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)

Publisher
Google books

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Catherine Karen Roy: File-based Autobiographies After 1989 (2011)

“This study analyzes four autobiographical accounts written after the fall of the Berlin Wall by former data subjects, i.e., by individuals who have been under the surveillance of the East German Stasi (Staatssicherheit). Following a suggestion by Cornelia Vismann, I refer to these texts as “file-based autobiographies.” The term reflects the fact that they were written in response to the opening of the Stasi archives and the passing of the Stasi Files Act, which allowed data subjects to access their files. By constructing narratives using files written and compiled by informers and secret police officials rather than relying on their own, personal memories, these data subjects challenge the traditional aesthetics of autobiographies and subvert the usual expectations of autobiographical reading. “File-based autobiographies” constitute nothing less than a new autobiographical sub-genre. Rather than offering a personal story that begins in early childhood and ends later in life, data subjects engage in a revision of their lives using files written by a hostile third party. The four case studies show how people under surveillance may need to draw on such documents, even if they are inaccurate, in order to support their claims of authenticity and thus fulfill the autobiographical pact. In this way, these autobiographers acquire and re-functionalize the hostile documents, thus challenging the original purposes for which the files were kept. They show that using their files not only results in unexpected memory processes, but is also a political and literary process that supports their personal agendas and targets particular audiences. Access to and subsequent use of their files gives them the authority to discuss their reaction to the opening of the Stasi files as well as the records themselves.”

Doctoral thesis
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, October 2011
230 pages

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Ian James: The New French Philosophy (2012)

This book gives a critical assessment of key developments in contemporary French philosophy, highlighting the diverse ways in which recent French thought has moved beyond the philosophical positions and arguments which have been widely associated with the terms ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’. These developments are assessed through a close comparative reading of the work of seven contemporary thinkers: Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle.

The book situates the writing of each philosopher in relation to earlier traditions of French thought. In differing ways, these philosophers decisively distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which dominated so much twentieth-century thought in order to rethink philosophical conceptions of materiality, worldliness, shared embodied existence and human agency or subjectivity. They thereby open the way for a radical renewal of the claims, possibilities and transformative power of philosophical thinking itself.

This book will be an indispensable text for students of philosophy and for anyone interested in current developments in philosophy and social thought.

Publisher Polity, April 2012
ISBN 0745648053, 9780745648057
220 pages

review (Marjorie Gracieuse, review31)
review (Shelly Walia, Spectrum)

publisher
google books

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