Motion capture technology...?

Hi Anna, responding just one last time to the Rotman... and his mention of motion capture technologies and our discussion of gesture.

I like this image (above) very much. It is an image of Vsevolod Meyerhold's system of biomechanics. In short, biomechanics was a rigorous training system through which Meyerhold sought to standardise and refine the movements of the body to act as a kind of language. By establishing these "etudes", Meyerhold wanted to establish a system of communication through isolating and slowing down movement in order that these gestures could express certain actions, intentions and be understood. 

Meyerhold wanted to breakdown the illusion of theatre in order to show its mechanical structures and he included the body and language within this. There's some fantastic images of the way in which he achieved this breaking down of the illusion of theatre by extending the stage into the auditorium and showing the mechanical workings of the sets etc.. 

But in terms of language, I think Meyerhold's interest in the body as a kind of machine (evident in the rigorous training his actors undertook, for example) is particularly interesting in relation to the question of motion capture technologies, because here (in the image above) we see the body capturing movement as a form of language much in the manner in which Rotman suggests motion capture or kinetic technologies might do. And therefore, we can consider the photographs of these movements to be a kind of notation or alphabet (in Rotman's terms).

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.

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?).

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.