Your Brain on Writing
“Certainly, for at least the last half millennium,” writes Brain Rotman, “the very concept of a person has adhered to that of a ‘lettered self.” In Becoming Beside Ourselves: the Alphabet, Ghosts, and the Distributed Human Being, Rotman explores this paradigm of the soul—or at any rate its ruins. He follows a long line of thinkers in linking the notion of a certain kind of self—vigorous yet enduring, unitary yet disembodied—to alphabetic writing. Now the technologies of inscription are shifting again, rattling the old Cartesian cage where we live suspended by chains within a body.
Computer technology plays a Oz-like game—pay no attention to the code behind the curtain. We don’t really see what we read; instead we see an instantiation, a ghostly apparition, an avatar. Like Necker Cubes and Penrose Triangles, the figures on the screen can only be read from one narrow angle; shift one’s perspective, and the illusion breaks into irresolvable shards. Hyperlinks fracture the text; motion capture technology promises to make our very gestures into inscriptions. Add these to the shocks already delivered by photography, film, and the broadcast media, and it’s clear: “the regime of the alphabet,” in Rotman’s estimation, “appears to be drawing to a close.” The end of this regime looks like the fragmentation and distribution of the self, the parceling out and networking of that consciousness originally formed by writing. Of course, writing had already altered consciousness; the technologies that now emerge from it will alter that consciousness yet again, perhaps into forms unrecognizable to us from within writing’s regime.
Rotman’s book is fascinating, and my dialogue with it will continue as I write Urge of the Letter. But I’m not so sure that the alterations to consciousness made by technology proposes are as total or profound as thinkers from Ong to Rotman have thought. For all its abundant variation, natural selection is quite conservative. Successful adaptations need stable foundations; they’re likely to persist in the face of all but catastrophic conditions. Humankind, curiously, had evolved to rely on mutability for its survival. Our intellectual flexibility, our cunning, tool-making, world-changing propensity, is itself an adaptation. And as such, it’s built to survive. Perhaps the forms it takes—from cave paintings and music to hieroglyphics and the alphabet to cloud computing and motion-capture—are the various expressions of a single (albeit composite) trait. If our number comes up—if the computers take over, or (far more likely) the byproducts of our technologies prove fatally toxic—the die will have been cast not in Alamagordo or Tokyo or Mountain View, but in the Rift Valley, Lascaux, and the Fertile Crescent.
That’s not to say I’m not hopeful. The barcode readers I mentioned in the previous post (on vyaz) prove that adaptive, conservative principle is still at work. In barcodes, we gave our computers an alphabet of their own; but we also design spectacles to read along. The magisterium of reading and writing isn’t broken—it’s expanding. To do so is in its nature—which is to say, it’s in our nature.
