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Notes
1 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p.39.
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. C. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Blackwell: Oxford, 1980), p.22e.
3 Gilles Chatelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, trans. Robert Shaw and Muriel Zagha (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), p.9. Chatelet offers a complex and extensive archeology of mathematical thought as embodied meditation, principally in relation to geometry and the mathematization of space, in terms of diagrams and gestures. For a fuller description of his ideas see Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: the Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp.35-38 and references there.
4 David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p.64.
5 Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Casare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p.57.
6 From the Palatine Anthology, quoted in Alan L. Boegehold, When a Gesture was Expected: a Selection of Examples from Archaic and Classical Greek Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.47.
7 Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends, pp.59-60.
8 Antonio Negri, ‘It's a Powerful Life: a Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy’, Cultural Critique, 57 (2004), p.164.
9 In line with general usage, I write ‘language’ and ‘speech’ as synonyms. This is incorrect since gestural systems of communication used by the deaf, such as ASL, though not speech are certainly languages. In what follows I've allowed the context to eliminate any possible confusion.
10 There is a plethora of theories of the origin of language. Among contemporary accounts which locate it in gesture, besides Terrence Deacon (The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997)) considered here, one might mention the very different approaches and frameworks of Armstrong et al (Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)), Micahel C. Corbalis (From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002)) and Robin Dunbar (Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)). For two marvelously rich early modern encounters with the semiotics of gesture see John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, or a Dissection of the Affections of the Minde (London, 1649), and Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand. Composed of the Speaking Motions and Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: or The Art of Manuall Rhetoricke. Consisting of the Naturall Expressions digested by art in the Hand as the chiefest Instrument of Eloquence (London, 1664).
11 Tim Lenoir, ‘Machinic Bodies, Ghosts, and Para-Selves: Confronting the Singularity with Brian Rotman’, Foreword to Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: the Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p.xxi.
12 Elena Antinoro Pizzuto and Micaela Capobianco, ‘Is Pointing “just” Pointing: Unraveling the Complexity of Indexes in Spoken and Signed Discourse’, Gesture, 8:1 (2008), p.85.
13 What I'm calling the Me is a gross simplification which lumps together the sequence of selves during infancy elaborated by Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: a view from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic, 1985). The sequence – emergent self, core self, subjective self – that precedes the verbal self of speech are not stages, like Freud's oral, anal, genital stages of sexuality, Stern emphasizes, but co-existent domains which, though each ‘prepares’ for its successor, continue to operate according to their own autonomous logic after the onset of speech.
14 Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species, p.454.
15 Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Merlin Donald, ‘Mimesis and the Executive Suite: Missing Links in Language Evolution’, in James R. Hurford et al, Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.44-67.
16 For an illuminating analysis of the affective political/ideological work of gesticulation and its auditory cognates as these are manifest in the speech of Ronald Reagan, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp.39-42.
17 See David McNeill, Hand and Mind.
18 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989), p.201.
19 David McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p.104.
20 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Answering for Sense’, trans. Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy, eds James J. Bono, Tim Dean and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (New York: Fordam University Press, 2008), p.86.
21 See Charles Saunders Peirce, ‘Virtual’, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed. James Mark Baldwin (New York: Macmillan, 1902). An elaboration of Peirce's definition of virtual X as well as its connection to Deleuze's conceptualization of the virtual is to be found in my ‘Ghost Effects/Virtual X’, in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ulrik Ekman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, to appear).
22 Besides being virtualized within speech as tone, haptic gestures also inflect purely visual gestures: ‘Even communicative gestures that are purely performed “in the air” exhibit features that bear the mark of haptic communication: for instance, the deceleration that is required for the soft landing of a process’. Paul Brouissac, ‘The Optic, Haptic, and Acoustic Dimensions of Gesture: Evolutionary Significance and methodological Implications’, conference paper, Berlin Gesture Center, Interdisziplinares BGC-Kolloquium, 6 November 2006.
23 The fold is a crucial concept in the philosophical system of Gilles Deleuze, precisely as the making of an inside by folding the outside onto itself. And, not coincidentally, folding is a fundamental biological activity creating an inside within bodies, as part of their production, for example when the hollow sphere of embryonic cells enters itself (gastrulation), or when the neural tube is formed from a sheet of cells. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
24 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), p.226.
25 One might note here that Jahweh's enunciation ‘I am’ is not without affect if we include what is conveyed by syntactical as opposed to vocal means: clearly the enunciation resounds with ‘being’. See chapter 5 of my Becoming Beside Ourselves for a fuller discussion of the Israelite and Greek encounters with alphabetic writing (and the metaphysical consequences thereof) and their juxtaposition to the post-alphabetic self mentioned below.
26 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p.451.
27 Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, A B C: the Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (San Francisco: North Point, 1988), p.128.
28 The succession of mediations here in no way implies that each eliminates or makes obsolete what it virtualizes. Writing didn't overthrow speech, obsolesce it, render it redundant or cause it to be marginal, but on the contrary, enhanced and transformed oral subjectivity. Likewise speech, far from abandoning gesture as a relic of pre-linguistic communication, facilitates ever-new gesturo-haptic ceremonies and rituals. Homo gesticulator did not become extinct with speech or writing, but is alive and well not only within oral thought, but as the source of thought, affect and subjectivities outside speech and alphabetic texts – in music, games, theatre, dance, the plastic arts, cinema, architecture and mathematics.
29 Steven Connor, ‘A Few Don'ts (And Dos) By a Cultural Phenomenologist’, < http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/cp/extimacy.htm> [15/06/2008].
30 Mark Federman, ‘The Ephemeral Artifact: Visions of cultural experience’, < www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/EphemeralArtefact.pdf> [15/12/2005], p.8.
31 Derek De Kerckhove, ‘Communication on Evolution: Social and Technological Transformation’, < www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/article_communicationevolution.htm> [15/04/2006].
A great deal more needs to be added to these fragmentary remarks about touch and the gesturo-haptic in the computational universe. A sustained, critical engagement with the question of digital corporeality – ‘how primordial tactility interjects technics into human life’ – focused on the sense of touch and framed within a Merleau Pontyian phenomenology, is the subject of Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge, 2006).
32 For more on this see ‘Virtual X/Ghost Effects’ referred to in note 21.