In Configurations, 2002, 10:423-438

Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing
Brian Rotman
Ohio State University
Department of Comparative Studies
rotman.3@osu.edu

It is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds Antonin Artaud (TD 99)

0 the curiously archaic present
Imagining a future in which alphabetic writing and with it philosophy and literature as we know them will disappear, to be replaced by forms evolved from them, André Leroi-Gourhan assures us at the end of Gesture and Speech that the mentality and accomplishments of these artefacts will not be lost, since the "curiously archaic forms employed by thinking human beings during the period of alphabetic graphism will be preserved in print". [404]

Leroi-Gourhan's belief in the eventual demise of alphabetic writing and its illustrious products is in part self-dissolving. Written -- and prompting a response -- in the very medium whose disappearence it heralds, any answer from the archaic present would be perforce obsolescent before its time. It also seems fantastical and infeasible -- outside the weightless imaginings of speculative fiction -- to think of anything as deeply folded into our Western historical and religious being and cultural self identity as alphabeticism disappearing. (Of course, from a non alphabetic standpoint such as Chinese orthography, its demise might seem less impossible and more imaginable; but such a perception doesn't impinge on the question of archaization that prompts his prediction). And yet is not the opposite belief to Leroi-Gourhan's just as outrageous? Can one really believe alphabetic writing will never be archaic, will always be with us, that in all possible, foreseeable or imaginable futures of the human or post human extending our present technologized state, alphabetic inscription will go on being the principal cognitive tool and medium for recording, creating, and transmitting human knowledge, telling history, thinking philosophy, inscribing art and affect?

Leroi-Gourhan asks us to imagine our present, overwhelmingly alphabetic graphic practices as archaic. In an immediate empirical and manual sense that is not difficult: writing a text such as the present one by making a hundred thousand minutely different, attention-needing and irksomely intricate finger movements on a keyboard is, in the scheme of practical things, hardly less archaic than laboriously incising cuneiform syllables one by one into wet clay. But this seems not to be in the direction of his question. One might, mindful of the alphabet's limitations in respect of rendering the prosodic elements of spoken utterances, invoke the mark-up languages extensions to it being developed to remedy the situation.1 These so-called languages are scripts along the lines of an extended HTML embedded in text files; only instead of enabling a browser to display a hypertext page they enable machines to read aloud alphabetic texts. Their purpose being to improve the machine-readability of texts along affective dimensions by providing tags for certain standardized types of prosodic effect; decoding these tags, text-recognition software and speaker can voice a passable version of these effects. But, however novel and effective, textual augmentation to improve machine vocality embeds us further rather than takes us out of the archaic alphabetic present.

Of course it is possible that existing and not new graphic practices are in the process of rendering the alphabet archaic. Certainly the explosion of visual images brought about by digital technology, the so-called "second computer revolution", has resulted in many of the traditional semiotic functions discharged by alphabetic writing (notably but not exclusively the display, recording, manipulation, and transmission of technical and scientific knowledge and information from demographic datasets to weather patterns) being usurped by visual artefacts -- icons, tables, graphs, arrays, diagrams, charts and maps replacing words; and it has resulted in changes in subject positions and subjectivity in directions quite distinct from that countenanced by alphabeticism and the textual protocols it furthers. But again, notwithstanding the threat to alphabetic inscription, this is not what seems intended by Leroi-Gorhan's prognostication, since visual practices which have long performed their own dance in relation to alphabetic writing are governed by an orthogonality to written texts rather than one of obsolescence or supercession. After all, the rivalry between words and images is as ancient as the alphabet's acrophonic emergence from pictograms, and the iconophobia so deeply embedded in the three alphabetic-text based monotheisms of the West testifies to a long established antagonism which would have to be dismantled or worked through or otherwise rendered irrelevant for the image to sufficiently destabilize the alphabetic word to constitute a source of its archaization. What Leroi-Gourhan points to is not another move in an old battle between pictures and words but a new medium; a communicational technology which would operate in a manner intimately and specifically related to the fact that the alphabet writes the movement of the speaking body.

