves” (“Becoming” 6). Although limiting, one can play MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft by oneself, while Second Life would not exist without involvement from other people (actual ones, not their avatars).
Questions: If ‘avatars sexing other avatars’ enables an actual feeling, how are the lines of private and public redistributed? And further, is there a private self anymore if public actions (i.e. the sexing avatars’ deeds) are responsive to and received by the lone, haptic recipients?
5.
mike | October 24, 2007 at 2:36 pm
My post will come across shortly, here’s a link I strongly encourage everyone to check out–if, like me, you’re interested in body-machine-medicine-subjectivity stuff:
Critical Art Ensemble has a whole series of projects on biotech stuff, including a book (available at the link for free, chapter by chapter) called The Flesh Machine.
6.
Jen Niester | October 24, 2007 at 3:47 pm
The Making of Selves, The What and How that Function Without a Who Online
For this response, I would like to revisit the question that was posed two weeks earlier about the Internet as a public sphere (which I see drew Kim’s interest as well). As you recall, Mike posed the question to Dr. Nealon about whether he considered open source communities to be a part of the public sphere. Nealon argued against this possibility based upon the fact that individuals participating in these online communities were participating from their own privately enclosed spaces. After reading Rotman’s theories on the self as an assemblage with multiplicities spilling out across the technological planes of our existence, I find Nealon’s answer a bit reductive and similar to the human science scholars Rotman criticizes for overemphasizing “the primacy of context, situation, embodied groundedness, particular setting, and on the importance of the genesis” (“Becoming”). There is genesis, but no rebirth, which keeps the self that participates in online communities within the body vessel situated in the private sphere.
But where is the self “made” that participates in open source communities? Is the self just a cyber-iteration of what already exists within someone before they step in front of a computer screen? Or is the self shaped and formed through an execution of code and an interactive process within a network of other encoded beings and the functions of the programs in which they exist? The latter may be hard to accept because it means a lack of control; we are being shaped and molded, our inner starlings assembling new patterns without a conscious decision. Rotman proposes a radical idea when states, “Perhaps the question has to be: what and how (and not “who”) is this self…”
Our self-obsessed culture of memoirs, self-help books, personal blogs, etc., seems that this a departure we are not ready for as we cling to the idea of exploring and promoting our own unique, singular self (which maybe because the idea of a self is being threatened in the same way Rotman explained the concept of the body is being threatened). Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, states in an interview, “The problem I think in society generally is that people aren’t talking to one another. There is less and less debate…The Internet is a place we go to confirm our opinions, to confirm our identity, to confirm our beliefs.” This description seems the antithesis of a public realm. Building off the criteria established by Hannah Arendt, to truly engage in the public sphere, you have to go there to perform an action and not to control and preserve a self. There is this idea of uncontrollability in her definition of action, which becomes more clear as we enter in online engagement that involves multiple agents, software, and a future open to possibilities. As we learned from Doyle last week, computer code can take on a life of its own.
When we enter online, I wonder if we push the idea of identity even further than Rotman does in his article, “Becoming Beside Onself,” as he writes about external/internal dualities. It seems that the a self can completely abandon the internal co-creator. Identities that form and re-form in online communities continue to function without us. Could there be a public sphere where we participate without conscious effort or even the corporeal movements of a mouse click? Blogs that we considered private reflections for our inner circle of friends could be copied, pasted, cut up, collaged, and turned into new statements, new actions, new selves that maybe acting out intentions that are very different than what we consider to be “who” we are, which reflects back to the idea that our technological diffused selves are not exactly a “who” but a “what” and a “how” that can live their own lives outside of us. At least this is the conclusion I was led to when considering what exactly is the post-human state. The positive I take from this concept is that when we disengage with the idea of a unified, sovereign self, it allows the focus to shift to action. However, underlying this is a loss of control, a loss of an essential voice, which could mean a loss of personal investment. My question for Dr. Rotman was what do you conceive as the relationship between the post-human, the Internet, and the public sphere? How do others feel about this topic?
Postscript: I had a wonderful moment of discovering my own machine-like qualities as after mentally floating in the ether over I-75 I snapped back into reality to realize that I actually had no memory of about 45 minutes of my drive. In my research I’ve been focusing on the influence of the computer in our lives, I never thought about how I’m being affected by driving 500 miles a week (aside from pumping coffee into my body as one would pump in gasoline).
More later… I want to come back to Kim’s question, which is a thinker… And I second Mike’s reading recommendation….
7.
mlmcginnis | October 25, 2007 at 5:07 am
In to/Out of the Machine
It is hard to read Rotman without thinking of two phrases that have obvious linguistic connections but obscure theoretical ones, one which Rotman employs in our readings this week and one which aunts Rotman’s work as an absent but palpable reference: deus ex machina and ghost in the machine. Intentionally or otherwise, Rotman’s work across these essays pulls at questions raised by these two ideas. What follows, then, is some attempts to suggest ways in which these two phrases might offer some directions for understanding Rotman’s work.
