Reply to Bridget's thoughts on gesture

I think that's a really interesting quote you picked up on about the possibility of handwriting containing gesture, he goes on to say:

But the effect, to the extent it exists, is tenuous and not uniform enough to serve any reliable communicative function. In any event, it was effectively eliminated from public texts with the arrival of printing and increasingly from private ones by typewriting. (p26)

I found this really puzzling especially given that he allows gesticulation, eye movements while speaking and even the use of a computer mouse to be part of his repository of 'gesture' and embodiment of language, and yet does not include handwriting and typing. It seems he has already decided that anything used to arrange letters in order or on the page cannot be gestural, and yet as you point out there are many examples in concrete poetry and scoring where gesture and expression are precisely foregrounded through written forms of words or notation. 

Rotman seems to view alphabetic writing solely as a poor copy or score for speech. Where he does allow it a power of its own to create abstract and imagined realms he casts it in a negative light - as an undesirable byproduct he terms 'ghost effect' (his examination of the disembodied subject, mathematical infinity and monotheistic religion in Chapter 5). He doesn't entertain the possibility that this capacity for abstraction might offer a powerful and extraordinary possibility for mediation through which both meaning and texture might be delivered back to us magnified and through which something new might be discovered or created (although he does suggest that this happens within mathematics). He sees literature as an attempt to redress a lack, not as a positive creative form:

....the history of reading is the history of redressing what writing fails to represent. Or, the same thing, the history of writing consists principally of attempts to find readable equiva­lents and alternatives to the vocal prosody necessarily absent from it. Lack­ing vocal gesture, writing was obliged to construct its own modes of force, its own purely textual sources of affect, which it accomplished through two dialectically opposed - or better, co-evolutionary -principles of cre­ation: transduction (the discourses of narrative prose) and mimesis (the voices of poetic diction). (p27)

And a final thought on linearity which he also lays at the alphabet's door: although a text is usually presented on the page, and read, linearly, he doesn't consider the fact that texts are rarely written linearly since what writing enables is a dialogue between writer, idea and text that flows back and forth through revision. It seems that speech is actually the more linear form since it flows out of a mouth in time - its creation and delivery occurring simultaneously.