Chapter 1 The Alphabetic Body

 

1       the alphabetic West

2       human gesture

3       emblem gestures

4       gesticulation

5       gestures of the voice

6       writing speech

7       textual brains

 

1     The alphabetic West

For Victor Hugo “Human society, the world, the whole of mankind is in the alphabet”. Not quite. The Chinese system of writing speech is logographic, its characters notate morphemes, the smallest meaningful sounds, rather than the alphabet’s meaningless phonemes. The Japanese use a mixture of morpheme and phoneme-based systems. Neither of these cultures figured largely in Hugo’s view of the world, but for western civilization his trumpeting of the alphabet makes perfect sense: each of the two originating worlds, Judaic and Greek, which have respectively determined the West’s religio-ethical and techno-rational/artistic horizons, was indeed created out of an encounter with a system of alphabetic writing.[i]

 

 

The encounters could not have occurred in more different social, historical, cultural, economic, religious, and intellectual milieus: ‘cattle-herding semi-nomad’ Israelites against slave-owning denizens of the Greek polis; agricultural exchange versus a monetized economy; scribe-priest control of writing versus a distributed citizen literacy; tribal kingdoms versus the militarized city state; fixation on a single written corpus defining a religio-ethnic identity against an expanding ecology of literary and philosophical writings.

 

The Israelite encounter produced the transcendental Jewish God inhabiting a holy text, the sacred scroll of the Talmud or Five Books of Moses, a “library” of texts comprising “the verse of nomadic people, popular and religious songs of all sorts, mythical tales based on the cosmogony of the Middle East, oral traditions concerning national origins, prophecies, legislative and sacerdotal documents bearing ... liturgical pieces, annals or chronicles, collections of proverbs written down long after their first appearance, ... , tales and romanticized fiction.” [Martin 1994, 103-4] The Greek encounter produced theatrical mimesis, deductive logic and an invisible, disembodied Mind which has since its inception determined the relation of ‘thinking’ to ‘writing’ embedded in and transmitted by the founding texts of western philosophical discourse. Each of these encounters and their metaphysical import will occupy us later (chapter 5).

Different alphabets were involved. Greek (its Romanized form now worldwide) created circa 800 BCE when the Greeks modified the Phoenician consonantal alphabet by adding letters for vowels plus some consonants; Hebrew, used by the Israelites from circa 1000 BCE, thought also to be derived from Phoenician and, like it, voweless. Whereas vowels were necessary to inscribe Greek, a language which used them to register grammatical differences, Hebrew, a tri-consonantal semitic language, could be written without them. Plainly, the two alphabets will involve different writing/reading practices and be amenable to different uses.[ii] Being entirely phonetic, the Greek alphabet allowed a word to be read outright from the text, whilst the Hebrew required interpretive work to determine it from the others within the semantic family indicated by its triple of consonants. For Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, the former “picks the sound from the page and searches for the invisible ideas in the sounds the letters command him to make”, the latter “searches with his eyes for inudible roots in order to flesh them out with his breath.” [1988:13]; and they suggest the Old Testament command by God to Ezekiel to breath life (or soul nefesh) into the dry bones “so that they may live” is a metaphor for the need to add the moistness of vowels to lifeless consonants. More extravagantly, David Porush claims all that is intellectually significant about the accomplishments of the Jews stems from this failure to notate vowels; an “imperfection” he connects to the “central metaphysical tenet” of Judaism, the “unpronounceability, the unwritability, and the unthinkability of the name of God”. (1998, 54)

 

For this essay, the metaphysics of alphabetic writing, both Hebrew and Greek, will be seen from a perspective which doesn’t turn on the presence or absence of vowels, or on the supposed travails of reading and interpreting an ‘imperfect’ script, or on the unpronounceability and so on of God’s name (and its supposed metaphysical consequences), though all raise interesting issues, but rather on a feature of writing that precedes such phenomena, namely its ability, in its capacity as a medium, to perform a reflexive, self-citational move – inherent in the writing of ‘I’ -- and thereby give rise, under appropriate conditions, to a disembodied, supernatural agency.

 

But before disembodied agencies, come embodied ones. Alphabetic writing, like all technological systems and apparatuses, operates according to what might be called a corporeal axiomatic: it engages directly and inescapably with the bodies of its users. It makes demands and has corporeal effects. As a necessary condition for its operations it produces a certain body, in the present instance an ‘alphabetic body’ which has relations (of exclusion and co-presence) with existing semiotic body practices. The alphabet does this by imposing it own mediological needs on the body, from the evident perceptual and cognitive skills required to read and write to the invisible, neurological transformations which it induces in order to function. It is the latter effects, beneath the radar of the alphabet’s explicit function of inscribing speech and so quite separate from its manifold inscriptional activities, that will be significant.