Deus ex Machina. Literally, “god out of a machine,” and famously used or abused by Euripides, the conventional understanding of deus ex machina is of a hoary literary device used by desperate dramatists to work their way out of an impossible situation. Deliberately resituating its meaning, however, offers us some insight into the relationships between humans and machines as described by Rotman. The obvious point to look to in Rotman’s work here is his forcible dislocation of Yahweh in “Ghost Effects,” in a section suitably titled “Deus Ex Machina: Writing and its Ghosts,” as he finds and locates the “monoGod” (“Ghost”) in the alphabetic machine only to serve Him His eviction notice. This move, Rotman promises, holds the possibility of thinking beyond the monolithic transcendental subject—what Rotman characterizes elsewhere as the “self-contained eternal psyche understood . . . [as] the tragic, fallen-from-god soul” (“Becoming”)—and into a new subjectivity that foregrounds its own “becoming multiple” (“Ghost”). The becoming-emergent multiplicity becomes the site of monotheism’s demise: “Emerging in its place is the possibility of a new plurality of truths and futures: beings with an awareness of our/their multi-directional itinerary” (“Parallel” 77). Thus the move away from monolithic models of the subject is paralleled (haha!) by a concomitant move out of the strictly linear regimes of the alphabetic machine and into the waiting domain of the post/translinear digital.
Ghost(s) in the Machine. We have seen the parallel motion out of the language machine of monotheism and of monolinear subjectivity. By calling attention to the “ghost in the machine,” though, I hope to pull together some strands of thought from both Doyle and Rotman before returning to the claim forwarded by my epigraph. The ghost in the machine, a phrase introduced in 1949 by philosopher Gilbert Ryle as a critique of Cartesian dualism (thanks Wikipedia!), evokes not only Descartes, but also Plato’s theory of the mind or soul trapped in an imprisoning body. For Rotman, though, the ghost is not only in the (flesh) machine (to borrow from Iggy Pop) but of the machine: “The self may be as is said a natural kind, but it is also a made thing and my understanding here is the machinic processes of technology are (always have been) part of its making” (“Becoming”). Rotman rejects the model of “a psyche whose genesis and vicissitudes are transcultural and independent of history”; rather, he offers in its place “a psyche that is also conceived as being put together within society and history from outside itself, as an extraneously made thing”. As such, the subject is bound intimately to the machine, to technology, and to the world outside of its own perceived limits of interiority:
The subject is situated, yes, but this is tragic loss of insular identity; as Rotman promises, “pesons, identities, psyches, consciousnesses, subjects, and all kinds of intentional agents” are not illusory. Rather, it is a situation comedy, in the old sense of the word, a happy ending guaranteeing union—not conjugal unions perhaps, but a union with the collective other of which we are always already a part, a cybernetic subjectivity that transposes the boundary of interior and exterior with the “intersection of a neurology already enculturated and a culture inseparable from natural selection (“Becoming”). Rotman’s parallel, multiple self is the ideal subject for the new systemic model of postvital life envisioned by Richard Doyle. As our model of life movies increasingly toward a postvitality best understood as a web or network of interdependent agents and organisms, the multiple subject becomes a necessity for navigating the new translife landscape: multiplicities within multiplicities, a cybernetic cascade of plurality in constant exchange of information, energy, life. By moving outside the flesh-machine, we join the overwhelming copiousness of the vital machine-without-borders.
This move, away from the strict regime of interior subject and exterior bodies, cultures, technologies, is the basis for my final series of questions. The “entity” hailed above is the human conscious, or rather self-consciousness, the Cartesian cogito. On one hand, Miles is plainly right: subjectivity cannot be confirmed by any empirical test yet known (or known to Miles in 1957). On the other hand, though, Miles’s claim points to a fading era in which still stood the categorical imperative of the necessary division of man from machine. Within the pre-digital modern, Miles does not have the vantage point to ask the questions we now ask. But as we begin to theorize the parameters and outlines of what Miles calls homo machina and what Rotman elsewhere has named homo digitalis, I want to return to the scene of a half century prior and take up Miles’s question in a different light: do we still need the distinction between man and machine, or is it simply an ideological ghost of the fading monolinear self? A related question: given that, as Rotman asserts, subjectivity is not illusory, how would we verify it? What is the distinguishing mark of a subject given to multiplicity? Is this mode of subjectivity terminally theory-bound, or will our affective experience of subjectivity likewise become plural? How does it feel to wear the new flesh?
8.
Clay Walker | October 25, 2007 at 11:57 am
Postscript:
After Rotman’s lecture on the 10th of 5054, I felt like I had an answer to my posted question. Let me see if I can recreate it my thoughts…
Rotman argued mostly in the Q&A section that each new technological modality (i.e., speech, writing, and this emerging digitatlity) superimposes itself on the prior mode (speech onto gestural-haptic; writing onto speech; digitality onto writing), but through feedback loops, it revises or revitalizes the older modalities. Thus, while new technological modes emerge and affect our subjectivity, space and time – the older modalities conitnue to develop, become more complex, and change according to the new overlays. If we begin with gesturo-haptic communication, over a period of time, speech emerges as a codified system of gestures. In fact, Rotman points out, certain linguistic or speech science circles are returning to this notion of speech as a a system of gestures. But all gestures are codified, whether it is a shrug of the shoulders or flipping the bird.
If I were to criticize my earlier post, I would say that I did not quite get some of Rotman’s arguments in his more recent articles on the practice of capturing bodily movements or motion capture systems. If we consider speech and hand movements (or whatever bodily movements you like) as gestures that are codified then what becomes important to talk about is presence and absence. As my presentation Tuesday will discuss, one key aspect of the voice as an object is that it requires a body, but it does not exactly fit the body -that is, it is produced in the body, but when it is perceived it is always away from the body (in another’s ear). The voice exteriorizes the interior, leaves the body while always pointing back at the body/subject. Gestures, on the other hand, never leave the body – they are fixed on the body even as their refracted light pierces the retina, they remain embodied. Thus, gestures are always present with the body, we have to see the body to see the gesture. Speech, on the other hand, is absent – we need not see the body, but hearing the speech implies the presence of the body.
