Ghost Effects

Stanford Humanities Institute, November 2004

 
My talk juxtaposes two narratives, one about the virtual, the other about ghosts. “Ghosts”, Mark Turner observes, “are everywhere. Ghost is a concept for which there is no referent, no evidence, anywhere, any place, any time in the entire sweep of human experience, yet one that is vital in many cultures and perhaps in every culture since the Upper Paleolithic Age. Apparently, there is a powerful impulse within human imagination that flows inevitably to this unwarranted fiction.” (Turner 2003)
 
The ghosts that interest me here are autonomous beings, quasi-human entities in their own right, rather than ghosts of something or somebody,  such as ghosts of past events, ghost memories, ghosts of the dead, and so on.  Though it must be said that these latter ghosts – beings that haunt us -- are never far from the discussion.
 
The virtual within contemporary culture has become a universal catalyst, signaling the passage of any X into virtual X. Until barely two decades ago ‘virtual’ was an unassuming term connoting something insubstantial, not quite real – ‘in essence or effect not in form, in imagination not reality’, with a few techno-scientific senses -- virtual rays in optics and virtual forces in mechanics – referring to a thought-experimental deployment of certain unreal entities. Now, like ghosts, the virtual is everywhere: virtual space, virtual particles, virtual waves, virtual machines, virtual memory, virtual lifeforms, and virtual molecules occur in computing and the physical and biological sciences; while virtual tourism, virtual shopping, virtual books, virtual bodies, virtual sex, virtual reality, virtual subjects, virtual history, virtual class warfare, virtual classrooms, and so on, and so forth, are part of social life. 
 
All these virtuals are plainly the outcome of digital technology, but one can question whether the phenomenon of virtuality they exhibit is itself electronic.[1]
 
Thus, certain abstract vectors inhabit the passage to the virtual:  virtual X is, in varying ways, a de-territorealized, asynchronous, distributed, simulated, and de-contextualized re-enactment of X. These vectors make themselves felt through a series of shifts in the familiar attributes of everyday social and psychic reality. What was (or was thought to be) individual, singular, and unified – subjectivities, modes of intelligence -- becomes collective, plural, and distributed. What was isolated and separated – knowledge, information, thought -- becomes networked and connected. Effects and processes that were serial and linear – computations, narratives, texts, lines of communication  -- become parallel and simultaneous. What were thought to be endogenously formed, monadic, and self-contained – art objects, psychic development, the ‘human’ – are revealed to be exogenous and multiply assembled.
 
Individually, each of these shifts marks the site of a dense and quite specific discontinuity. Taken together, they indicate a large-scale break in the discursive and phenomenological fabric of western culture. How large? What might be a comparable cultural disruption? Let me offer a provocation.
 
Virtuality is ancient. Far from being tied to digitality its lineage long antedates itscurrent technological matrix. Its current manifestation, the virtual X of contemporary life, is the third great wave of the phenomenon. The second came with the writing of speech. The first was with the advent of language itself. Furthermore, each of the associated mediations – the spoken, written, and digital – has a double action. On one hand, it materializes and re-contextualizes what preceded it; on the other hand, it midwifes the virtual into being at the site of an irruption, a radical dissociation within a previously indivisible whole. Each wave of the virtual re-structures consciousness through the creation of previously unavailable – no doubt imagined but unactualized -- modes of presence, agency, and self-representation.
 
In particular, the contemporary virtual is to be seen as re-structuring the entire three-millennia domination of text-based culture, a process likely to affect most those entities deeply and implicitly the product of written mediation -- either transforming them or introducing phenomena foreign or antagonistic to them. 
 
In what follows I shall comment on three such entities – God, Mind, and Infinity – each of which emerges within the matrix of alphabetic writing. But before these ghosts out of the machine of writing, some remarks about virtuality, specifically its emergence within language itself.
 