And the operative term here is body. For it is from an embodied ethnological perspective that he understands alphabeticism, writing being for him "the subordination of the hand to language"; a servitude coming to an end as homo sapiens are "freed from tools, gestures, muscles, from programming actions, from memory, freed from imagination by the perfection of the broadcasting media, freed from the animal world, the plant world, from cold, from microbes, from the unknown world of mountains and seas ..." [407] But forty years later, in the full flood of a digital transformation of our cultural infrastructure not suspected by him or his contemporaries we are beginning to understand that bodies and their (our) immersion in the world are not so easily abandoned, that twisting free from corporeality merely replays an ancient fantasy of transcendence rather than follows a narrative of inevitable technological advance, and that contrary to withering the body or leaving it behind it will be by uniting with it -- merging, augmenting, capturing, and re-engineering it -- that technology might render our present alphabetic dispensation archaic.

This is because technology operates via a corporeal axiomatic that despite prevailing wisdom cannot be subsumed under the label of the instrumental; it can, in other words, neither be reduced to its role as a tool or prosthesis extending or replacing the body nor to its role as a medium conveying/creating information and meanings. Behind and literally before both these is technology's corporeo-materiality, its engagement with the body on a pre instrumental, pre-discursive, pre-semiotic level of unmediated physicality; an engagement which though subsequently a vital motivational and affective element of these explicitly purposive roles is necessarily outside the intentional forms and arrangements governing instrumentality.2

In light of this, responding to Leroi-Gourhan's provocation requires paying a closer attention to the connection between the alphabet and the body, one which will enable a departure from the usual instrumental and semiotic formula governing that connection.

1 notating as against capturing
The alphabet notates the signifying sounds produced by the organs of speech. A suitably specific departure, then, from its presumed archaic state might go by way of a double jump. Firstly, beyond the written mark: why interpret 'writing' as notation, as the projection of body activity (here speech) onto a pre-set list of inscribed marks and a syntax? why not an a-symbolic mediation -- a sampling or capture rather than a synbolic representation? Secondly, beyond the oral-vocal apparatus: why the restriction to the movements of the organs of speech, to the physiology and neurology of breathing and its articulation into consonants and vowels? Why not the movements of any and all the body's organs and parts, oral-aural or otherwise, traditionally signifying and a signifying alike?

The dominating interpretation of notation and writing (outside the pragmatically unhelpful totalization of the latter within post structuralist discourse) is that of media comprised of marks and syntax with pre-assigned meanings ranging from the constative to the performative and operational. Thus: the originating example, at least in the present context, is of course the alphabet whose letters (along with punctuation and other marks) are operational signals for a human reader to reproduce specified sounds and their relation according to a juxtapositional and linear syntax; after it, came the symbol system of Western 5-line musical notation, where the sounds are to be reproduced by pre-calibrated voices and instruments and the syntax has a simple 2-dimensional structure; and then various systems for notating dance movements of which Laban notation with its larger number of symbols, incluusion of muusical notation and more elaborate 2-dimensional syntax is the best known; and, older than alphabetic writing and in a category of its own, the vast field of mathematical writing with its open ended array of ideogrammatic and diagrammatic symbols and multi dimensional syntax that can (and systematically does) become part of the meanings being mediated.

But against notational media are the practices, apparatuses and modes of capture which constitute non symbolic media. In these, what is mediated operates under the regime of the enacted or reproduced rather than the symbolized. Thus, the phonogram and tape recorder don't notate sound in the form of symbols but write it -- record or capture it -- as a direct signal to an apparatus able to reproduce (a perceptually indistinguishable version of) the captured sounds; likewise the camera for the reproduction of captured visual scenes (though with the additional layer of convention and subsequent interpretation of images not present with sound capture). Described in terms of figures of speech, notational media are regulated by metaphor and similitude whilst capture media operate under the regimes of metonymy and synechdoche. Or, focusing on semiosis, notation effects a discrete algebraic framework or relational structure of prior differences whilst capture presents a continuous topological model of posteriorly given internal differences.

The existence of media like photography, film, video, and sound recording, then, which are able to make a direct iterable trace of the look of the visual real, or the sound of the audible real, addresses the second of the two jumps just indicated by way of an immediate suggestion: why not a parallel solution for the perception of the moving real. Is there in othere words any reason -- biological, physical, theoretical or practical -- why movement could not similarly be mediated? Could there not be a form of kinematic writing able to capture the perceptual feel of actual movements in space and time? The answer is yes, in fact there could: digital technology does indeed offer the possibility of a non-notational medium capable of reproducing the kinematic; it is called, appropriately enough, motion capture.