 

I shall approach the alphabetic body through the topic of gesture. The particular motive for proceeding thus will emerge in due course, but in relation to the general question of embodiment, communication, and human subjectivity the idea is not unnatural: there are deep-lying lines of force between gesture and becoming human. As an affective medium of the body and its semiotic envelope, gesture reaches deep into human sociality through its vital role in hominization (the proffered breast, the use of facial expressions, pointing, cuddling, the phenomenon of turn-taking, the induction via motherese into speech), and through its linkage to the embodied wordless empathy, the psychic mirroring of each other necessary for meaningful utterance and without which what sociologist Michel Maffesoli calls puissance, the ‘will to live’, would not be possible. Whilst for Giorgio Agamben gesture constitutes a key category in relation to political ontology, a third term between means (pure action) and ends (pure production) whose essential mode of action is that within it something is “being endured and supported” – activities which, he claims, allow the “emergence of being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus opens up the ethical dimesnsion for them’” (2000, 57-8)

 

2     human gesture

Notwithstanding its role in empathy, hominization, and its relation to the ethical, making gesture the point of entry into the alphabetic body might seem puzzling. After all, the alphabet inscribes speech and compared to the latter gesture is widely held to be crude and pantomimic, an atavistic, semantically impoverished mode of sense-making overtaken by the development of language. And though evidently important in ceremonies and rituals, prayer, and sacrifices to gods, and crucial to all forms of dance, music, and theatrical performance, it would seem to offer little to any contemporary discourse on language and the technology of writing.

 

Such a diminished status is no longer the case[iii]. Nor was it always so. In the middle of the 17^th century John Bulwer, pursuing Francis Bacon’s dream of discovering mankind’s original language that disappeared in the Biblical catastrophe of Babel, turned to gestures, “transient hieroglyphs” Bacon had called them, as the key to the search. Bulwer, a physician, was interested in gesture’s physiological character. He looked to the fact and manner of gesture’s evident embodiment to provide clues to the original but now lost universal language. Bulwer, inventor of the first finger-spelling alphabet, opens his book Chirologia[iv] with an extraordinary tribute to the hands’ abilities to convey meaning and incite affect: “With these hands”, he says, “we sue, entreat, beseech, solicit, call, allure, entice, dismiss, grant, deny, reprove, are suppliant, fear, threaten, abhor, repent, pray, instruct, witness, accuse, declare our silence ... ”, and so on, for some two hundred manual signs – revealing a gestural microcosm of mid-17^th century English social, religious, and legal encounters. In another essay, Panthomyotomia, Bulwer attempts a metaphorical dissection of the muscles of the face and head in an attempt to relate their movements to the motions of thought taking place so near them. Bulwer’s writings inaugurate a (yet to be consummated) gesturology and make him the first theoretician of the semiotic body. In the next century others followed, most famously Condillac with his attempt to lay out the gestural roots of language, Charles de Brosses’ project on the gesturo-physiological origins of language, and the Abbe de l’Epee’s championing of a language for the deaf composed of gestures.

 

But by the mid-late nineteenth century gesture had fallen victim to a scientific psychology which subordinated an emotionalized (implicitly feminine), gesturing body to a rational, speaking mind. A cruel consequence of which was the banning in 1880 at a conference of deaf educators in Milan of all use of Sign (gestural language) from European and American schools in favor of enforced voicing and lip-reading by the deaf: “Gesture”, the organizers insisted, “is not the true language of man ... Gesture, instead of addressing the mind, addresses the imagination and the senses. Thus for us, it is an absolute necessity to prohibit that language and to replace it with living speech, the only instrument of human thought.” [Harlan Lane 1984, 391] Some eighty years later this phonocentrir dismissal of Sign started to collapse when the gestural systems used throughout the world by the deaf to commune with each other were recognized as full-blown languages, on a grammatical, morphological and semantic par with and in some respects superior to human speech. One consequence of this re-evaluation of Sign was a re-emergence of theories proclaiming the gestural affiliations and origin of human language.[v] (Nevertheless, some thirty years after Sign’s linguistic recognition, traces of the phonocentric and textocentric derogation of gesture remain: several universities in the United States refuse Sign as a fulfillment of graduate language requirements on the kettle-logic grounds that American Sign Language (ASL) is not a ‘real’ language; ASL is not a ‘foreign’ language; and, in any case, ASL lacks a written form.) But its ability to replace the tongue as the vehicle and physical means of language is not the deepest nor, for our purposes, the most significant aspect of the relation between gesture and speech. More significantly, in relation to the alphabetic writing of speech, is the fact that gesture operates in the interior of speech itself functioning, as we shall see, as the presence of the body within utterance and constituting the affective, pre-verbal dimension of the voice itself. But before this, by way of context and a necessary clarification of the speech/gesture nexus, I want to describe two kinds of gesture – emblems and gesticulations -- each with its own relation to language.