A bio-linguistic ghost: virtualizing dumb presence
“Ghost”, Mark Turner reminds us, “is a concept for which there is no reference.” Likewise for the concepts of spirit, demon, angel, god, and other varieties of the non-, the un-, and the super-natural. But what is reference? And how do concepts, naturalistic or otherwise, refer? How can one make reference to impossible or non-existent entities? The standard frame for such questions is the structuralist one articulated by Ferdinand de Saussure which understands language (langue) as an abstract structure, self-contained and prior to its deployment (parole). According to this, reference is entirely a social convention, the result of an arbitrary pairing, an unmotivated, element-by-element correspondence between separate planes of signifieds (objects, concepts) and signifiers (words).
 
Whatever its merits, Saussure’s framework offers no linguistic explanation of how concepts with no referents might occur or why they might be the objects of belief. By contrast, a recent neuro-biological account of the evolution of language, which rejects Saussure’s conventionalist framework, does just that. According to Terrence Deacon “The correspondence between words and objects is a secondary relationship, subordinate to a web of associative relationships of a quite different sort, which even allows us reference to impossible things.” [1997:70]
 
Deacon’s analysis of the evolutionary and neurological genesis of this web, of how reference to the impossible comes about, is complex and carefully argued. A metonym of it goes in essence something like the following.
 
What is normally meant by the term ‘reference’ is symbolic reference which Deacon understands as emerging out of two simpler kinds -- iconic reference:  similarity between sign and referent or, better, the lack of a perceived difference, and then indexical reference: a contiguity interpreted to exist between sign and referent. The hierarchy is completed by symbolic reference constituted out of representations of relations between indices. Whereas the first two are widely shared across species, all nervous systems exhibiting some form of iconic and indexical reference (albeit across a large cognitive range), the last is confined to humans with only a rudimentary form learnable by some higher primates.
 
The terms icon, index and symbol are, in Deacon’s use, those of Charles Peirce’s semiotics and Deacon’s deployment of them adheres to Peirce’s axiom that all ideas are essentially transmissions of signs organized by a semiotic logic that is the same for communication processes inside and outside the brain. This means that icons and indices refer to inferential and predictive powers implicit in their underlying neural mechanisms, which “are not physically re-presented but only virtually re-presented by producing ... responses like those that would occur if they were present.” [78] In other words, because it handles only representations of events, the brain imposes no separation in principle between the hypothetical, the possible, and the actual – all are treated as representations of representations.
 
This feature allows Deacon to explain how symbolic reference can arise from biologically constrained here-and-now reference via a co-evolution of neurology and language: changes in the new born’s brain, manifest in its cognitive abilities, exert a selective pressure on which features of language are learnable and which not, this in turn creates selectional pressure on neurological change, which further impacts the structure of language, and so on.  The outcome, over thousands of generations, is the emergence of symbolic or virtual reference. The ability to refer to that which is absent or unreal, the core of symbolic reference, is thus folded into and distributed among a web of older layers of previously more ‘real’ forms of reference.
 
The result is that inhabiting language -- what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben characterizes as the impossible to state state of being-in-language -- is an entanglement of subjectivities, experienced as an unmarked, implicit, ever-present doubling, a mutually constituted oscillation between virtual presence and ‘real’ referential absence. Or, in the psychoanalytic paradox-speak of Jacques Lacan for whom the Real is outside the Symbolic: “In the Symbolic order nothing exists except on an assumed foundation of absence. Nothing exists except insofar as it does not exist.” [Quoted Bowie 93]
 
Thus self-consciousness, which would appear to be the paradigm of ‘real’ as opposed to virtual reference, is nothing of the sort. Folded within it is the unexpungeable invocation of other selves, reference to whom is always symbolic. The experience of this referential doubleness, which enters into every use of a self-name, symbolization of the self, or speaking of ‘I’, might be the basis, Deacon suggests, for a biology of ghosts, a natural origin for the psychological salience of non-mortal, non-natural entities: “The symbolic representation of self”, he says, “provides a perspective on that curious human intuition that our minds are somehow independent of our bodies; an intuition ... translated into beliefs about disembodied spirits and souls that persist beyond death.“ [454]
 