But before elaborating, it will help to gloss a common and for our purposes not irrelevant usage of the term 'capture' that connects it to older forms of mimesis. Thus, within traditional theatrical and ceremonial discourse one talks of imitation, mimicry, copying and quotation as a modes of capture, in which the human body and voice are used to capture movements, postures and sounds of humans (but also animals and machines). But these actions lack any trace or record of themselves, and though they function as vital forms of capture within artistic performance are not a form of writing as that term is interpreted here -- their impermanence, their lack of any iterable trace being precisely the point of the epithet that theatre is 'written on the wind'. From the opposite direction there are those media which do indeed record and notate (unwittingly) a mimicked movement, though this aspect -- which legitimates calling them written media -- is not in their accepted description foregrounded about them. Examples would be painting, carving, calligraphy, pottery, sewing, embroidery, knitting, and weaving all of which achieve a certain freezing of actions by reproducing traces of human movements (rather than the movements themselves) as inextricable components of the pots, written messages, depicted images, tapestries and textiles whose production is their primary function.

Of these modes of inintentional capture, painting by virtue of its cultural pre-eminence resulting from its representational usages is exemplary; its recording of the artist's gestures through brushstrokes constituting what is recognized to be an essential aspect of the art; it is however an aspect discursively downplayed and neglected when compared to painting's representational function. Art historian James Elkins battling this neglect of the sheer materiality of paint and arguing against the marginilization of the embodied action and painted gestures in favour of the depicted content, insists on the paint-psyche connection, how paint "embeds thought", how it furnishes a "cast of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts" Seen thus, paintings, particularly oil paintings, become records of a thousand accumulated strokes of the brush, which "preserve the memory of tired bodies that made them, the quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures." [WPI 5] Or, less deliberate and localizable, infamously brushless as it were, and detached from the depictive and representational agenda of figurative art, are the so-called action paintings of Jackson Pollock -- paintings which enact a version of the corporeal axiomatic in that they embed the feelings, attitudes, and unconscious knowledge of the artist's entire body. In the development of Western art the resulting capture of body movements, produced an entire style and language of painting -- abstract expressionism -- which rerouted the itinerary of modern painting. In the present terms, one can say that such expressionism is abstract precisely to the extent that concrete content has mutated from being a depiction of the object -- which is precisely the domain of a notational medium -- to the arena of capture in which content is encompassed trans-notationally as (the trace of) of performed movement.

Abstract expressionism exhausted itself long ago. Eclipsed by performance art where its relation to the traced body of the artist gives way to the live mobile presence of his or her body, and more substantively by installation art in which there is a transfer of embodiment from artist to viewer as the viewing body is kinematically augmented by being required to move in, through, and out of the space created by the installation. But though the installation's overshadowing of the traditional flat image effectively terminated the function of the brushstroke as frozen movement, the presence of that sort of mediated trace of the body's action didn't disappear but migrated to digital technology, where the potential for directly capturing gesture, as well as recording or tracing it in painting, has been given a new and still developing itinerary; an itinerary whose emergence from the original haptic device of the computer mouse was unintentional. Thus, as one knows, the mouse is the enabling technology of the Graphic User Interface; invented thirty years ago as a move-and click device for registering the user's (x,y)-position, it has in addition to this function since become a digital paintbrush able to capture (traces of) the highly restricted movements and gestures of the hand swivelling at the wrist and sweeping across a rigidly delimited flat surface. The resulting brushstrokes can be used to create certain kinds of digital paintings -- mousegrams one might call them -- that exhibit these gestures, or rather reduced, metonymic projections of them, in a captured state.3

Pre-eminently among forms of painting action painting captured traces of the artist's activities -- imprints, casts, or residues of movement; whatever thought, affect and feeling painting was able to embed directly (non-representationally) into the painted surface via its pourings and brushstrokes had to be accomplished through these immobile reducts of the dynamic gestures and movements of the painter's body. Motion capture is able to escape from this frame of reducts and residues by being able to deliver a form of kinematic writing not confined to such stationary traces.

