Brian Rotman - Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being

We will be reading three chapters from this book for the first reading group meeting on Wednesday 13th February:
Chapter 1 - The Alphabetic Body
Chapter 2 - Gesture and Non-alphabetic Writing
Chapter 5 - Ghost Effects

To book a place and to receive a copy of the text via email please click here

A synopsis:

"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 the alphabet did centuries ago. 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.

Rameses III mortuary temple

The last DSH reference for today...
'Between Poetry and Painting' is published in Occasional Papers' new book Notes From the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard 

Massin's 1964 edition of La Cantatrice Chauve by Eugene Ionesco

Another reference from Dom Sylvester Houédard's 'Between Painting and Poetry'

 

 

Pattern poems and a Proteus poem by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius (4th century AD)

Whilst re-reading Between Poetry and Painting by Dom Sylvester Houédard and searching the internet for his visual references I found pattern poems and Proteus poems by Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius.

An essay by J Stephan Edwards 'The Carmina of Pubilius Optatianus Porhyrius and the Creative Process' explains:

Optatianus produced three distinct types of poetry, two of which are imitations of earlier forms, and one type that was an original creation. Taken as a body of work, the Carmina are part of an evolving tradition of poetry known as technopaignion. This type of poetry is meant to display the skill of the writer for arranging words in a complex way so as to create either a visual pattern with the verses themselves, known as pattern poetry, or to conceal a text within the poem for the reader to ‘puzzle out,’ or versus intexti. A limited number of pattern poems pre–date Optatianus’ work, most originating in Greece. Simmias and Theocritus are the best known creators of Greek pattern poetry. Optatianus’ pattern poems are probably a continuation of that Greek tradition and represent the genesis of his creative process. Similarly, Optatianus also wrote one known proteus poem, the words of which can be re–arranged to create new verses while maintaining the established poetic meter. There are no known examples of versus intexti prior to Optatianus, so that he is thus credited with having invented that form. He did so with amazing virtuosity. The intexti vary from simple acrostics to complex patterns that produce a graphic design within the text of the poem, a kind of self–contained illustration. As further evidence of his remarkable skill, a number of the poems also contain proteus poems, while others have intexti that can be transliterated from Latin to Greek. A minority of the poems goes so far as to incorporate all of these elements into one carmen, a masterful achievement of skill and inventiveness.

An essay by Florian Cramer 'Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet'  goes on to talk about the 'Proteus' poem Carmen XXV in more detail:

I Ardua componunt felices carmina Musae
II dissona conectunt diversis vincula metris
III scrupea pangentes torquentes pectora vatis
IV undique confusis constabunt singula verbis

 All words printed in the first and the fourth column of the poem and all words in the second and third make up two sets of words which can be arbitarily shuffled with each other.  The words in the fifth column are fixed, thereby ensuring that the poem will remain hexametric despite its words shuffling.....  In its initial notation, or state, the poem tells of dysharmonic junctions, uneven meters, rough tones and confused words tormenting the singer.  Optatianus Porfyrius, an important formal innovator of European pattern poetry, makes his poem an aesthetic self-reflection which, jumbling its own words, performs and confuses itself simultaneously. Optatianus’ Carmen XXV became paradigmatic for poetry when Julius Caesar Scaliger coined the term “Proteus verse” for word permutation poems in his 1561 Poetices, and made them a canonical poetical form for the century to come.

Cratylus - an oblique starting point

Liquid Consonant (production still), 2012

Language is an inexhaustible subject and material resource in Anna Barham’s process of making. Her fascination with the combinatory possibilities that systems of signs, such as alphabets, offer to produce language, have found in Plato’s Cratylus a ground for further investigation and, in turn, new artistic production. In Cratylus, Plato sets up a fictional dialogue that investigates the ‘correctness of names’, wondering how a particular combination of letters came to be chosen to represent a given object. In a climactic passage of one of the text’s central arguments, Socrates and Hermogenes, while acknowledging the vastness of the task, perform a methodological exercise allowing them to divide a series of words into letters whose pronunciations appear to somehow describe, through sound, the very object that the words stand for. And words suddenly appear to them as encoded descriptions of objects. Socrates thus compares the construction of language to painting, suggesting that “it’s just the same as it is with painters. When they want to produce a resemblance, they sometimes use only purple, sometimes another colour, and sometimes – for example, when they want to paint human flesh or something of that sort – they mix many colours, employing the particular colour, I suppose, that their particular subject demands”.[i]

It is the discussion of the letter rho (Ρ,ρ), which specifically motivated Barham in this new body of work. According to Socrates, rho imitates motion because “the tongue is most agitated and least at rest in pronouncing this letter”[ii] and can thus be found in Greek words in which movement has an essential role (flowing, flow, trembling, whirling etc). In her own language Barham traced the presence of rho in the phonetic notion of a “rhotic consonant”[iii]. In the artist’s mind, “rhotic” subtly slipped into “erotic”, leading her to appropriate the Greek words cited by Socrates in order to act out their pronunciation and hear their sounds through the sensual lips of a digitally animated mouth.