The virtuality introduced by symbolic reference, then, ruptures the subjectivity of an individual enclosed within an iconically and indexically represented environment. It effects an escape from this subject’s body, from the iconic continuity and indexical associations of a pre-linguistic ‘me’, into the shared domain of the spoken ‘I’. Speech, in other words, midwifes the first out of body experience. As such, it echoes the more originary rupture, the out of the womb experience which delivers body into hominized life. In the presence of the symbol, then, all self-representation and self-reference loops through the virtually present social other. Split off and reified, this virtual component of the self is a ghost. Subsequent manifestations of the virtual through the medium of writing, as we shall now see, engender other disembodiments and forms of remote agency and presence, which feed upon and extend the phenomenology of the virtual and its ghosts released by the symbolic 'I' of speech.
Deus ex Machina: Writing and its ghosts
Speech, then, materializes thought and virtualizes dumb presence. The spoken‘I’ providing a symbolic, out-of-body template for a ghost-effect that, Deacon suggests, might be the ultimate source for beliefs about disembodied spirits and souls persisting after death.
 
Writing performs a parallel move on speech, materializing utterance and virtualizing spoken presence. The written ‘I’ providing a template for a virtual voice, a ghost-who-speaks from elsewhere. 
 
Ghosts cling to communicational media. At the beginning of the digital age, the photographic plate revealed luminous body shapes, apparitions, and ectoplasmic traces of the presence of a previously invisible army of paranormal entities. Samuel Morse’s telegraph machine, by making simultaneous writing between remote agents possible, crystallized a population of disembodied communicating agencies – spirits, ghost-entities, and spectral presences who, amazingly enough, communicated through Morse-code like taps for yes and no. Could there have been a comparable culture of oiuja boards, seances, table tapping, spooky emanations, and theosophical prophets without the telegraph’s effects, and later those of the telephone and wireless? And would spiritualism have garnered so many believers and advocates without Edison’s phonograph, which, in one contemporary account, allowed the “startling possibility of the voices of the dead being reheard.” [Kahn 271][2]
 
But these nineteenth century ghosts were parasitic on much older ones. The writing of ‘I’ long preceded and anticipated the entities released by the telegraph and phonograph. Millennia before such machines, virtual speech was already the medium of uncanny messages from the grave. Among early writing, Henri Jean Martin observes "We can decipher funerary inscriptions everywhere [throughout Mesopotamia] in which the dead ... ask that their names be pronounced or that an offering prayer containing their names be read aloud, almost as if that could make them live again." [Martin 1994:102-3][3]
 
Media do not, despite what Friedrich Kittler would have us believe, “determine our situation”  but they do, like all technologies, open it up to new effects and new forms of affect. Certainly, every communicational medium conjures a generic being: it makes available a figure, an abstract user of itself, a placeholder for the one who can send,receive, and record the messages it permits. When the medium is writing the figure is the virtual speaker. And (given the appropriate rhetorical infrastructure) the writing of ‘I’ crystallizes this figure as a quasi-material, quasi-human agency – the putative self-referring originator of the text. A figure that is at once invisible, absent, without location, detached from the voice, and unmoored from its time of origination or its subsequent appearances.
 
At the beginning of the alphabetic West two different figures, two entities fitting this description emerged and have since constituted major horizons of western thought and discourse, namely: Jahweh or God, the monobeing conjured out of their tribal god by the Jews, and psyche or Mind, the organ of thought postulated by the Greeks. They occupy opposed transcendental spaces: God -- a limitlessly external ‘everywhere’ enclosing the human ‘created in its image’, Mind --  enclosed within each human as an unspecifiable ‘in here’ with respect to which the body is cognized as separate and inferior.
 
Plainly, the writing of ‘I’ sets in train a fundamental and inescapable analogy to speech: an I-sayer who ‘speaks’ in the voice of writing, the imputed source of written enunciations such as ‘I am’, ‘I think’, “I believe’, and so on, an agency who/which is to the text as the oral-I is to its utterance.
 