9.
eric herhuth | October 25, 2007 at 1:46 pm
After Writing God, What Will We Read?
I read a lot; while watching TV or a movie, while eating, while listening to my wife or listening to music, while I’m out with friends or colleagues, while doing anything I often find occasion to read something. When I look at art, I read and when I drink beer, I read. I mean when the stuff is in my mouth and I swish it around and think about character and undertones am I not reading? So here reading is that mode of analysis that separates, names, and organizes. It is a linear processing used frequently everyday for problem solving; it’s what they call ‘critical thinking’ in secondary ed, and it can be a mode of interacting with the world at just about any time (although it’s not always socially acceptable). But why, on occasion, do we call this mode of analysis reading?
After reading this week’s articles by Brian Rotman, I had to wonder if this analytical mode was on its way out, but that does not seem to be the case. Instead, the state of affairs might be better described as the development of different kinds of reading. First, there is the “Rampant Visualism” that is occurring in our culture. Not that visual images cannot be read but the common purpose of the image is parallel communication as opposed to serial (Going Parallel 72). Rotman points out that even digitization, which is a serial process, serves the purpose of “visualization to a parallel end” (Parallel 73). Will reading be limited to this means to an end? Is it such already?
In “The Alphabetic Body,” there is a brief description of how the reading of texts could be in the future: “there will be eyeglasses projecting micro-reduced words onto the retina (further still, directly into the brain via an implant)” (92). How will the diminishment of the physical act of reading affect our general analytic modes? From my observances, the sales of audiobooks and speedreading programs appear to be doing well. If it’s about speed and efficiency then uploading the contents of a text into my memory/consciousness/whereverelse is a fine idea (granted, I don’t have the foggiest notion of what the uploadable contents of a text would be). There are plenty of theories out there about the dialogue that occurs between reader and text, and about reading as a unique event, and I am sure that this event will continue to change as we spend more time with images and like parallel media.
So my question becomes, what is the relation between the reading of a text and the everyday serial mode of analysis? As the reading of text is made easier, so to speak, and this work reduces to an extent the left-brain dominance caused by writing, I imagine the diminishment of dissection. Bodies will remain whole. The conversation will not consist of turns but all will speak at once and listen at once. But this is too idealistic. Every image is a cut from some whole (I think). Dissection may be diminished but it cannot be eradicated.
Well, how about this new writing, “corporeal or gesturo-haptic writing.” Even in the process of “motion capture” “periodic readings, i.e. digitized samples,” are taken via sensors attached to “chosen points on the body” (Alphabetic Body 102). To make stuff usually requires some serial work as opposed to parallel, which is evidenced in this motion capture. Of course the more machines we make that make machines that make machines that make machines, and so on, it seems possible to escape our condition of homo faber as described by Hannah Arendt. It is from this angle that gesturo-haptic writing is an exciting new medium, for it avoids the “triangular interdependency of ‘messages’ and sending receiving bodies” (GH Writing 435). No stuff is made in this sense, but instead, what is communicated are “corporeal events in so-called real time.” It is here that a new kind of reading seems most likely. It would be a bodily reading that separates, names, and organizes the corporeal experience. Rotman describes the importance of bodily events of a gestural nature in the “fact of their taking place, and in the subsequent psycho-social-corporeal effects (of affect, safety, assurance, threat, etc.) that they induce and could only induce as a result of having actually occurred” (GH Writing 435). It is the powerful actual-inducement that would be broken down in gesturo-haptic reading, and from this knowledge, certainly, new technologies and ways of human being will be made.
My questions remain:
Must serial modes be a means to a parallel end?
What is the relation between the reading of a text and the everyday serial analytic mode?
How will the alteration of the physical act of reading affect our analytic modes?
** After a brief conversation with Brian Rotman about these questions, it seems the futural scope of his work does consider the diminishment of reading and a corresponding diminution of everyday serial analytic modes. And again, the interactive, bodily nature of new media, with its introduction of new neurological processes, may shape a new kind of reading, a new mode of analysis to be used throughout everyday life.
10.
Jared | October 25, 2007 at 2:08 pm
~Jared Grogan (now pronounced Jar – eed/ Groggin)
October 23, 2007
The question –’why not become beside oneself?’ — is indeed meaningfully posed. And certainly, as something binding is happening in the making of a technological self, we are without much choice but to sound it out. The parallel machinic processes of construction, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of an assemblage, crucial to the digital, genetic and evolutionary re-making of multiplex n-self beside our I-self, (re) presents us with some of the deepest questions about changes in the human condition; but it also presents us more immediately with some questions about ‘our’-selves, our scholarship in the near future, and each other as audience.