 

3     Emblem gestures

Like spoken words, ASL gestures are coded entirely by a linguistic system. Distinct from these, not captured by a code, forming at most only a "partial code" situated between the two linguistic systems, is the field of so-called emblems. Emblems are what we ordinarily mean by ‘gestures’. Holding up the palm, jerking the thumb, kissing one’s fingertips, pointing, snorting, smacking one’s forehead, squeezing a shoulder, bowing, slapping someone on the back, giving the shoulder, biting a knuckle, flourishing a fist, tapping the nose, shrugging, chuckling, beating one’s breast, giving the finger, winking, and innumerable other visible, haptic, auditory and tactile disceiplined mobilities of the semiotic body.

 

According to studies initiated by David Efron (1941/72), Adam Kendon (1972), and subsequently developed by David McNeill and others, emblems are gestures whose principal function is to carry out certain social activities. “Emblems”. McNeill writes, “are complete speech acts in themselves, but the speech acts they perform are restricted to a certain range of functions. They regulate and comment on the behavior of others, reveal one’s own emotional states, make promises, swear oaths [and are] used to salute, command, request, reply to some challenge, insult, threaten, seek protection, express contempt or fear.” (1992:64) This list (that could easily be describing a portion of Bulwer’s enumeration of the expressions of the hand) makes it clear that emblems are social, experiential and interpersonal, deployed to make something happen, to impinge on the behavior of the self and others; emblems are not really interested in making statements, analyzing matters, or conveying facts and propositions.

 

Unlike speech they do not combine via a syntax as part of a language or an elaborated code. And they differ from words in that their meanings are neither explicitly defined nor (outside instruction in rhetoric or acting) are they intentionally learned or studied, but rather they are picked up, absorbed and inculcated, taken in directly by the body, as it were, and (perhaps for this reason) remain stable in form and import over long periods of time despite linguistic changes in the communities of their users. These features indicate that emblem gestures might operate according to a different dynamic and logic, and might accomplish different ends, from that of speech. Calling them 'speech' acts, suggests they are within the horizons of speech and assumes they operate, as a mode of meaning or affect creation in the same ways and for the same purposes as speech. But is this so? Are emblems in any sense translatable into spoken language? Can they be transposed into words? What, for example, is the speech equivalent of a wink? Or, for that matter, a shrug? a slap on the back? folding one's arms? hands clasped in prayer? And does their mode of operation and outcomes resemble that of speech? If so, why as speaking beings do we bother with them?

 

The cultural range, robustness, and persistent use of emblems, their way of refusing and displacing speech, calls for an explanation. McNeill offers one in terms of 'word magic'. "Spoken words are special and carry with them the responsibility for being articulated. However, conveying the same meaning in gesture form avoids the articulatory act and, thanks to word magic, this lessened responsibility for speaking transfers to the speech act itself."[1992, 65] Doubtless, there is truth in the idea that gesturing rather than talking removes one from the net of justifications, arguments, questions, deceptions, interpretive qualifications and recriminations that speech immediately introduces. But how many emblem gestures admit of same meaning as a word or spoken phrase? Indeed, what does "having the 'same' meaning" mean? How convincingly can speech render an emblem? Giving the finger, for example, carries a different charge, has a different meaning, enables a different affect, initiates a different confrontation from saying "up yours" or "fuck you" or "go screw yourself", and so on. (That there are inequivalent verbalizations suggests emblems generate meanings by their very exclusion of speech). But in any event, assuming that ‘sameness’ of meaning makes sense, is the difference between gesturing and voicing the 'same' meanings reducible to “lessened responsibility”?

 

Thus, consider other deployments of emblems, for example their extensive, deeply embedded, and seemingly indispensable use in secular and religious rituals and practices. Here something different from lessened responsibility, almost the opposite, seems to be in play; as if words, so easily uttered, are insufficiently responsible, not binding enough, too fleeting and precise at the same time, and only bodily action can fulfill the relevant ceremonial and devotional/liturgical purposes; as if gestures are able to create and stabilize belief, to induce as well as express religious feelings, social ideologies and moods, and forms of consciousness more radically and with more appropriate affect than the specialized precision of speech.[vi] In this context, what Andre Leroi-Gourhan says about speech's (and writing's) inferiority to art vis a vis religion, "that graphic expression restores to language the dimension of the inexpressible -- the possibility of multiplying the dimensions of a fact in instantly accessible visual symbols" [1993, 200], carries over from graphic symbols to visual gestures.[vii]

 