For the Greeks the isolation of graphic signs for phonemes and addition of vowels to form their alphabet was momentous, and within the cascade of conceptual changes it produced – notably the exploitation of writing’s invention of the ‘idea of the idea’ (David Olson) and the reification of thought intrinsic to it (Eric Havelock)  -- the agency who utters ‘I’ and the agency who writes ‘I’ entered into a complex dance of identification and separation, collapse and opposition. It is impossible for a physically absent person or for a person who is dead or one never existed to speak ‘I’. None of these impossibilities attaches to the textual ‘I’ with its ability to reference the absent, the deceased, and the fictional. This difference polarized into an unbridgeable opposition.  The scribal ‘I’ (along with the ideas which it thinks and their domain) was conceived as transcending the physical world of the spoken I, and as mind became the immortal, disembodied ghost that originates thoughts.[4]
 
Of course, this process could not have been conscious and no explicit evidence of such a ghost-agency’s birth is to be expected, but etymological change over the period of writing’s introduction suggests it took place. In preliterate Homer the words psyche or noos or thumos, subsequently translated as ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ or ’spirit’, had no such mentalist or unembodied meanings, but “depended to a large extent on an analogy with the physical organs.” and the word soma in Homeric usage denoted not a ‘body’ opposed to a ‘mind’ but essentially a corpse. [Snell 16] By the fifth century this had changed: for Heraclitus the psyche is already a soul with “qualities that differed radically from those of the body and physical organs” and soma had become its body. [17] In the Platonic dialogues psyche is the mind-soul, its disembodiment inseparable from the Platonic ‘Ideas’ and ‘Forms’ whose unembodied status was itself, as indicated, derived from writing, whilst noos for Aristotle was the thinking principle, separable from the body and immortal; more of which presently.[5]
 
Though they realize the same scheme, the two ghosts –- Mind and God -- result from vastly different social, historical, cultural and intellectual encounters with the alphabetic writing of speech: ‘cattle-herding semi-nomad’ Israelites versus denizens of a Greek polis; agricultural exchange as opposed to a money economy; a scribal-priest monopoly on writing versus citizen literacy; an abjad alphabet fitted to a consonantal language versus the deployment of a vowelled alphabet to inscribe Greek; tribal consolidation, captivity and exile versus a slave-owning empire; the Jewish religio-moral-ethnic fixation on a single fixed corpus against an oratorical-theatrical and philosophical ecology of secular texts; openly divergent subjectivities versus struggles (from Abraham to Job) against subjection to the God – the Absolute Subject as Althusser called him -- who hails Moses.
 
But, salient here is the explicit role of writing in the making of God: Judaism is a religion of the book, founded on God’s revelation through the written word. The unwinding of Yahweh’s scriptive self-revealing and becoming the universal monobeing is a project I can’t pursue here except to offer some links between Yahweh and the writing of speech.
 
First, the Torah. Though framed as historical truth, presented as a single narrative with a unified meaning, understood as a continuous itinerary of the Jewish people as authored by Moses, chosen prophet and conduit of Yahweh’s word, biblical scholarship has demonstrated that the five books are nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an assemblage of diverse and at times contradictory texts by different hands, in different contexts, with different agendas, dating from circa 1000 to 500 BCE, re-written and augmented by priest-scribes with politico-theological purpose and rhetorical intent during and immediately after the Babylonian exile in the mid sixth century BCE.
 
Second, the revelation. The key event of the entire Torah is Yahweh’s encounter with Moses on Sinai when his covenant (the very idea of which is an artifact of writing) with the Israelites -- foundational to the entire ethno-theological narrative of Judaism – takes place. In its telling in the book of Exodus, the moment is doubled. Yahweh inscribes his commandments – they are written with “the finger of God” -- and, a few verses later, speaks them to Moses and instructs him to write them down. According to hermeneutic scholarship, the text of the speaker-God dates from circa tenth century BCE, that of the writer-God from the period of the Torah’s redaction some four hundred years later. The earlier being is the God of the Israelites, a tribal appropriation of El, the chief Mesopotamian god – hence: Isra-el (Yisrael = champion of El), el-ohim, beth-el as well as Micha-el, Gabri-el, Dani-el --  who promises to smite their enemies and jealously demanded in the Decalogue they worship no other gods before him. The later god who writes the covenant is the monobeing for whom all other gods are not merely inferior and beneath him but false, non-existent. Spoken pre-eminence has been transduced into written uniqueness, a shift into monicity further consolidated in exile by the priestly insertion into the earlier book of Isaiah of the hysterically re-iterated “ I am the lord, there is no other ... there is no god but me.” [Isaiah 43-5]
 