While reading Rotman’s interpretations of parallel machine thought as the facilitating artifact, conditioning the n-self to emerge… suddenly Richard Doyle makes sense (and somehow this is a good thing for me). Doyle writes I-self and N-self-portrayal through reassembled information bits of spiritutal-theoretical-psychedelic and bio-technological eddies, wound up in panic and dispersed through the pages of Wetwares. I’m not trying to sound esoteric…Doyle just pulls description apart as we take some time to reflect on what he’s saying in this text. Increasingly, Doyle seems to be onto something about how we can understand and theorize these futuristic but present informatic events when he presents him-self as a text as an interface for interpreting phenomenon, ‘a potent mutagen of human experience,’ that can only be understood not only retroactively, but engaged in something like an act of intersubjective reading and revision… or revisionary rhetoric.
Wetwares might be an interesting example of what Julie Jung explores in Revisionary Rhetoric as a multegenre text– not something I tend to think of as avant-guard, but certainly experimental, intertextual, and metadiscursive. Jung’s (and for the life of me I’ll never live that pronunciation down…but in cowardly self-defense…it may have been a habit I developed while teaching in Toronto…since the majority of Chinese students taught at Centennial had anglocized their pronunciations, often absurdly…and many new students would even ask to be given English names by English teachers… effectively being re-named by members of the English department)… anyway… Jung’s central claim is that ‘we can revise only what has been written… but maybe we can write only what has been revised,’ –suggesting that the goal of the writer is to ‘produce heteroglossic discourse that both listens [to readers] well as it makes itself heard… textual features of metadiscursivity and intertexturality enable writers to meet this challenge by creating texts that contain gaps… which, when filled in by others, make room for fuller and deeper listening. In this way, revision becomes a process of consciously constructing gaps out of which I, you, we can respond’ (33). She experiments in her book with experimental multigenre revisions of academic writing, and she suggests that writing, even in scholarly articles, could use more overt demonstrations of open/alternative modes of writing and reading that encourages interaction with multiple gaps or silences (often created for her by simply putting two dissimilar concepts together) in such a way as to generate and reflect personal, pedagogical, and professional revisions… and that this embraces changing habits, attitudes and concepts of the self..
In light of Rotman’s writing, it seems important to ask if composition and rhetoric scholars like Jung and Krista Radcliff are pushing us to more consciously engage multifaceted and intersubjective reading of scholarly texts, and if this is something almost inevitable because of broader transformations in readers who become beside one self. This begs the question: are certain texts becoming artifacts that fascilitate parallel machine thought, and is this something that academia is embracing or interpreting as a threat? Also, should we be bold enough to take multigenre/multimedia or ideographic steps in our scholarship?
Another question I had in mind, and which I got out at the bar:
For Spinoza, one of the central guiding goals of man is the productive or excess-body that assigns corporeality ontological primacy and whose behaviour is the means for the bringing into being all so-called mental idealities…(You say that “Plainly, it will be the model of desire/corporeality as excess that will be used here to theorize a self whose assembly is inseparable from technological change”)
BUT IT IS worth noting ALSO that self-preservation is one of Spinoza’s central goals of man; it is an instinct which we feel in the emotion of desire. “To satisfy desire is conducive to self-preservation, it brings joy or pleasure” Do you think this DESIRE/SELF-PRESERVATION cycle is still strong? Has it been destroyed by rampant consumerism, faith in technology and new relationships with excess? How has it changed in your mind? Is this relationship between desire and self-preservation turning into something different in our increased attention to SUSTAINABILITY?
Dr Rotman gave me some interesting feedback… most of which seemed to revolve around the idea of his discussion of the transforming self. He also encouraged me to keep thinkin about it while directing me to get to know Spinoza with more familiarity…
Anyway, he was pretty amazing… which I could have stayed later…
11.
Michael Cipielewski | October 25, 2007 at 2:16 pm
We were talking about the Plushies, people who like to dress in animal costumes and… well you know. How these things come into normal conversation, I cannot say. Plushies, like any niche group that connects through technology, cannot survive as a population without technology; how would Plushies in New York and San Diego find each other if not for technology? If not for the written word, telephones, printing, and the whole of internet communication, they would most likely never known there had a been another person anywhere with their interest in animal costumes. The desire, or unique openness (or I would argue, the second self) would either slowly fade, or remain as an unrequited desire, “drag[ging] and feed[ing] on its own deferrals.” (Weinstone 1) I’d like to look at MUDs – multi-user domains because it seems to constitute the majority of instances like these, where methods of “snail mail” are waning due to (cost) effectiveness, speed, and the like.
It is important to note a native desire in XYZ (as above, Plushies for example) pre-technology as it were. I suspect Rotman would point out that no desire is native per-se, that an animal costume itself is indicative of technology, therefore irreducible to a so-called pre-technological state, only representative of “our circular relation to technology in which we are both subject and object, cause and effect.” (61) I may modify the term then, pre-interface, to have a vocabulary to discuss two main aspects of the above: desire and technology.
In discussing multiplicity, Multiple Personality or Disassociative Identity Disorder, MPD/DID, Rotman describes “some aware of their co-inhabitants, some fully worked out personae, but most person-fragments and generic functions.” (75) What is striking is the concept of “working out” in context of any persona. The parallel functions of a pervasive “self”, where there is no cogent self in the traditional sense, but many selves, or self-representations rather, existing simultaneously. The “working out” or the “working on” personae is most important here. In context of the Plushie community, MUDs allows the proliferation of desire through interface, where disembodied personae are re/created socially. I described native desire above in this context: a pre-MUD, pre-interface context. (And to steal from medical billing, a pre-existing condition) The point is that a native desire, as a sort of identity facet (a second self to whatever level of wholeness or fragmentation), will either disappear without the MUD or simply “limp along”, incommunicable and static, never gaining purchase. Further, it may be a “chicken or the egg?” question, but MUD technology allows not only those with native desire to interface, but those without an articulate self-knowledge of desire, but simply an openness to a desire; so could it be said that MUDs made Plushies, in the modern context? Or that Plushies contributed to the very contexts in which they proliferate?