Evidently, emblem gestures say nothing (even when they are auditory and even when they can be verbally parsed). In fact they function at their most characteristic when differentiated and opposed to speech. Unlike words, which stand in a coded relation to ideas, things, interpretants, people outside themselves, such gestures signify and have meaning – better: have force, affect, point – through the fact of their taking place, in the effects they help bring about, in the affectual matrices they support, in all that they induce by virtue of their occurrence as events. In other words, emblem gesture do not say anything outside their own situated and embodied performance: their relation to speech is one of exclusion, avoidance, and on occasion silencing. Agamben locates the essence of gesture in this silencing and articulates it as an exclusively metamedialogical phenomenon: “Because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something in language; it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak.” (2000, 59)

 

However illuminating it is to construe gesture in metacommunicational terms, as the “making of a means visible”, the formulation is ultimately reductive in several senses. First, as we’ve seen, emblem gestures execute a variety of speech-act type functions such as promising, threatening, and the like, as well as devotional and meditational acts that have little or nothing to do with the “exhibition of mediality”. Second, insofar as they metacommunicate in this way, it is as emblems that they do so and not as gestures at large; moreover, they behave in this way in relation to speech and not necessarily with respect to other media. Third, even in relation to speech, gesture behaves in ways other than a gag: besides excluding or silencing speech or marking its inability to articulate in sentences the state of being inside language, gesture co-originates with and accompanies spoken language as gesticulation, and on a deeper level is intrinsic to speech as tone or prosody, the auditory gestures of the voice, without which human verbal utterance is impossible. Lastly, characterizing gesture in exclusively metalogic terms “what is relayed to human beings in gestures is ... the communication of a communicability” (58) masks the fact that gesture is also and always a medium of no small importance in its own right. To say more we need first to describe its gesticulatory and prosodic forms of mediation.

 

4     Gesticulation

A casual look at conversation and story-telling shows verbal utterance accompanied by fleeting, often barely discernible, seemingly idiosyncratic and indefinite gestures of the fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, and face. Gestures that appear to be connected, although how is not clear, to to the substance of what is being narrated. These gesticulatory movements are not planned or consciously produced; they are involuntary and spontaneous and are for the most part unnoticed and communicationally superfluous. Certainly, the blind people have no difficulty comprehending speech, people converse easily on the telephone, listen to recorded messages, and fully understand speech on the radio, without registering too much disturbance at the non-presence of any accompanying gestures. More than other kinds of gesture, gesticulation seems an unnecessary addendum to utterance, an echo perhaps of a pre-intellectual, pre-verbal form of communication, having little to do with the articulation or expression of thought in speech.

 

Empirical investigations of the gesticulatory activity accompanying verbal narration suggest otherwise. Far from being epiphenomenal, a surface effect unconnected to the expression of thought, gesticulation relates to the semantic, pragmatic, and discursive aspects of speech in non trivial ways, embracing various kinds of gesture accomplishing distinct semiotic tasks. There are iconographic gestures, for example outlining a square shape depicting literally a‘window’ or metaphorically indicating a ‘window of opportunity’; kinetographic gestures, for example miming handwriting to indicate ‘writing’ or a ‘text’ or ‘literacy’; or bringing the hands together accompanying the expression ‘an agreement was reached’; or gestures to mark an abstraction introduced into the narrative, for example cupped hands (the container metaphor in Western culture) when narration jumps out of the story being told and refers to its genre. There are also ‘beat’ gestures, brief on/off movements marking the word they accompany as significant not for its semantic content but for its discursive or pragmatic role, for example, a hand flick when a new character or theme or metalingual gloss is introduced into a story. Beside these self-contained or holistic gestures there are also contrastive pairs. For example, a straight-line gesture indicating a direct source of information against a curved one indicating information that is mediated; or evolution in time by a series of looping gestures in contrast to a straight line for a succession of stages having no element of transformation. And there is a class of gestures that realize experiential meanings, from self-pointing to specifying times and places, that correspond to deictic or indexical terms in speech such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘now’ which make essential reference to the physical circumstances of the speaker.[viii]

 

Plainly, gesticulation (notwithstanding its communicative redundancy in most practical contexts) is linked to the words it accompanies at non-trivial levels of speech. Why and how this has come about is not as yet understood. One might attempt an explanation along the lines that gesticulation translates a prior version of the sentence that is uttered, or that gesticulatory movements are created to illustrate, amplify, or gloss speech as the latter is produced. That such explanations (which give causal priority to speech) are not feasible follows from the way gestural form and the maaning of the utterance it accompanies are connected: there is a tight temporal binding, accurate to fractions of a second, discovered to operate between gesticulation and speech. Any gesture has a preparatory phase, a stroke phase in which the gesture proper occurs, and a withdrawal phase. In gesticulation, the preparation precedes the word(s) it relates to whilst the gesture itself coincides exactly at the height of its stroke phase with the word(s) in question, after which gesture and words disperse together; a simultaneous anticipation, coincidence, and falling away only possible if gesture and words are produced together, only if they issue from something preceding each of them; only if, McNeill argues, there were some earlier linkage, a common ‘origin’, in some sense pre-verbal and pre-gestural, to them both.