Third, how did Yahweh get inside the Torah? How did he give birth to himself inside the text. An autochthon of the alphabet, his presence issues from writing’s ability to invoke an agency behind itself, to put in play an I-source that authored it. I write ‘I’ hence how can I not exist? A formulaic self-creation realized within the biblical text in the notoriously opaque and much commented upon declaration ‘I am that I am’. Immediately after which, asked how he is to be named, how introduced to the Israelites, the agency enigmatically gives as his name the phrase “I am”.  Though apparently a textual record of an utterance, it is only as writing could such a response be possible. Only by means of a text can an agency quote a fragment of its own speech – the ‘I am’ of “I am that I am” -- and thus recursively name itself as the one who said these very words.
 
Or wrote them? The being’s character stems from the difference. One reads an alphabetic text and, in order to interpret it, one supplies the prosody, the voice’s gestures -- tone,  rhythm, delivery, manner of speech -- which indicate motive, carry intentions, convey desire and affect. This necessary and thoroughly routine augmentation rests on an assemblage of assumptions involving context, prior knowledge, the text’s relation to other texts, the author’s situation and attitude to its utterance, and so on. But if there is no prior knowledge, if the text is unique, if the author has no reality outside it, such things are impossible. Defined entirely by writing, then, God’s voice is in principle absent of all assignable prosody. Consequently, his toneless words, cannot but conjure an agency that is unknowable, terrifying, inscrutable and monadic, without desire for or acknowledgement of an addressee, and incapable of being individuated, of being compared to another, as humans are, as a voice among voices.
 
Finally, the text’s displacement of the original voice, the scribal-I’s appropriation of its oral predecessor, doesn’t end with the priestly insertion in Exodus of a God who writes, but persists, allied to an intense alphabetic fetishism within Jewish philosophical and especially mystical thought. Focusing on the delivery of the commandments at Sinai, Talmudic scholars argued that only the two phrases following the initial ‘I’ (anochai) of the first commandment – ‘I am the Lord thy God’ -- were audible to the Israelites at the foot of the mountain. A millennium later Moses Maimonides took this further: only a sound, not a word, was audible to them. Further still: in the eighteenth century a Hassidic scholar reduced it to a single letter, aleph, initial letter of the word anochai, which, for Daniel Heller-Roazen, is “a mark”, not of speech but “of silence ... at the inception of speech” 2002:103]. Thus the voicing of the commandments is reduced via a nested series of beginnings mimicking the acrophonic principle that supposedly gave rise to the alphabet itself. By the twentieth century the voice of God had disappeared entirely, only writing remains: the triumph of the letter finding its contemporary terminus in Grammatology “one of the postmodern branches of the Science of Judaism.” [Vassilis Lambropoulos 1993: 260] enshrined in Derrida’s speech-annihilating formula ‘There is no outside to the text’.[6]
A ghost of mathematical writing
But let me move from the alphabetic monobeing to another ghost; one that mathematicians invoke, though they don’t describe it so, when they write 1,2,3, ... and think infinity.
 
A salient feature of ghosts is their mode of embodiment and disembodiment. Their aberrant physicality, more than anything, underlies their strangeness, the spookiness of their presence, and inflects all inferences about them.
 
The medieval (Christian) king, according to Kantorowicz, has two bodies – a private and human one, his material body – and a divine, immortal one. The monarch’s presence and his exercise of power derived from the institutional, theological, and rhetorically assembled co-presence of these bodies.
 
The mathematician has three bodies, or three material arenas of operation  -- a mortal Person, a virtual agent, and a semiotic Subject -- likewise co-assembled.  The mathematical person subjectively situated in language is the one who imagines, makes judgments, tells stories, has intuitions, hunches and motives; next, the mathematical agent, imagined by the Person, is a formal construct which executes ideal actions and lacks any capacity to attach meaning to the signs which control its narratives; and between them, their interface, the mathematical subject, who embodies the materiality of the apparatus that writes and is written by mathematical thought.
 