2 motion captured
One captures the motion of a moving body through the use of tracking technology, by attaching sensors (responsive to visual or magnetic or aural or inertial tracking technologies) to chosen points on the body (of an animal, machine, human) and takes periodic readings, i.e. digitized samples, via cameras, magnetic sensors, and so on, of where in space these sensors are as the body moves. In fact, 'motion' as such is not essential; in the case of hapticity, the body might move (as in stroking) but does not have to; even potential movement, the propensity to move -- pushes, pulls, impulsions, graspings -- which issues in pressure and dynamic resistance can be captured by force-feedback devices closely related to tracking sensors. In both cases, the resulting data-set of sampled readings contains the information needed to construct what can be perceived to be a reproduction of the original actual or potential motion of the chosen aspects of the body in an unlimited series of situations.

As the phonogram and camera enable the storage and production of sound and vision so motion-capture technology stores and reproduces kinesis. Two differences however should be noted. First, developmental: unlike the capture of sound and vision, which were originally analogue and only subsequent to their technical, cultural, and artistic establishment became digitized (allowing a contrast between the old analogue content and its digitized form), motion capture leapfrogs this history by producing digital files from the outset. Second, operational: the haptic sense, unlike the passive recording of sound and vision, has to be captured actively; observation is not enough, in order for the sense of touch to be registered at all some degree of enactment or manipulation must precede perception. But, notwithstanding the complications and creative facilitations these differences imply, there is a functionally complete analogy between digital sound, digital video, and kinesis recording, in that like sound and video the readings of motion-capture sensors are raw digital data, providing a metonymic sampling of their target motions as opposed to the metaphoric and symbolic representation provided by all notational forms of writing.

The kinetic patterns stored by motion capture dis-embed, de contextualize, and de-territorialize the original motion from the place, time, circumstances, physical form, cultural particularity, and presence of its performance. Released from their originating situations and instantiations, they can be re-territorialized onto a still proliferating range of physical situations and re-embedded within any number of contexts unrelated to the original occurence. Captured motion is able to be endlessly re-instanced and re realized -- to drive two- and three-dimensional animations, to effect the movement of an automaton, a puppet, a robot, a cartoon figure, an electronic doll, a virtual reality avatar, or indeed to become part of the movements and perceptions of another human body.

This latter facility has been exploited by the Australian body artist Stellarc, as part of his extended campaign to demonstrate that the "the body is obsolete" (by which he means the non technologized, 'natural', purely biological and unprosthetic body -- were there to be such a thing), in a recent installation/experiment in which he sent readings of his arm movements via the internet to drive the (suitably prepared) arm of a remote host, a person elsewhere on the planet, causing her to stroke her breast without any anticipated, conscious or willed effort on her part. The result is a form of transposed physicality: for the remote person it appears as a kind of automatism or possession from without and for Stellarc or anybody else initiating it a pseudo-masturbation or indirect self pleasuring enacted through another's body.

Once motion is digitally capturable it becomes digitally generatable: capture by means of sampled readings and simulation by means of executed algorithms being two sides of the same process. Evidently though still in the initial and developmental phase of the technology, captured and simulated gestures are already in widespread use, figuring in art objects, computer games, virtual choreography, animated films, different kinds of electronic installations, and various realizations of the concept of electronic or virtual theatre.

Likewise, though subject to different technological and cultural imperatives, captured forces operating via force-feedback devices are enabling varied forms of purely haptic action at a distance. These range from simulated handling of molecules by research chemists and robotically executed tele-surgery controlled through visually-enhanced feedback loops to cross-planetary arm-wrestling and the inevitable attempt to realize sex-at-a-distance, or teledildonics, which according to its adherents and would-be practictioners would allow a participant to feel his/her avatar sexing another's avatar, or as they put it "computer-mediated sexual interaction between the Virtual Reality presences of two humans". Differently and richer in the direction of more nuanced affectivity, force capture would include the full haptic modalities -- all the numerous forms of stroking, of touch, pressure, and dynamic contact -- that organize the uncharted inter-actions and communings that are assembled within our presentday construction of human embodiment.

