Becoming Beside Ourselves
Language: English
Published by Duke University Press, US, 2008
- Softcover
- New
Seller: Rarewaves USA United, HEBRON, KY, U.S.A.Rarewaves USA United
AbeBooks seller since June 20, 2025
Condition: New
£ 38.24
Quantity: Over 20 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum.The Ghost in Turing's Machine: exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In Becoming Beside Ourselves, Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West's dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as alphabetic texts have done for millennia.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.…
Seller Inventory # LU-9780822342007
- Title
- Becoming Beside Ourselves
- Author
- Brian Rotman
- Publisher
- Duke University Press, US
- Publication year
- 2008
- Condition
- New
- Binding
- Paperback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0822342006
- ISBN 13
- 9780822342007
- Item weight
- 318 grams
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.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
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.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Rarewaves USA United
HEBRON, KY, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since June 20, 2025
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