 

For McNeill (1993) this gesture-word nexus consists of a dialectic of opposed modes of representation: gestural (imagistic, holistic and synthetic) and verbal (linear, segmental and analytic); the final utterance being the result of an interaction between a relatively free, privately formed, individual gestural impulse and the rule-based, public, socially constrained demands of a linguistic system. In other words, thinking, at least insofar as it eventuates in speech, has its beginning in visuo-kinetic images which then become gesticulated and verbalized to form an utterance.. One might note in this connection linguist Wallace Chafe’s analysis of verbal utterance as composed of 'idea units' corresponding to single 'thoughts'; the duration of each unit being about two seconds; more or less the time for a complete gesture to take place. (Chafe 1985) it is as if spoken thought starts life as a yet-to-be-realized gesture, an idea we shall encounter later in a more developed form operating within mathematical thought. I turn now to the third form of gestural mediation and speech, that which inhabits speech itself, namely prosody.

 

5     gestures of the voice

Emblem gestures operate outside of and alternative to speech, gesticulation operates alongside and parallel to speech. We come now to another form, ultimately more significant for our purposes, the audible body movements which operate inside speech: gestures which constitute the voice itself.

 

Speech involves systematic and interconnected movements of the lips, tongue, cheeks, jaw, glottis, vocal chords, larynx, diaphragm -- identifiable and repeatable patterns of body parts -- suggesting that it might be usefully regarded as a species of gesture; auditory as distinct from visual, but gestural nonetheless. Findings from research in phonetics and artificial speech synthesis over the past two decades confirm this. They indicate that it is precisely as a gestural system that the complex kinematics -- the aural/oral assemblage of movements that make up the human voice -- are best comprehended. Specifically, the task-dynamical, physiological models of the type describing the assemblage of movements and skeleto-muscular organization of the body during walking have proved ideal for modeling the dynamics of the lips, tongue, larynx, and so on, during speech production.

 

Moreover, not only is the production of speech gestural, but so it turns out, somewhat unexpectedly, is its perception: "Surprisingly", as evolutionary neurologist Terrence Deacon finds himself saying, "auditory processing of speech sounds does not appear to be based on extracting basic acoustic parameters of the signal, as a scientist might design a computer to do, before mapping them onto speech sounds. Speech analysis appears designed instead to predict which oral-vocal movements produced them and ignore the rest." (1997, 14) We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their preparatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away, and completions; the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them. In a certain sense, we listen to speech-sounds as signs of their gestural origins, as a physician listens to the sounds a patient's heart makes in order to analyse the movements causing them.

 

Linguists draw a fundamental division between two aspects of spoken utterance: they separate what is considered by them to be ‘proper’ to language, what is actually said, the grammatically and syntactically governed strings of phonemes, words, phrases, and so on, for example, “To be or not to be”, from the ‘paralinguistic’ manner of their saying, from how what is said is said; for example in this case, the prosodically varied ways such a line might be delivered by an actor playing Hamlet. Prosody is the gestural dimension of the voice, its “grain” (Barthes): it comprises all the vocal dynamics often referred to simply as ‘tone’, or ‘tone of voice’, namely the phrasing, the intonation, the musicality, the rhythm, the volume and emphasis, the rise and fall of pitch, the fallings away and accelerations, the pauses, gaps, hesitations, the anticipations, elisions, silences, elongations, repetitions, and contractions that the word-strings of an utterance are subject to.

 

Prosody has an ancient lineage. It originates from innate primate calls. But though the two are closely related as signals, and though “laughing, sobbing, screaming with fright, crying with pain, groaning, and sighing” constitute a more or less innate repertoire of prosody-like calls, the two are distinct.[ix] For, “unlike calls of other species”, Deacon points out, “prosodic vocal modification is continuous and highly correlated with the speech process. It is as though the call circuits are being continuously stimulated by vocal output systems.” [1997:418]; as though, as a neurological consequence of hearing oneself speak, the midbrain and limbic systems responsible for primate calls, become detached from instinctual control, become de-innate. This allows them to be eventually re-deployed in expressively and semiotically variable ways: the vocal gestures that constitute prosody become culturally malleable vehicles of human affect.[x]

 

According to a recent, neurological account of the evolution of language by Terrence Deacon [1997] (see chapter 5), this move, the escape from instinctual calls to what we now identify as the prosodic dimension of spoken utterance, did not occur overnight. The prosodic system which is essentially a “system of indices” that direct attention to what the speaker deems to be most salient, must have been “tightly linked to the evolution of speaking abilities”, that is, to the trans-indexical, symbolic use of words, over a considerable time period, since the two systems are “parallel and complimentary to one another anatomically as well as functionally.” This deeply laid down parallelism, manifest as a “seamless complimentarity” [364], rests on a neurological division of labor between control of the rapid-fire articulatory phonemic movements and the slower waves of prosodic gestures.