Following Charles Peirce one can, as I have shown elsewhere, view mathematics as a thought-experimental process of ‘reflective observation’. According to this, the person imagines the agent performing an activity and observes the result of the activity via the symbolic mediation by the subject. The agent is a proxy or surrogate of the person, so that for the observation to be a convincing thought-experiment the agent must resemble the person. But the resemblance is necessarily partial: the agent is invoked in the first place is to execute an action – such as unlimited counting -- that goes beyond the person’s temporal and/or material constraints. The agent is thus a person without a body. Or rather a person with a virtual body that has a split character. On the one hand it lacks those features of bodies that prevent the person carrying out the action. On the other, any feature not so excluded remains unaffected and available to the agent.
 
Precisely this sort of specific exclusion and unlimited inclusion is, according to cognitive anthropologist Pascale Boyer, the characteristic of ghosts that figure in religious settings. The mathematical agent and the inferences that can be made about it parallel those of supernatural entities, the concepts of which arise from such a double move:
 
“Religious concepts violate certain expectations from ontological categories [and] preserve other expectations – [namely] all the relevant default inferences except the ones that are explicitly barred by the counterintuitive element.” (Boyer 2001: 62, 73)
 
For Boyer, ontological categories have a biological genealogy. They comprise natural, that is, pre-linguistic, evolutionarily determined, unconsciously mobilized, and instantly available templates. There are a small number of these – namely Person, Tool, Animal, Thing, Plant – each the source of multiple, readily produced, and habitual expectations. The double move he outlines results in concepts that are at once un- or non- or supernatural – precisely the result of the violation – and yet highly productive and stable on account of their remaining uninterdicted wealth of default inferences. A traditional ghost, for example, might pass through walls, thus enjoying what the linguist Leonard Talmy identifies as “fictive motion” (Talmy 2000), but be able to see and hear with unimpaired human powers.[7]
 
For classical mathematics the ghost activity of interest is infinite counting, and the relevant ontological category that is violated is Person. Expunged are all expectations and inferences that spring from the physicality of the person – fatigue, mortality, boredom, inscriptional resources, effects of repetition  – which militate against any attempt to iterate indefinitely. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere (Rotman 1993) the supernatural or ghost character of the classical agent is masked by the prior naturalization of the endless sequence 1, 2, 3, ... of so-called natural numbers as an unexamined given, definitional of mathematical thought itself.
 
This prior naturalization is, in effect, built into the logic Aristotle wielded to discuss counting. This capacity – unquestioned, implicit, and obvious -- to be able always to count one more time, became the basis for the potential infinite in mathematics. Potential, that is, against the paradoxical effects of the actual infinite threatened, in Aristotle’s understanding of them, by Zeno’s paradoxes.
 
The agent of endless iteration, then, is noos, the immortal disembodied thinking organ deployed as an active mathematical principle. In a further move, the repudiated actual infinite re-entered mathematics in the nineteenth century. At the moment Friedrich Nietzsche was announcing the death of God, Georg Cantor was transposing a version of Him into a mathematical principle. Violated this time was the ontological category of Thing. The part-whole expectation of ‘things’ inherent in that category, that had so troubled Galileo, was converted by Cantor into a definition. As a result what had been an horizon – the outer limit to noos-imagined human counting -- became an object of mathematical discourse. And the frankly theological concept that Cantor called ‘the Absolute’, with its paradoxical and inaccessible set of all sets, took the place of this displaced limit. The result was an agent with the capacity to enter into narratives about infinity itself.
 
