Description
Book SynopsisPresents 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.
Trade Review“
Becoming Beside Ourselves is a bold, provocative, and highly original argument about the relation between medial effects and changing manifestations of subjectivity. It traces a sweeping trajectory from what Brian Rotman calls the ‘lettered self,’ associated with alphabetic inscription and the codex printed book, to the subject as distributed assemblage associated with network culture. While others have made parts of this kind of argument before, Rotman’s analysis is unique in placing special emphasis on gesture and revealing its traces in orality and print. In a brilliant synthesis, he mixes evolutionary theory with a Deleuzian view of agent-as-assemblage, arguing that computational media both reveal and perform distributed cognition as a crucial aspect of human being-in-the-world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the interrelations between computational media, contemporary subjectivity, and human evolution.”—
Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles
“Brian Rotman’s exciting new text not only adds to his previous work on signifying technology (zero, infinity), it expands his study of abstraction to encompass the construction of subjectivity itself.
Becoming Beside Ourselves will open up all kinds of unexplored terrains, from grammatology to psychoanalysis, from the history of technology to the study of culture and religion.”—
Fredric Jameson, Duke University
Table of ContentsForeword: Machine Bodies, Ghosts, and Para-Selves: Confronting the Singularity with Brian Rotman / Timothy Lenoir ix
Preface xxxi
Acknowledgments xxxv
Aura xxxvii
Introduction: Lettered Selves and Beyond 1
Part I
1. The Alphabetic Body 13
2. Gesture and Non-Alphabetic Writing 33
Interlude
3. Technological Mathematics 57
Part II
4. Parallel Selves 81
5. Ghost Effects 107
Notes 139
References 151
Index 163