 

One might observe here a similarity to the paralinguistic activity of gesticulation. The split-second coincidence of words and their accompanying gesticulation – a consequence of their co-origination – is here a literal fusing: word and gesture are integral, two sides of the same utterance heard as single acoustic events. However, in the case of gesticulation, the gestures signal meta-linguistic and discursive features of the ongoing verbal narration, which are essentially markers of cortical origin, whereas here the gestures constituting tone of voice signal subcortical, affectual aspects of the utterance originating in the midbrain; aspects that are often vital to the meanings put into play: as rhetoricians and actors know, differences in tone can make the same words gentle or withering, questioning or threatening, flattering, indifferent or menacing, or sardonic or gleeful or seductive or pleading, and so on.

 

But, as we shall see, the inseparability of words and their tone, the seamless whole that constitutes verbal utterance, applies only to speech. It is precisely what is lost when writing entere the scene; as soon, that is, as utterance is transcribed and rendered as an alphabetic text. (Indeed it is only in the wake of writing that these separate aspects of speech appear).

 

6     Writing speech

What if one could separate speech from the voice? Eliminate the tone and keep the words? Alphabetic writing is a communicational medium, and every medium disrupts what had been for its predecessor conceived as a seamless whole, an integrated assemblage. The process of remediation involves a recalibration of space-time with consequent separations and severings of what were spatial and temporal and physical and aural contiguities and a reconstitution of (a dimension of) the original content in virtual form which for writing is the text, speech being reconstituted in virtual form as ‘speech at a distance’. Writing segments the spoken stream of sounds into words (which themselves owe their status as separate items to the action of writing) from the time, place, circumstances, psychological wherewithal, and social contexts of its production and re-situates it at another time, elsewhere, for other purposes, in other circumstances, in unknown contexts. It cuts speech loose from the voice, substituting for the individual, breathing, here-and-now agency of the one who utters them by an abstract, invisible author, and replacing a unique event, the utterance which unfolds over time, by fixed, repeatable, a-temporal alphabetic inscriptions; inscriptions which necessarily fall short of representation: Speech”, Barry Powell observes, “is a wave” and the alphabet’s separate graphic marks “cannot represent it.” (2002, 123). And, more salient here, alphabetic writing eliminates all and any connection speech has to the body’s gestures. One might object that hand-written 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. 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.[xi]

 

At first glance this elimination of gesture is what one would expect. After all, the alphabet writes speech and has no truck with emblems, which operate outside the domain of speech, and it has no interest in gesticulation which adds nothing in practice to speech and is thus irrelevant to the alphabet’s task. But omitting the gestures that are interior to speech – eliminating the entire prosodic landscape of vocal gesture -- is another matter; one which makes clear that the alphabet does not and in fact cannot write speech. Alphabetic letters don’t capture or represent or notate the utterance that comes out of the mouth and is heard by a listener. They notate individual(ized) words, which (in the wake of writing) can, as we’ve seen, be designated simply as ‘what’s said’ but they do not notate the prosodic dimension, not the affect, force, point, and manner of delivery of the words, not how what’s said is said.

 

It would be difficult to exaggerate the consequences of prosody’s omission for the development of western literacy: responding to it has been the condition for the possibility of this literacy, shaping and inventing what counts as a text and, what is the same thing, establishing the protocols of reading alphabetic writing. The recognition that such writing falls short of speech was of course immediately apparent early on: in the writing down of Greek funeral orations and the problem of their delivery by an orator other than their bardic author; and in the Jewish talmudic tradition of endless rabbinical interpretation engendered by the problem of interpreting the ‘spoken’ word of God. A contemporary account of writing’s inability to render tone is provided by speech-act theory: “Writing”, Olson writes, “lacks devices for representing the illocutionary force of an utterance, that is, indications of the speaker’s attitude to what is said which the reader may use to determine how the author intended the text to be taken. The history of reading is largely the history of attempting to cope with what writing does not represent.” (1994, 145)

 

