Theology and Reading
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 52, No. 2 – Spring 2010
Managing Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Brian Rotman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 176+. xxxiv pages. softcover, $21.95.
In the age of Facebook, iTunes, World of Warcraft, avatars, and many other digital-social formats, the world is becoming a rapidly shrinking stage. Where does this leave the individual? How, in the digital age, can personhood be defined? In Becoming Beside Ourselves, Brian Rotman explores the entailments of techne upon human psyche in both the present-archaic alphabet age and the present- nouveaux digital age.
The current volume is the third part of a Rotman trilogy dealing with the “nature and functioning of certain signs and the writing practices associated with them” (xxxi). The first two books, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (1993) and Ad Infinitum . . . The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In (2000), are briefly discussed in a foreword by Timothy Lenior and the preface by Rotman. Each discussion serves as a reader’s guide to the thought of the trilogy and the place of the current volume within it.
The crux of this book is Rotman’s distinction of “I” (the first person singular pronoun) throughout the ages. Rotman argues that the understanding of “I” has changed through the course of human history, and that understanding has always been a result of the medium in which it was used (xxxii). Rotman distinguishes four mediums: “a gestural self-pointing ‘I’; an ‘I’ spoken in language; an inscribed ‘I’ within alphabetic writing; and a digital ‘I,’ a self-enunciation within contemporary network media” (xxxiii). In other words, there is a distinction to be made concerning self-awareness brought about by the different media employed in human history: gesture, speech, writing, and digital. For Rotman, the purest form of human communication lies in the nexus between gesture and speech (23). It is the prosody the two create that becomes lost when one moves to writing (25). The loss of prosody, the gestures and use of the body, (i.e. body language, during speech), is the consequence of accepting alphabetic writing as the favored, dominant medium (27). Only a networked, digital medium which envelops a person into the haptic, visual, auditory, and temporal world of the communicator is able to allow humans to regain a sense of “I” which earlier humans enjoyed before the creation of the alphabet. In fact, according to Rotman, digital medium allows for the fullness of speech-gesture communication with the permanence of writing (43).
Interestingly, whether he realizes it or not, Rotman describes each subsequent change in media as a loss of something important and valuable in the previous one. That is, the evolution of media produces a worse result than it previously held. For instance, gesture, though it is limited in its ability to disclose information, nevertheless is free from linguistic constraints which the coded words of speech must subsequently wrestle with (19). Likewise, writing lacks the intonation and overall prosody of speech (25). for Rotman, only digital media enables one the freedom to express without constraint. It liberates the “I” to a parallel self, a “para-human” which is present in many realities, all attributable to the digital, virtual world (103). This progress is a twisted Darwinian process at best and is troublesome for an argument which aims to advance “I” to an evolutionary ultimate (136–37).
By Rotman’s own admittance, the center portion of the book is somewhat disconnected with the rest of the book, and may be passed over by non-mathematical readers. Rotman’s self analysis is accurate, and we will omit critique of it here. Those interested with the mathematical consequences of Rotman’s argument will, nonetheless, find chapter three helpful.
The second portion of the book attempts to wrest the understanding of “I” from the medium of the alphabet, (i.e. writing), and place it under the full discretion of digital communication. In refuting the alphabet’s several millennialong dominance, Rotman describes what he calls “ghosts” of each medium. For writing, the ghosts are the 1) Jewish mono-divinity, 2) the Greek notion of the mind, and 3) the mathematical explanation of infinity. Each of these ghosts, according to Rotman, are creations derived from Western society’s dependence upon an alphabet (113–14). Much space is devoted to the discussion of these ghosts.
Deep into the volume, the reader may be uncertain as to whether Rotman is making his claims of the para-human as a means to lament the current virtual age or to extol its virtues. In chapter four the reader no longer has doubts: “We can, I believe, embrace the para-human, to begin—haltingly, with confusion, pain, wonder, inevitable resistance, nostalgia, feelings of loss and dread, and moments of intense liberating pleasure, not to say joy and surprise—to become plural ‘I’s able to be beside ourselves in ways we’re only just starting to recognize and feel the need to narrate,” (104–05).
Rotman’s basic premise of the digital “I” is misguided. What he takes to be “virtual” is better described as “artificial.” While taking writing to be a distortion of speech, he forgets the reason for its genesis, that is, to establish in a more permanent media what speech could not. Once an utterance is spoken, it is gone. Writing records human language as least as long as the media on which it is recorded is preserved. Digital media, on the other hand, is able to be “motion captured” (46), but its successful public acceptance has been due to its ease of manipulation. Digital media only conveys a sense of a certain “I” so long as trust has first been established between the communicator and its recipient. Once the trust is betrayed, virtual “I” becomes artificial “I.” Consider the new Facebook regulations released in 2009, online sexual predators, the internet technology market bubble, and real-time stock trading. In each case, trust has been betrayed, and the public has retracted considerably from digital “I.”
Also, Rotman recognizes that the virtual world is enabled by electronic technologies (111). However, no discussion is given to the dependence of virtual “I” upon electrical energy. Virtual “I” exists as a result of digital technology, but digital technology may be ended with the flip of a switch. Digital is wholly dependent upon energy, thus virtual “I” is dependent upon an uninterrupted energy supply. If this supply is disturbed, virtual “I” reveals its true artificial nature. Consider New orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. The entire world was aware of the plight of the victims trapped in the city because of the digital media which conveyed it. However, those in the city, those most directly affected, had less understanding of their situation than those who were half a world away. Their “para-human” self was eliminated.
Rotman’s true purpose for the book is revealed in its final pages, that is, an end to theism (136–37). While space limits a full defense of theism here (and as a Baptist pastor, the temptation is difficult to avoid), a few notes may be made. First, if Rotman is correct, and writing is responsible for creating monotheism, then the new digital age, which will usher out the alphabetic age (137), will see the final and welcome end of theism. So, is Rotman then suggesting that the only sword which will bring death to theism is illiteracy? This seems to be the case. Also, the atheistic, virtual world which Rotman imagines seems less attractive than the old-fashioned, theistic, alphabetic one he desires to end. Rotman heralds, through digital media, the invasion of another’s mind, invasion of another’s actions, and sex-at-a-distance, including “pseudo-masturbation, an indirect self-pleasuring enacted through another’s body” (46–47).
Rotman sees the distributed para-human as a foregone conclusion. Perhaps the current Great Recession of 2009 will cause him to reconsider.