While rho shifts between words in Socrates’ argument, lines made of combinations of words rhythmically germinate, letters playfully changing places, to reveal endless series of anagrams in Barham’s texts, which she presents in the various forms of drawings, video animations, publications, performances and sound pieces. To elucidate his argument, Socrates manipulates a series of words and takes the reader on a journey through which he demonstrates how letters are transformed by the mouth of the speaker into sounds that travel between different nouns, verbs and adjectives. The aural and gestural quality of words as they emerge in Cratylus undoubtedly resonates with Barham’s labyrinthine journeys through anagrams that she has travelled numerous times, never able to exhaust the possibilities of creating new shapes, sounds and, in turn, meaning, out of a single sentence.

Socrates’ search for the etymological origins of words appears as an endeavour driven simultaneously by the rigour of science and the creativity of poetics. Thought through the lens of Barham’s practice, his attempt to “apply each letter to what it resembles”[iv] evokes a performative act. Through his dialogue with Hermogenes and Cratylus, Socrates unfolds his argument as a trail of thought, questioning the possibility for his speech to make sense. He envisages the possibility that his ideas might be considered absurd. In this context, his rhetorical construction deploys itself on the edge between sense and non-sense. It might be this very possibility of lacking sense, of falling into the realm of fiction, which, from a contemporary perspective, positions his speech at the undecided limit between art and philosophy.


[i] Plato, Cratylus, 424d
[ii] Cratylus,426e
[iii] In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho.
[iv] Cratylus 424d

Vanessa Desclaux, 2012

Cratylus - 1979 Sao Paulo Bienal

Cratylus was used as the title for a British Arts Council exhibition held at the Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo as part of the 1979 Bienal.  Subtitled The English Artist and the Word, the exhibition featured the work of Ian Breakwell, John Furnival, Dom Sylvester Houédard http://collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artist/5/17691, Jeff Instone, David Leverett, Tom Philips.

Online translation of Cratylus

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0172%3atext%3dCrat.

Socrates

Reference and Symbol in Plato's Cratylus and Kuukai's Shojijissogi

An essay by T.P. Kasulis

"Early in its development, a philosophical tradition will consider the nature of language, for language is after all, the medium of philosophical expression. To be truly philosophical, an enquiry must have at least a rudimentary theory about the relationship between words and nonlinguistic reality.  This does not mean that every cultural tradition will make the same initial decision about this relationship.  We only require that a preliminary theory of language be logically consistent and a reasonable reflection of at least some aspect of language as used in everyday life.  This paper examines the pioneering Western and Japanese philosophies of language as presented in Plato's Cratylus and Kuukai's Shojijissogi (the Significance of Sound-Word-Reality). We will find similar questions asked in these two works, as well as dissimilar answers.  The comparisons and contrasts will suggest some general observations about the nature of comparative philosophy."
Continue reading at http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/kasulis3.htm

Push/Pull, Graves Gallery, Sheffield

Information Landscapes - Muriel Cooper / Visible Language Workshop, MIT 1994

Suppose I call a man a horse, or a horse a man

Site Gallery - Artist in Residence

9 February to 23 March 2013

Words and letters form the substance and subject of Barham’s work.  She uses them like a malleable material, fascinated by their unruly and feral potential for meaning.   Ideas of the collaborative nature of language and the possible relationship between sound and meaning will provide the starting point for a series of events and a new body of work, which she will produce during her residency at Site.    

The title of the residency, Suppose I call a man a horse, or a horse a man is taken from Plato’s Cratylus, where Plato creates a fictional conversation about the correctness of names, wondering how a particular combination of letters came to be chosen to represent a given object.  This text was also the starting point for a recently produced animation Liquid Consonant, 2012 which will be screened throughout the residency. The main gallery will be occupied by a modular structure Barham has designed specially for the space and from which she will host a series of discussions and events as well as using it as the site of production for a new HD video work.

With a practice spanning performance poetry to drawing and video, words and the rules that govern them provide a central creative thread for Barham. From their logic on a page; their dissection into component parts; the way they sound as they roll off the tongue; and their anagrammatic qualities, even a single sentence can provide infinite creative possibilities. The philosophical questions that language provokes interact with its plastic and material qualities, and the work that Barham makes plays inside this gap, testing the limits of how far words can be stretched from their original meanings. 

Events:

Residency launch: Saturday 9th February 11am-1pm 

In-conversation brunch with Anna Barham, Bridget Crone, independent writer and curator, Richard D Steadman Jones, researcher of the history of ideas, University of Sheffield and Laura Sillars, Artistic Director, Site Gallery.  

Reading Group: Wednesdays 13 February, 6 March, 20 March

Exploring texts on the ideas of language and philosophy that touch Anna’s work. 

Screenings and Discussions:

Throughout the project Anna will be organising more events as her research unfolds. 

Closing Party: Friday 22nd March 2013, 6pm - 8pm