This is at best a partial truth. More and other is involved in prosody’s absence than the loss of illocutionary force, understood here in terms of speaker’s “attitudes” and author’s “intention” as a deliberately formulated, linguistically explicit, consciously presented ‘thought’; an abstract entity whose very conception within the written history of the west is of an item originating in a ‘mind’; itself an abstract disembodied entity brought into being by alphabetic writing. Equating what writing omits with the content of a conscious speech act only obscures the inexplicit, a-conscious effect of this loss which, as we shall see, is key to the very construction of ‘mind’. For the present we can observe that the identification is perforce reductive: it occludes the corporeal underside of the alphabet’s action. What writing omits from speech is the body: the feelings, moods, emotions, attitudes, intuitions, embodied demands, declarations, expressions, and desires located in the voice, rather than consciously formulated (writable) thought. What it omits is the entire field of affect conveyed and induced by human vocality, through the voice’s impulsions, inflections and rhythms, its aural texture and emotional dynamics. A vocal field bordered on one side by song and on the other by the non-speech of sighs, moans, cries, grunts, screams, laughs, and so on;, all that, in Roland Barthes’ phrase, surrounds a “language lined with flesh” (1975, 66-7)

 

Notwithstanding this, it is still true that 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.

 

The poetic generation of affect is the more direct, iconic, and corporeally rooted one of mimetic retrieval: it seeks to recuperate vocalic gestures, to reproduce the oral/aural achievements of an embodied voice within the sound effects of

speakable texts. Paul Zumthor commenting precisely on the performance and reception of oral poetry talks of “body movements” being “integrated into a poetics”, and he notes the “astonishing permanence that associates gesture and utterance”, and insists that “a gestural model is part of the ‘competence’ of the interpreter and is projected into performance.” (1990, 153) The impulse then is to reproduce a kind of sonically faithful simulacrum of the work of the voice: through words chosen as much for their aural/oral features as their significance, through fusions and splittings of phrases, through the deployment of textual arrangements – and ordering, juxtaposing, spacing, enjambment -- which mimic the gesture-based dynamics of toned speech.[xii]

 

With prose, retrieval gives way to textual reinvention. Here, alphabetic writing brought into being an entire apparatus of its own for inscribing affect. Prose rejects any directly sonic recuperation of vocalic gestures in favor of a textual transduction of them. It transposes or transmutes prosodic effects into inscriptional ones through the invention of new, textual forms governed by grammar and syntax rather than sonic values; distributing (written versions of) affect across the entire lexical and syntactic landscape via the creation of a range of devices – neologisms, phrasal conventions, textual diagrams, rhetorical inversions, figures

of ‘speech’, letter-forms, and narrative formulas and ‘styles’ – the latter serving and facilitating a great variety of affectual desiderata for various purposes, from the literary project of inducing polyvalence and estrangement (the primary function of literature according to Victor Schlovsky) to the sought after clarity and unambiguous neutrality of legal texts and the ‘plain style’ of scientific prose intended to eliminate any trace of ‘subjective’ and non-literal affect.

 

 

Observe that, strictly speaking the development of prose and poetic diction is not the fruit of the alphabet alone, in the sense of being constructed from letters. Both mimesis and transduction called for and in turn were forwarded by devices and techniques of punctuation that discharge a core set of functions handled orally by tone. These are extra-alphabetic having to do with handling text -- blank spaces between words, commas, question marks, periods, quote marks, paragraphs, hyphens, marks of ellipsis, capital letters, exclamation marks, parentheses – rather than representing sound elements of speech. Moreover their introduction went hand in hand with the conceptual innovations they offered, “Certain constructs that cannot exist without reference to the alphabet – thought and language, lie and memory, translation, and particularly the self – developed parallel to these writing techniques.” (Illich and Sanders 1988, x) To which must be added the use of these devices to aid reading. Thus St Jerome described the segmenting of texts, writing ‘by clauses and phrases’ (per coma et commata), that he had found in classical texts, as being more intelligible to the reader than the textual practices of his day: “It told the reader either to raise or lower the voice, in order to render sense through proper intonation.” [Fischer 2003:48] But, as we have seen, only a small portion of (the work of) intonation, proper or otherwise, has been built into the augmented devices of the alphabet. Interestingly, the process continues: a whole new generation of punctuation techniques – mark-up languages, scripting codes, and style sheets – specifically for augmenting electronic texts are now being developed and used to make them easier to be read aloud by voice sythnesizing machines.

 

7     textual brains

The two sides of human speech, syllables (self-contained, discrete) and the tone (continuous and extended) of their delivery are governed neurologically by the comparatively recent neo-cortex and the ancient midbrain or limbic respectively. In speech – indeed as speech -- they occur simultaneously, are united, coupled into a single meaningful sonic event. Alphabetic writng disrupts this unity. It splits the voice, selecting from the stream of speech (what it defines as) words to notate, jettisons all trace of their tone, and sets up its own neurological apparatus to handle the writing and reading of the resulting letter notations.

