Brian Rotman: Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (2008)

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.

With a Foreword by Timothy Lenoir
Publisher Duke University Press, 2008
ISBN 0822342006, 9780822342007
176 pages

Commentary (Ben Pritchett, Mute)
Review (Stevan Harnad, Times Literary Supplement)

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Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000)

“Drawing together many histories — of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores — Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction — from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton’s Nadja — finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.”

Publisher Penguin, 2000
ISBN 0670882097, 9780670882090
326 pages

Reviews: Andrew O’Hehir (Salon), Joseph Anthony Amato (Journal of Social History).

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Paolo Plotegher, Manuela Zechner, Bue Rübner Hansen (eds.): Nanopolitics Handbook (2013)

The invention of new modes of sensibility is vital to enriching and sustaining political engagements, labours and lives in the situated contexts of urban collectivity. The nanopolitics handbook investigates the neoliberal city and workplace, the politics of crisis and austerity, precarious lives and modes of collaboration – through bodies and their encounters. Starting from the exploration of what bodies can do – with curiosity, courage and care – nanopolitics is a proposal for producing new collective subjectivations.

Based on the experiments and experiences of the nanopolitics group, this book proposes exercises, concepts and ideas as little maps and machines for action. Drawing on social movements, grassroots organizing, dance, theatre and bodywork, the reflections and practices here present strategies for navigating and reconfiguring the playing field of ‘nanopolitics’, activating its entanglement with the major politics of our time.

Texts and exercises by: the nanopolitics group, esquizo-barcelona, David Vercauteren, Camila Mello and Fabiane Borges, Nelly Alfandari, Jorge Goia, Lottie Child, Carla Bottiglieri, Gabriella Alberti, Paolo Plotegher, Davyd Bodoun, Emma Dowling, Mara Ferreri, Manuela Zechner, Bue Rübner Hansen, Amit Rai, Anja Kanngieser, Lisa Burger, Irina Burger and Signe Lupnov.

Publisher Minor Compositions, 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
ISBN 9781570272684
280 pages

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