Motion capture technology, then, allows the communicational, instrumental and affective traffic of the body in all its movements, openings, tensings, foldings, and rhythms into the orbit of 'writing'. There is in this no limit, at least in principle, to what about or of the body is capturable: the locomoting, cavorting, dancing, strutting, gesturing body; the arm, hand, torso, and head of the Signing body; the everpresent and ubiquitous gesticulating body accompanying speech; facial expressions, transient twists, posturings, posings, and turns of the body in performance; shrugs, eyeblinks, winks, barely perceptible tremors and nods of the socially communicating head; and so on. And not only the signifying and a-signifying moves and dynamics of people, but also of machines and animals and objects from a chimpanzee's grin or the throbbing of a massage chair, to the movements of a musical conductor's baton, the swing of a golf club, the vibrations of a violinist's bow, and so on for actions and kinematic patterns that will exist purely by virtue of being invented/captured and thus signifiable by this very technology. All of this constitutes a gesturo-haptic medium of vast, unrealized and as yet untheorized or critically narrativised potential.

And what, to revert to our original question, does this imply for alphabetic writing and for going beyond the writing of speech? And would not such in its turn go beyond the hegemony and authority (as this is presently constituted) of written discourse itself? Could motion capture be about to induce a transformation as radical and far-reaching for the body's gestural activities, for its skin and organs of grasping and touching as writing accomplished for the organs of speech? Could bringing (a digitally objectified) gesture out from under the shadow of the spoken word install a new order of body mediation? In such an installation it is not a question of the gesturo-haptic equalling or even seriously rivalling the presentday importance and centrality of speech (which would be absurd), but rather the putting into place of an experiential, as opposed to linguistic and spoken, modality. Certainly, gesture's relation to speech is complex and many levelled: it can accompany and be intricately synchronized with speech (gesticulation), can operate counter-orally and function to displace, nullify, or problematize speech (so-called emblem gestures), can be a rival in the sense of an autonomous and complete alternate linguistic medium to speech (Signing), or can operate inside speech as its armature and the vehicle for its extra-word affect (prosody). These gestural activities are evolutionarily old and have long augmented and conditioned speech on an automatic, everyday basis which makes them ideal for designers of human-machine interfaces, since there is no difficult learning curve: "Communicative behaviors such as salutations and fairwells, conversational turn-taking with interruptions, and referring to objects using pointing gestures are examples of protocols that all native speakers of a language already know how to perform and can thus be leveraged in an intelligent interface." [Cassell et al 1]

Interface design is a pragmatic aspect of the gesture-speech nexus in which gesture is seen as augmenting and combining with speech. But, as indicated, gesture can be counterposed to speech as a form of principled silence offering so many different ways of saying nothing; in this sense, what the gesturo-haptic amounts to is a new mediation of silence, a means of arriving at a new and productively positive valorization of a once contemptuously silent -- dumb, a-rational, emotional and hence (though I'll not pursue it here) female -- body. Or better, a new, previously overlooked body in a constant state of arriving, since the saying of nothing, becoming mute, is coeval and coterminous with speaking, and hence inseparable from the never-ending business of creating a wordless interior to spoken language. To achieve the body without organs of speech (as Artaud might have put it), to dumb the body, de-organize it, divest it of speech, silence it, so that, no longer governed by the sayable, it may become the field of other productions, other desires, can be alive to other semiotics, other mediations -- here the gesturo-haptic -- that speech, unable to process silence except as an absence of itself and yoked to its alphabetically written form that suffers from precisely the same inability, has always been only too pleased to elide.

Nobody indeed has argued with more passion and effect against such elision and the corporeal truncation it rides on than Antonin Artaud. Precisely the opposition between the gesturo-haptic and the linguistic in relation to the means and protocols of theatrical performance was the overriding justification and aesthetic and moral force of his theatre of cruelty. For Artaud the purpose of theatre was the induction of feeling, emotion, and affect, the bringing about of a physical and hence spiritual and metaphysical transformation of the bodies of the audience, the creation of a corporeal upheaval in its recipients whose effect on their subjectivity would be as discontinuous, violent, far reaching and unignorable as the plague. Speech could not achieve this. Artaud, requiring his theatre to function with a "pure theatrical language which does without words, a language of signs, gestures, and attitudes ..." knew that speech could not but denigrate and marginalize gesture whereas what was needed was a reversal that re-routed the dominion of thought over the body: "gesture ... instead of serving as a decoration, an accompaniment of a thought, instead causes its movement, directs it, destroys it, or changes it completely [39]. Artaud's programme of theatrical embodiment -- his refusal to subordinate the stage to the performance of written scripts, his insistence on the imperatives and possibilities of screams, shouts, gestures, cries, primitive signals, inchoate utterances, and silences -- did for modern theatre what Pollock's refusal of intentionality and conscious purpose and his insertion of the body onto the canvas did for painting; a re-establishing of the gesturo-haptic at the expense of the depictive, the representational, the linguistic, the textual, and the symbolic.