And this “chicken or egg” question also begs a larger question with more social implications: where does responsibility tie into all this? That is, in the MUD, if the relationship between user and technology is cyclical, and possibly both native desire and “awakening” desire exist… how does ethics tie into this, and what agency does the MUD user have over the technology in the cyclical model, if any?
Postscript later
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Katrina Newsom | October 25, 2007 at 3:55 pm
The selection of readings for this week helped and complicated some of the topics of interest that I am pursuing. The role of the written text is something that I have been concerned with since my undergraduate years especially after reading Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. This text was the first of many that I would experience that refused to translate certain words into the English language. Because of this, many students rejected the text within the first few pages, but I struggled beyond it to find a treasure. Achebe’s choice to not translate certain concepts into language complicated the hegemony of the English language. It challenged the assumption that the English language possesses adequate or equivalent meanings or descriptions to concepts and words of other languages. But I must take it a little further than just the English language and extend Achebe’s resistance to Brian Rotman’s “alphabetic writing.” The reason I must refer to Rotman’s concept here is because the terms and concepts Achebe refused to translate informed some type of action or ritual that could not be explained away by the English language. I understand that the mere fact that the terms/concepts that Achebe used were in themselves an alphabetic writing, but the difference is that the investment into the written word comparatively has a very different (dis) advantage for him than for the West’s alphabetic writing. Before I go further, I need to make sure I understand Rotman’s position correctly. The shift from written language to other forms of information apparatuses, such as digitization or gestures and images can potentially threaten the future of alphabetic writing as the primary medium of communication and information and that perhaps it could be argued that Rotman focuses on the West essentially because of the powers that are inherent in the language; the power to colonize and marginalize many people. This leads me to ponder the question – what is at stake for me as a graduate student of English and a student of African/African-American and world literature? Much of my research has been in the area of language both in its written and spoken forms. This language has arguably created tragedies for many people. Therefore, the pertinent question is: Are the prejudices that exist in the alphabetic writing, which has marginalized many people, inherent or has it been applied onto the alphabetic writing as a tool of control? If so, does the future of images, technoscience and gestures offer hope for marginalized individuals in that it will render the prejudices within the conveyances of information obsolete? Also, I wonder in what ways if any has the alphabetic writing been reconditioned and complicated by the emergence of the African/African American fantastical tradition of myth and storytelling where the body and the positioning of the body had been an important factor for conveying information? The problem that arises out of this is similar to the problem that André Leroi-Gourhan has with his concept of the demise of the alphabetic writing in which he must use the medium of writing to convey this idea. Likewise, the African/African American forms of storytelling, mythical traditions, and criticisms are also trapped in this paradigm of communication and information. So I am led back to the initial question – will digitization or the “image” be advantageous for marginalized people?
Keeping this in mind, I want to explore Brian Rotman’s “Going Parallel” and “Becoming Beside Oneself.” These works helped me to understand why a particular idea I have been pondering since I started graduate school has proved to be so problematic. While reading such text as Claude McKay’s Banjo or Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, I tried to understand the complexities of identity (or the self) through the concept of derivative and antiderivative. I wanted to show how identity was continuous and yet at any given moment the self could become this or that or rather, not this or not that and because the derivative measures acceleration and if I remember correctly velocity, I thought I could articulate identity in terms of motion or in terms of continuous movement. Unfortunately, when I tried to apply this concept to a text, I struggled to create an adequate frame to show the motion of identity. After reading Rotman’s “Becoming Beside Oneself”, I begin to understand why the concept of derivative was so problematic. He describes a form of it as “a many, which comes from a prior one by splitting, copying and so on” (6). This appears to resemble his articulation of math in “Going Parallel” as “sequences of calculations” in which “they were linear problematics that begat calculus; a cognitive technology that notwithstanding its focus instantaneous change and apparatus of diagrammatics to go with it – is a linearizing mode of thought par excellence” (62). Yet clearly, as Rotman asserts throughout both these works, the mind is not linear and I argue neither is identity (self), which is a product of the mind and many other influences. Also, I agree with his assertion that the self (identity) must be viewed in terms of parallel processes because it is multifarious. The unfortunate demise of employment of the derivative/antiderivative to define identity leaves me with a great sigh, “I must return to the big picture.”
13.
Jack McIntyre | October 25, 2007 at 4:06 pm
**Note: This has been rewritten since class
Very briefly summarized, Brian Rotman argues that the notion of monotheism and a single, unified self arose along with writing, facilitated by and facilitating neurological changes imposed on the brain by this new technology, and the “I” of writing, an “I” that is disembodied and eternal; God is the written “I” par excellence. Now, with writing losing its primacy and with the computer screen, motion and force capture, and other technologies becoming ubiquitous, it is reasonable to expect that conceptions of the self and God will change; especially, the idea of a unified self will be replaced by a multiplicity of selves. Notions of God will change as well; God will be lost or dramatically reconfigured.