 

At this point a neurological qualification is in order. Here and in what follows I deliberately adopt a simplified topographic picture of the arrangements of the brain’s functions. In reality there seems to be not one localized area of affect and feeling – the midbrain and limbic structures – and one localized area of cognitive thought – the neo-cortex – but a number of separate, interconnected regions, distributed throughout the brain, each specific to types of emotion and cognitive processing; part of an emerging consensus of the brain as “a collection of systems, sometimes called modules, each with different functions.” (Ledoux 1996:105) An adequate neurological picture of how affect and abstract thought, tone and ‘what’s said’ are interrelated, then, would have to incorporate how the relevant modules are connected to and interact with each other. No such account at present exists. In fact neurological interest in the topic of affect is relatively recent and has yet to provide such a picture. However, for the purpose of identifying the rudimentary, but highly significant neurological effects brought about by the practice of alphabetic writing/reading, a crude first approximation, framed as an opposition of cortical and midbrain systems, is more than adequate.[xiii]

 

‘Learning one’s alphabet’, acquiring the ability to read and write alphabetic inscriptions, is an intense cognitive business requiring a permanent alteration of their brains that takes human children a protracted period of repetition and practice to accomplish. Neurologically, the requirements of literacy create in the brain what we might call a ‘literacy module’, a neural complex within the neo-cortex dedicated to writing/reading purely textual entities, that is, handling the production and reception of phonemic strings that constitute written words shorn of their prosodic content and associated affective fields; words decoupled from the moods, feelings, desires, and regulatory activity routinely evinced (and induced) by spoken utterance. The module comprises a mesh of pathways centered in the frontal-occipital lobes and virtually unmoored from the midbrain. As such it is distinct from the ‘speech areas’, the lateral-parietal network governing the generation and reception of utterance and which from the advent of language has been coupled to the affect apparatus of the limbic systems and midbrain.

 

The opposition between speech and disembodied writing is a hierarchy. This in the obvious sense that in the process of establishing itself as the vehicle for the creation and furtherance of western culture, writing has from its inception dominated speech, assigning it a subordinate status within literacy’s increasing colonization of all that was the province of oralism. And also in a less evident sense of being patterned on a neurological precedent difficult to avoid. Thus Terrence Deacon observes the production of human speech might be modeled on the “superposition of intentional cortical motor behavior over autonomous sub-cortical vocal behavior” necessary to counter the “unintended eruption of primate cries.” (1997:244) In like manner, writing can be seen as demanding a neo-cortical override of the midbrain, a superposition necessary to suppress or inhibit the production of prosodic speech. Corresponding to the unintended eruption of primate cries, then, one has the counterproductive eruption of vocal affect, of prosodic gestures which, interestingly in this connection, themselves derive from de-instinctualized primate cries. In any event, it seems that the familiar hierarchies – cognition over affect, thought over feeling, signification over force, and ultimately mind, soul, and spirit over body and soma – that permeate the intellectual mainstream and values of western culture, might have their antecedents in an absent – better, disenfranchised and repressed -- midbrain set against a consciously present, inevitably foregrounded and dominating neo-cortex.

This means that on the one hand, writing’s de-prosodized words appear incorporeal, as if they issued from a disembodied and autonomous source.[xiv] On the other hand, from its beginning, writing has effaced its own role in constructing the hierarchies of mind over body, thought over feeling, and so on. By claiming (in writing) to re-present speech without loss, by systematically identifying itself as a medium which transparently inscribes speech, it masks the radical disjunction from speech which enables it to make such a claim.

 

Conflating virtual and actual speech has consequences of an ontological and metaphysical kind. Once the alphabetic body is in place, once the neuronal pathways of literacy have been installed in the brains of its users and became automatic through the repeated alphabetic writing of speech and reading of lettered texts, that is, as soon as writing invisiblizes itself as a medium, the stage is set for the coming into being of an entity – necessarily incorporeal -- who is imagined to write ‘I’ Such a being or agency ‘speaks’ itself with a virtual voice and, in (undeclared and unexamined) analogy to the spoken ‘I’, is imputed to be the source and origin of virtual speech. In chapter 4, we shall see how two such agencies – Mind and God – exhibiting different modes of transcendental escape from corporeality can be understood as mediologically engendered ghosts, spectral quasi-presences which emerged out of the alphabetic writing of ‘I’.

 

One can ask about the ‘speech’ of such virtual beings. For example, seeing that the connections essential to vocalic affect are routed through the frontal lobes, imagine the suppression of them as performing a kind of orthographic version of a pre-frontal lobotomy: certainly, descriptions of lobotomized speech, “in their words ... no traces of affection could be detected” (Amaral and Oliviero 2005), suggest how, if it were possible to realize it, we might perceive de-prosodized words, speech emptied of all affect; an idea I return to later.

 

      

 

notes