Becoming silent, acting mute is becoming infant, and as such is understandable as part of a willed accession to the state of pre-speech, a kind of return to or renogotiation of the past, except that what is involved in such a move is not a 'return' or any kind of regression, but a reconfiguration of the present/future by altering its genesis, its supposedly necessary and irrevocable linkage to that past by re-originating itself. The result would be an alteration in the condition for the possibility of being human, a quasi- or neo-primitiveness in which future humans partook of the characteristics of (presentday) children. In this cultural neoteny whereby the adults come to resemble the young of their evolutionary forebears, speech would not of course disappear, but on the contrary become reconfigured (as it was once before when transformed by alphabetic writing) -- better: re mediated and transfigured into a more mobile, expressive and affective apparatus -- by the nascent gesturo-haptic resources being ushered into existence by the technology of motion capture.

3 gesturo-haptic writing
Plainly the gesturo-haptic achieves both departures from the alphabetic inscription of the words spoken -- jumping beyond notation and beyond speech -- suggested earlier: its capture of the moving human body (not to mention animals and machines) far exceeds the alphabet's inscribing of the organs of speech. Nevertheless the gesturo-haptic presents itself as a form of writing that bears a fundamental kinship with alphabetic writing by making available a set of effects parallel to the virtualizing action performed on speech by the alphabet. It certainly extends to gestures the same kinds of conceptual and pragmatic mobility, spatio-temporal dislocation, freedom from the contexts of their production, and analytic transparency as the notational system of alphabetic writing afforded human speech. For as we know, the alphabet, by allowing (insisting) that words become self-standing objects, discrete items of awareness that could be isolated, studied, compared, replicated and systematized, gave rise to grammar, written discourse and literature, and a science of linguistics. Likewise gestures with respect to their digitally captured forms; they too are now being identified, individualized, examined, replicated and synthesized as discrete and autonomous objects of conscious attention. The opportunity is thus opened for such newly digitized and objectified gestures to emerge from the shadow of speech, to be 'grammaticalized' and give rise to a gesturology, whose theoretical implications would extend to a re thinking of the status of human corporeality. More practically, such a gesturology might serve as an enabling semiotic frame allowing the gesturo-haptic to function as a medium for Sign to possess what it has so far lacked -- a stock of iterable gestural artefacts constituting a 'literature'. It might also do for the principled silences and unwords of the gesturo-haptic body, not least the production of that body's presence to itself and to others, what linguistics has done for spoken language on the level of positive knowledge and what geneaologies of discourse have striven to do for the constitution of the speaking subject.

But at the same time the gesturo-haptic is a form of writing which exceeds the textual. Insofar as the 'text' can never be separated from the hermeneutic and the interpretative activities of de ciphering, of reading, of engaging with a site or artefact whose primary function is to signify, the gesturo-haptic is outside the text, its mode is exterior the notion of the text, the gram or the trace of anything prior to its own performance, since it works through bodily enacted events and the necessity of being experienced as these occur. In this sense it is profoundly and inescapably exo-textual; a mediating technology that escapes the purely signifying and the representational by operating within interactive, participatory, and immersive regimes. In other words, the gesturo-haptic doesn't communicate in the accepted sense -- source A sends signifying item B to a recipient C -- it doesn't convey messages, send information, transmit meanings, or bear significations which exist and are determined in advance of its action; what it traffics in are corporeal events in so-called real time, processes and proceedings which have to happen and in happening -- better: in the manner of their happening -- engender meaning; and in such a mode of mediation there is no pure B uncontaminated by an A and C, or vice versa, but rather a triangular interdependency of 'messages' and sending and receiving bodies. More conventionally put: gestures (however isolatable these might be as discrete items of communicaton or objects of analysis) are not signs in Saussure's or Pierce's sense, except insofar as they become so retrospectively in that they come to signify (if that is the term) their own happening and its expected/habitual affects; their meaning in this retrospective semiotization is the fact and embodied consequences of their having occurred.