In making this argument he points particularly to Judaism, the first of the Abrahamic religions and the source of all others. Islam is consistent with this argument as well, with its straightforward monotheism and fundamental tenet “there is no God but God.” Regarding Christianity, however, the issue is complicated by the doctrine of the Trinity, a doctrine that is essential to Catholicism and nearly ubiquitous in Protestantism as well. Basically it posits that God is composed of three entities: the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit or Ghost. Simultaneously, God is one; Christianity is adamant in its monotheism. There is a similarly paradoxical notion of Jesus: he is both fully human and fully God.
I acknowledge that this doctrine of the trinity arose at least partly as a defense against critics who might attack Christianity for having contradictory tenets; how can God have a son who is God, yet there remains only one God? How can an entity be fully God and fully man simultaneously? However, accepting this practical explanation for these doctrines seems to me excessively reductionist. I am not prepared to argue the point in depth, but I would like to note that the problem the trinity addresses could be easily solved with a doctrine of duality; why choose a trinity? Also the gospels seem to directly address, even highlight, the paradox of Christ’s humanity/divinity: he is frequently referred to, and refers to himself, as both the son of God and the son of man.
This leads me to believe – and I will adopt this position for the rest of this essay, if only because I find it interesting – that the instability built into the structure of Christianity is useful and meaningful, and it makes Christianity consistent with Rotman’s work. Understanding the self as a multiplicity must be paradoxical, at least to the current (Greco-Roman? – linear?) way of thinking; certainly any given self has only one body; or will we think of a single body as a multiplicity as well? Can the self be separated from the body? I believe (?) Rotman’s work implies that no, it can’t. Yet, as Doyle and others imply, technology may indeed allow this to happen. There is the new contradictory concept of corporeality of the self; the self will be simultaneously more centered in the body, yet there will also be a “virtual,” non-corporeal, tangible-despite-being-disembodied self, inhabiting the emerging “virtual world.” All of this obviously parallels the issue of Christ’s divinity/humanity. And this self – separated from the body; is it possible to conceive that at the same time that the self is one, the self will be many? My point is that a mode of thought that reconciles these problems in Christianity would simultaneously resolve the incomprehensibility of the new subject that Rotman implies is on the horizon. Christianity as popularly practiced, or course, does not resolve these problems, but as Foucault convincingly argued in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, much of Christianity is derived from late Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, loosely connected to Socrates; the change that Nietzsche laments, the corruption of the pre-Socratic tragic Greeks, also corrupted Christianity. Perhaps by ignoring the instability at the heart of Christianity the West has missed the point entirely; perhaps Christianity is startlingly prescient and relevant to the emerging new subject.
Comment/question for Crystal:
I find your response interesting in the context of recent debates I’ve heard on the news, about deaf people passionately opposing technology that “cures” deafness. As I understand it the deaf community considers itself a unique culture and such technology will destroy it. While I understand this to an extent, it is hard for me to imagine how deafness is not a disability. I am aware of the problems posed by normalizing people, but I can’t imagine interacting with a deaf person in the same way I’d interact with a hearing one – unless it’s online, in which case hearing would be irrelevant. So, regarding your question about how the increasing importance of gesture affects the deaf body, I would say that for me, practically speaking, it neutralizes what I can’t help but think of as a disability. What I mean is I can interact with a deaf person in exactly the same way I’d interact with a hearing person. This is due to universalized communication of gestures – typing and mouse movements.
But to return technology “curing” deafness, this online interaction which negates hearing also destroys deaf culture, in that online, there is no difference between deaf and hearing people. Obviously most of life still takes place offline, so there are still distinct cultures, but this raises a question for me: distinct cultures are based on difference, on normalization. In fact, it seems to me deaf people must normalize sign-language, for the practical reason that they can communicate more easily with people who sign and most hearing people can’t. It seems to me that the culture of the deaf that much of the deaf community wants to preserve is the result of normalization of the body; projects to negate normalization are a threat; normalization is, in some ways, desirable.
I guess my point is to ask: is normalization desirable, and why/why not? And, is it inevitable? These are probably shallow questions, but I haven’t thought much about the status of so-called disabled bodies.
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Kim Lacey | October 25, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Referring to this week’s response, Clay made an interesting point in regards to affect and Freudian drives. He says, “Silvan Tomkins argues that Freud had it wrong, affects not drives are the primary system of human motivation and of the drives, the sex drive is the most free (thus the most like the affects) in that it can be attached to and satisfied by unlimited ideas, objects, etc.” (Hope you don’t mind that I posted your summary, Clay…) I haven’t yet read Tomkins book (although I’ve heard it mentioned many times), but it sounds like a neat approach to virtuality. Clay also says that “its [the sex drive] satisfaction remains the intense and time-limited corporeal orgasm,” that seems to be the conflict–that these virtual “sex-explosions” (now I’m borrowing from Borat) can happen repeatedly and regularly – which is a specifically ‘human problem.’ Since there are meds that increase sexual possibility and extend duration, this seems to suggest that we are now trying to be like our avatars in the way that we are trying to expand time, or even dismiss time altogether. Sex is a very time-oriented act, and these advances are promoting a timelessness of sex altogether. Just as the sexing avatars aren’t limited by time (well, I guess, only that gap when their ‘controllers’ are away from the computer), modern meds seems to be encouraging us to go virtual in the sense that our sexual encounters can be constant. (Maybe constant isn’t the word I’m looking for, but something along the lines of (m)any time(s)–your typical Viagra ad images) I’m working with corporeality in this paper, so it’s kinda always on my mind lately. I haven’t thought enough about the ‘sexing avatars,’ but now I’m pretty intrigued. Strangely, I haven’t been bitten by the WSU affect-bug yet, and I’m not well read enough on it to comment in that sense, but thanks for the insight, Clay.
