Some thoughts on gesture

Hi Anna, I'm sorry that I can't make the reading group tonight but I have had some thoughts and questions regarding chapters 1 & 2 of the Brian Rotman book that I thought might be relevant... have a look, I think my questions are around the affects or afterlives of text. Best, Bridget

In Chapters 1 & 2 of Becoming Beside Ourselves, Brian Rotman sets up an analysis of the world in which we are governed by notation – specifically the alphabet. He suggests that the alphabet has constrained us by reducing (and confining) our experience into the shape and form of its letters, and as well as mediating our understanding of a text through these very forms. Therefore, his claim is that alphabetic writing captures us twofold – one, by reducing our experience to shapes or forms on a page, and two by limiting our understanding of a subject through the form of its notation. This leads Rotman to make the rather startling statement that the alphabet is non-gestural. He writes that:

…alphabetic writing eliminates all and any connection speech has to the body's gestures. One might object that handwritten alphabetic texts evade this total disjunction from gesture. ·Written emphasis, uncertainty, rhythm, discontinuity, stress, tailing off, and other scriptive traces of the body, might be said to be the handwriting correlates to certain rudimentary forms of vocal gestures.
(Rotman, p. 25-6)

Rotman therefore articulates a division between the alphabet (stillness, notation) and the expressive nature of the body (gesture). He later extends this to a division between alphabetic writing and digital forms of “writing” such as motion capture technologies, which he suggests are able to return gesture to writing by utilizing a more kinetic and movement based approach to writing through the use of motion capture and other digital technologies.

I am curious about this division that Rotman makes between alphabetic writing as reducing the gesture and expressiveness of speech, and digital technologies as having the capacity for a true or real expression of the voice. So my initial question is: how is alphabetic writing gestural?

Q. How can alphabetic writing be gestural?

Immediately, I read the passages (pp.25-6, and later 49-53 ish) in which Rotman discusses alphabetic writing and gesture, and what he calls the “gesturo-haptic resources of the digital” (p.49) – I thought of three wildly divergent things:

1. The work of concrete poets who explore exactly this question in their use of typography and other forms of notation to experiment with the way in which alphabetic writing or notation is gestural. Examples might include Dom Silvester Houdard (whose work you’ve included on the blog already) and Bob Cobbing.
2. I also thought of passages in Cornelius Cardew’s “Treatise Handbook” in which he writes of the joy of discovering an expressive system of notation to give form to his music, writing in a note on the score itself that: “the sound should be a picture of the score and not vice versa.”
3. And finally, I thought of a series of drawings by an Australian artist Christian Capurro (Compress, 2001-ongoing) in which he erases images from a magazine leaving not the image of what has been erased but what is produced on an underlying page by the pressure of the act of erasure. While this is not alphabetic writing per say as he erases images, it suggests to me the way in which a form such as writing or an image goes off into the world and produces its own set of actions and affects that might take us unawares. So that the drawings that comprise this series are the accidental product of a kind of automatic writing and are produced as an affect of another action.

…and this final thought leads me to the question of ghosts and as I haven’t yet read Chapter 5: Ghost Effects, I’m hoping that those that attend the reading group this evening might have some thoughts to contribute on this subject!

So just to round off by saying that I'm not sure that I agree with the clear division that Rotman seems to make between the digital as being more able to express the gestural and kinetic nature of gesture than older more analogue forms of notation because I think that art and experimental poetry practices have shown us how the alphabet and other forms of notation might lift off the page in their own gestural expression (if that doesn't sound too fanciful?).