But, to repeat, however conveniently naturalizing, this after-the fact discursive description of the gesturo-haptic should not be allowed to mask the fundamental difference -- the gap between language and experience, discourse and embodiment, representation and enactment -- separating it from purely textual writing. Of captured items such as a handshake, shrug, squeeze of the shoulder, a kiss, a turning aside, and so on, one can say that despite their conventional meanings, what is salient about them, their importance, value, and strategic or instrumental interest, is not derived from these meanings, but in the fact of their taking place and in the subsequent psycho-social-corporeal effects (of affect, safety, assurance, threat, etc) they induce and could only induce as a result of having actually occurred, and having done so in the manner, style, and force (all that constitutes what one might call their gestural prosody) that they did.

To think otherwise about gesturo-haptic mediation, to allow it to be reduced to a species of discourse and assume its effects to be wholly articulable within representation is then a double misapprehension, since it misperceives how the medium works through bodily transformation and not linguistic symbols and, less transparently, it obfuscates its direct -- pre-discursive -- action on the body, what I called earlier technology's corporeal axiomatic, and hence its action in inducing and installing subjectivity.

4 technologized subjectivity
"Cultures", Merlin Donald reminds us, "restructure the mind, not only in terms of its specific contents, which are obviously culture-bound, but also in terms of its fundamental neurological organization." [14 ] Likewise, as evolutionary neurologist Terrence Deacon argues, a cultural phenomenon such as the development of language and its ramifications can be seen to have altered the size and overall capacity of the brain (rather than, as is usually supposed, the reverse). In Donalds's case, the arena of this restructuring is the evolution of cognition through neurological changes brought about by culturally mediated systems of external memory (writing for example), which is evidently an instance of technologically mediated exogenesis; as such it can be generalized from the memory-storage functions of written notation to their extension in the present account -- capture -- made available by the medium of gesturo-haptic writing.

A principal mode of exogenesis is synthetic assemblage, the coming- or putting-together of independent activities to form a new, functionally unified and autonomous, entity with emergent properties not present in its components. Two evolutionary examples, far removed from motion capture, illustrate the point. One is human number sense. The ability to number things in a collection has been shown by Stanislas Dehaene, contrary to the accepted view, not to be an endogenously formed faculty, but a capacity assembled by social demands (the imperatives of mathematical practice) from differently evolved and independent brain activities each with their own functionalities having no prior intrinsic or necessary connection to number. The other is speech itself which though evidently a unified faculty (the object of linguistics) is, as Deacon makes clear, the result of a coming together of many separate neurological capacities and physical changes from the propensity for vocal mimicry through left/right hemispheric specialization of the brain to the descent of the larynx enabling a sufficiently adequate range of vowel production [353].

The same synthesis enables a gesturo-haptic form of exogenesis. Captured gestures can become the elements for previously non existent and unknown assemblages of body movements; assemblages which are the site of neurological restructuring and in the presence of which new neuro-physiologies, forms of corporeality, and subjectivities come into being. Going far beyond the neurological examples of number sense and speech, these assemblages will not be confined to the synthesis of elements drawn from internal and pre-existing brain activities. Once the body's movements, gestures, and hapticities are captured and digitally manipulable they become, as we've seen, de territorealized, which means they can be assembled outside the neurological confines of a (any) individual brain and put together through networks and culturally mediated collectivities, both existent and yet to be created. In this expanded field, captured body movements become the means of creating subjectivity -- selves, subjects and subject-positions -- differently operative and differently sourced from those available within alphabetic writing. By allowing gesturo-haptic mediation this kind of constitutive role, such a re-writing of the corporeal provides a particular -- technologically specific -- concretization of Gilles Deleuze's remark "We are only just beginning to understand what a body is capable of", in that it reveals the body as both vehicle and recipient of becoming, as the site of a movement to and from the outside of the human, whose contemporary technological facilitation can be seen in the emergence of a bio-technic subject which is still in the stage of being characterized -- dispersed, pluralized, de-centered, distributed, etc -- as negations of what it is in the process of superceding.

But however productive this sort of non-endogenous assemblage is, it presents only one strand -- the explicit and manifest aspect -- of the exogenesis brought about by technology. Technologies as we've observed have the potential to restructure our neurology, to impinge on the body and its psychic envelope along different channels. The conventional avenues being either as prosthetic extensions of physical, cognitive and perceptual powers (the usual effects of tools, machines, apparatuses) or, as media, through the corporeal changes of affect and subjectivity wrought by cultural products they make possible (the usual effects of the arts, literature, film, and so on). But less obvious and no less interesting, more so perhaps because they operate invisibly, are the non-explicit, non-intentional and pre-cultural corporeal effects of technologies: their implicit restructuring of time and space, their facilitations of new modalities of self, the work they do behind or beneath or despite the explicitly instrumental or signifying functions they are known by and introduced to discharge.