Oh, and is everyone now re-reading Prof. Rotman’s work in that great British accent? (Or, perhaps that’s just me ‘geeking around’ again *wink wink* Jared.) Regardless, it was a pretty great opportunity to have him around for the few days that he was here!
15.
Clay Walker | October 25, 2007 at 5:57 pm
No Kim, I don’t mind if you pubilsh my private communique in public – again, complicating the private/public spheres. Anyway, here it is – my response to Kim’s post that I originally meant to put up here anyway, just didn’t get around to it until now.
It would be interesting to look at how this notion of “sexing avatars” complicates theories of human drives. Silvan Tomkins argues that Freud had it wrong, affects not drives are the primary system of human motivation and of the drives, the sex drive is the most free (thus the most like the affects) in that it can be attached to and satisfied by unlimited ideas, objects, etc. Nonetheless, its satisfaction remains the intense and time-limited corporeal orgasm. Perhaps this alone distinguishes it from affects which can be satisfied over long periods of time or can have their satisfaction defferred to other affects and so on. The question seems to be that because of the sex-drives similarities with affect systems it alone can be pursued in virtual spaces – on the other hand, we still cannot eat, breathe, defecate in virtual space – and as long as human subjectivity is, at least in part, rooted in the corporeal body, we probably never will. Maybe if those cryogenetically frozen heads become re-attached to non-flesh bodies, then maybe these functions may become virtual – but that potentiality, itself, remains virtual!
16.
Michael Cipielewski | October 25, 2007 at 7:45 pm
POSTSCRIPT:
I can see how Rotman’s discussion of the serial and parallel lends itself to the discussion of singularity and the collective. On one hand, I am tempted to make a connection between the singular and serial, and the parallel and collective respectively. Undoubtedly Rotman makes the connection between the parallel, simultaneously and individually serial functioning collective (as a hybrid of the serial/parallel), but a reference to the “monadic thinking self of the collective” complicates the issue of responsibility. Was I referring to individual or collective responsibility in my response? I can say that the issue of responsibility, of ethics, is different for either of these.
And it recalls Nealon’s discussion of the corporation. (And I’ll try to stay away from any anti-corp discourse!) That is, the corporation as the “I”, the many, the “we” reversion back to the “I”… is it not a strange dynamic that the move from I to We is an inverse action? Ah, the collective I and the multiple self!
I do not think the user has agency over technology now. In fact, I think the idea of controlling technology is absurd in a certain sense; it is true that in a personal sphere, an individual can control which technologies they directly come in contact with (i.e., I’d never touch a PDA, or something to that effect. I see this attitude like a cloud over the Playstation, Xbox, and Wii respectively), but socially… these technologies are inescapable! So ideas of personal responsibility, social viscosity, and the like floods my mind. The individual plays only a small part in the collective – hive – mind, in the relationship to a single cell in the human body. A question of social versus personal responsibility surely follows. I’m not entirely convinced our circular relation to technology is a ethical question at all… is it not simply a social question?
17.
Kim Lacey | October 25, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Another point inspired Clay: It is always strange to me how we feel that blog postings and comments are enclosed/private, although are easily accessible/public by following endless hyperlinks or simple Google searches. And then, what’s private when it is made public? Obviously the comments on our class blog are presumably meant for our class purposes; but even as I was searching for the article Jule sent around, this blog was the fourth “hit.” Anyway, this occurrence (the “private” blog comment) is making me think through Rotman a bit more deeply, and how our divided selves are truly different (censored? not at all?) in these online spaces–are we, essentially, reinventing the “I”? I’m not sure that reinvention is the right term, but perhaps multiplying or dividing would be a better one (I think that referring back to what both Rotman and Michael were saying about MPD/DID is specific to this point).
Anyway, back to my original point, mea culpa–I should’ve asked you first, Clay…
18.
Kim Lacey | October 25, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Oops, that first line was supposed to read “Another point inspired BY Clay.”
And, yes, I’m done posting for the week…
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Katrina Newsom | October 27, 2007 at 3:49 am
Response to Jack:
When thinking about the emergence of the self as parallel or multifarious etc., I can’t help but ask is the becoming of the self a result of external influences or merely the emergence of adequate languages or tools that have made it possible to describe what has already existed? This may be a given. Arguably, the dualities that exist in our mind/soul/human essence (whatever we deem it) could possibly have changed because of external devices such as computers or other forms of media but also, it could simply reside in our ability to now name or acknowledge the multidimensional self(ves). So when thinking about the idea of the self in comparison to the Trinity (the duality of God) – I think about the fact that the idea of becoming may have existed outside of language, but not outside of action. With this stated, I want to refer to some scholars’ explanations of the contradiction inherent in the monotheism of Christianity. According to some scholars, the contradictions within the dualities of God (or the self) are not contradictions at all but are simply the different manifestations of God: the Abrahamic God, Jesus-the son of God (God in the flesh), and the Holy Spirit or the presence of God. Each of these manifestations function in different ways. I am in no way suggesting that this is a truth, but this can be applied to the self or the self as it functions within any given moment for any given reason. I may simply be repeating what you’ve already stated, but this is something that I also question.