This double aspect of technological restructuring operates at all levels from large-scale infrastructural phenomena such as electricity distribution or computer technology to the most banal machinic device. Thus, a trivial but paradigmatic example of the latter: the pop-up toaster is a tool invented to prosthetically extend the cooking body; less obviously, it contributes to the atomization of attention, micro-periodization of temporality, and intermittence of conscious awareness that are endemic to subjectivities operating in an electronically patterned infrastructure. Likewise, but in a diffuse and more indirect way, one can identify pre-cultural, non-intentional technologically driven changes in subjectivity associated with developments in computational and visualization technologies.4

Such effects are not moreover tied to hardware and physical apparatuses: the technology in question can be primarily cognitive, as is the case with alphabetic writing. Here the explicit, intentional functions and effects -- prosthetic extension of speech, written discourse, the creation of Western literacy together with its wider technological and intellectual outworks -- are evident enough as are certain much commented upon concommitant and collateral psycho-neurological effects of the alphabet such as the emphasis on linearity, the inculcation of analyticity, and the promotion of context-free and atomized modes of thought. Less evident, in fact quite invisible (as to be expected given technology's corporeal axiomatic), is alphabetic writing's reconfiguration of the body at the level of neurophysiology; an effect, which installs a transcendental fissure or onto-theological resource inside its texts whose ultimate form is an abstract, disembodied being -- the God of Western monotheism.5 In light of this, to speak of the end of the alphabet is to suggest the possibility of a shift in Western deism, a reconfiguration of God and the God-effect, as momentous as the alphabet's inauguration of that being. If this is so, then the stakes for an end to the alphabet would be high indeed and, to return to Leroi-Gourhan's fantasy of post-alphabeticism we started from, we have to wonder if such a thing is feasible; if an end to alphabetic writing or, less totally, a significant shrinkage in its universality, importance, controlling functionality and hegemonic status, is thinkable from within that very writing here in the West?

Impossible to say, but Leroi-Gorhan's question of the ultimate limits and end of the alphabetic text -- like Marshall McLuhan's similar contemporary probing of the status of typographic man - has now been given an extra twist by digital technology, a way of thinking the question in terms of the impending transformation of the body and its subjectivities brought about by the yet to be realized possibilities of gesturo-haptic writing.

endnotes
1. Failure to render the prosody of spoken utterance in writing is the subject of The Alphabetic Body. The present text is an elaboration of the last section of that essay.

2. In Embodying Technesis Mark Hansen argues at length that "the putting into discourse" of technology, by which he means the propensity to ignore what is called here technology's corporeal axiomatic in favour of its discursively explicit instrumentality, is a major fault in 20th century thought on the suubject.

3. Some examples of mousegrams can be found on the present writer's website at http://ServerB.QN.Net/~brotman/mouse display.html

4. A preliminary attempt to sketch such a change in subjectivity from the mono and linear to the multiple and parallel can be found in my Going Parallel and Becoming Beside Oneself.

5. Or so I reason in The Alphabetic Body.

References
Artaud, Antonin The Theatre and its Double (New York, Grove Press: 1958)
Cassell, Justine et al "More Than Just a Pretty Face: Affordances of Embodiment" (http://gn.www.media.mit.edu/groups/gn/publications: July 2001)
Deacon, Terrance The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York, Norton: 1997)
Deheane, Stanislaw The Number Sense (Oxford, Oxford U. Press: 1997)
Donald, Merlin Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U. Press: 1991)
Elkins, James What Painting Is (London, Routledge: 1999)
Hansen, Mark Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (University of Michigan Press: 2000
Leroi-Gourhan, André Gesture and Speech, translated Anna Berger (Cambridge, Mass.: 1993)
Rotman, Brian "Going Parallel", SubStance, 91, 56-79, 2000 ----
"The Alphabetic Body" , Random Figures, Parallax 22, Volume 8 (1), 2002----
"Becoming Beside Oneself", www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/WritingScience/etexts/Rotman/Becom ing.html