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Sharon | November 27, 2007 at 9:44 pm
In “Ghost Effects,” Brian Rotman uses a semiotic framework to conceptualize God, mind, and infinity as concepts without referents. Rotman’s analysis places these ideas in the domain of the virtual. He uses semiotics to explain that these concepts do not refer to anything that is real, that they are merely the effects of language. I would like to challenge that way of thinking about the “ghosts” that emerge through communicative media by trying to connect those concepts to a larger framework of thought: the domain of human knowledge.
I have often heard it said that the defining essence of man is that of having language. Not until reading Brian Rotman’s work, “Ghosts,” have I heard that language is the defining essence of God.
Rotman writes: But, salient here is the explicit role of writing in the making of God . . .
What does Rotman mean when he writes this? I hope that I am mistaken in reading his text as stating that we are coming to the end of the age of faith before we have ever reached it in all its fullness.
Rotman’s brief analysis of ghosts and ghostly presences presents God as nothing more than a cultural artifact. The idea of God evolved through language over time, and thus, God has had many names. In the passage in which Rotman writes about the el that gives birth to the idea of isra-el, the champion of the God El, there is an insinuation that this kind of inconsistency indicates that there is something disingenuous or inauthentic about our ideas about God. He writes also of the discrepancies that can be read into the way that human beings have written about God, revealing how historical accounts of the Jewish people centered on the idea of God are riddled with contradiction. He writes:
Though framed as historical truth, presented as a single narrative with a unified meaning, understood as a continuous itinerary of the Jewish people as authored by Moses, chosen prophet and conduit of Yahweh’s word, biblical scholarship has demonstrated that the five books are nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an assemblage of diverse and at times contradictory texts by different hands, in different contexts, with different agendas, dating from circa 1000 to 500 BCE, re- written and augmented by priest-scribes with politico-theological purpose and rhetorical intent during and immediately after the Babylonian exile in the mid sixth century BCE.
I think it is still difficult to ascertain whether the contradictions that Rotman exposes point to a flaw in the object of the discourse, or whether they speak to the limits of human ability to represent in language ideas that may exist beyond the limit of our knowledge. In any case, it is evident that Rotman wants to draw our attention to the limits of language. Giorgio Agamben asks “what does it mean to see and expose the limits of language?” Agamben writes that “humans see the world through language but do not see language.“
What effect does language impose on our beliefs about what the world is? I think it is interesting that instead of explaining
So it may seem in the absence of faith that the idea of God exists only as a symbol in our culture. But does that fact alone put an end to that idea or does it do the opposite, open that idea up to its potentiality? I suppose that the answer to the question turns on what kind of philosopher takes it up. An idealist may be open to the immaterial possibilities that exist in the world, but to the materialist who regards matter as the only reality in the world, the idea of God, the soul, and the infinite are impossible. Who can say with certainty whether the material world is the world of true being, or whether it is, in itself, an illusion and the world of true being lies beyond the material reality of the world?
In the 17th century Descartes recognized limits in human perception and knowledge. His observations about differences between modes of perception and their connection to knowledge is telling here about this problem of God and language of which Rotman writes. And here I would think we would have to ask, is there a reality behind an idea, or do we simply believe that there are such things as ideas because we have invented a name for them and a philosophical discourse surrounding them. In other words, must an object have a material reality in order to exist? Descartes discussed at length the nature of the idea, classifying ideas as either adventitious, innate, or fictitious. These classifications are important, because it is through them that Descartes tried to determine the origin of the idea. An innate idea arises along with the creation of the mind, an adventitious idea arises from an external source, and a fictitious idea is a product of the imagination–it is the concept without a referent. Descartes analysis of the idea adds something to the mystery of concepts without referents. What comes of asking whether ideas about God and the infinite are innate? Descartes claims, in The Third Meditation, that ideas about God and self are innate. He pushes this idea further by ascertaining that different kinds of knowledge come from different ways of perceiving the world. Through the senses we perceive the sun as a very small object, but through the intellect we get a very different image of the sun. While Descarte’s reasoning about the existence of God takes us into solopism, it may still be productive for us in some way as it troubles the relationship between sense perception, thought, and knowledge.
If we follow Kommerell’s thinking on language and gesture, we may be less inclined to view the idea of the linguistic representation of God as evidence for or against God’s existence, bur rather, as evidence of the way in which language reaches its limit as it approaches ideas that lie beyond human experience, perception, and knowledge. The idea of the eternal whether it is expressed as God or the infinite is a mystery. The idea of the mystery leads us to what Kommerell refers to a “speechless” dwelling in language. Writing about Kommerell’s work, Agamben says that “there is a gesture that felicitously establishes itself in this emptiness of language and, without filling it, makes it into humankind’s most proper dwelling. Is he saying that that it is the aporias in language that make it possible? Agamben also writes about the connection between knowledge, language and revelation. He explains that “the proper sense of revelation is therefore that all human speech and knowledge has at its root and foundation an openness that infinitely transcends it. But at the same time, this openness concerns only language itself, its possibility and its existence.” I left this in quotes because I am still thinking about what import these statements have with regard to language, being, and knowledge. My question for discussion is why it is that Agamben, Rotman, and Kommerell make the same move in connecting their discussions about language to the idea of God.
Who can know once and for all “was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält.”