Cantor’s infinities, together with their set-theoretical matrix and supporting Platonist theology, have exerted a hegemonic influence over twentieth century mathematics. Recent developments, however, indicate that the days of its dominance are numbered. Digital mathematics – intrinsically antagonistic to infinitary thought and already the basis of a new experimental mathematics of computed objects would appear to be its nemesis.[8] Where traditional mathematics works through proofs about imagined objects – the actions of a weightless ghost -- digital mathematics simulates them as real-time, material entities, the actions of a machine. Thus, traditional mathematics’ syntax-driven discourse of symbols, notation systems and formulas organized into linear, alphabetic chains of logic (pictureless first-order languages, axiomatization), is confronted by a discourse that is performative and driven by digital -- screen-visualizable – images for which proof and logical validation are secondary. This is not to say that the classical, infinitary agent will disappear, but rather its ideality, its ghost ontology, cannot but be revealed and ineluctably altered when confronted by the materializing, de-infinitizing action of digital computation.[9]
 
Digital ghosts?
Speech produced virtual reference and the ghostly intermittence of being-in-language. Writing virtualized speech and what emerged in the alphabetic West were the ghosts of God, Mind, and Infinity. And now digital technology is virtualizing writing and all that flowed from it to produce agency and presence, at a distance. An obvious question, then: what sorts of ghosts, ghosts of the virtual, might be emerging from digital media?
 
The question is surely premature: digitality is an unfinished project, its mediations ongoing and unpredictable. Indeed, the very nomenclature of virtual-X, like horseless carriage, is a backward characterization caught in its difference from its predecessor. In any event, one cannot assume that the internet, for example, is the final form either of itself as medium or of the media effects that it might promote. Or, a quite different development, the digital capture – essentially the virtualization -- of motion, what I’ve called elsewhere gesturo-haptic writing, offers a new mediation of the body by doing for the kinetic what the phonograph and camera do for the aural and the visual.[10] Or, different again, digitality, via genetic engineering (trans-speciation, cloning) and nanotechnology through its neuro- and bio-medical applications, is poised to transform what it means to be or have or act upon or perform or perceive a body; activities that are intimately connected with the nature and existence of ghosts.
 
Nevertheless, we might proceed by analogy. If ghosts appear as virtual entities at the site of self-representation – spoken‘I’, written ‘I’ - as the abstract user or placeholder of the relevant medium, then a possible source for contemporary ghosts will be entities associated with a digital ‘I’.
 
 But there is as yet no delimitable medium within the field of the digital for which such a placeholder is identifiable, no digital user analogous to a speaker or writer. Anything we might call an ‘I’ in the digital field is more likely to be a ‘we’ or ‘they’ – a plural assemblage, whose agency and presence is inseparable from collectivized and distributed forms of self-representation.
 
Such, at least, is the lesson one would draw from looking at the characteristics of the contemporary virtual and from the forces of hominization accompanying it. We are and have surely long been cyborgs, hybrids, increasingly folded into the network of machines that invent us as we invent them. We miscegenate with our apparatuses and machinic creations and, as subjects, are exogenous, our psyches the result of exterior determinants and not any longer (if they ever were) endogenous and self-contained. Though productive of new subjectivities within the ecology of digital forms, the principle of exogeneity is not new. As Merlin Donald has pointed out, the evolution of cognition has long been the result of an exteriorization of thought: “We act in cognitive collectivities, in symbiosis with external memory systems.” [Donald 1991: 382] But now our cognitive abilities and subjectivities are not only collective but dispersed across heterogeneous arenas, smeared across multiple sites as, ever more connected, we navigate through an expanding universe of virtuality and encounter innumerable digitized traces, anticipations, proxies, avatars, representations, and doubles of ourselves. As subjects we are becoming multiple, beside ourselves: the individual ‘I’ increasingly collectivized by digitally mediated forms of ’they’ and ‘we’ (or ‘I-and-I’ as the Rastafarians say it).
 
But that is to leap into a conjectured future.[11] Meanwhile, digital agency and presence is still actively entangled with the world of writing. As the alphabet reconfigured orality, so digitality is reconfiguring the written wor(l)d, appropriating all the corporeal practices and associated subjectivities of the scribal-I, relentlessly capturing all that was materialized, incarnated, and somatically held together through lettered bodies, text-bound characters, isolated and silent reading selves, literate personas, forms of textual agency, and written subject positions. Having captured them, digital mediation mimetically doubles and transduces them into virtual forms.
 
Once it is recognized that alphabetic writing equipped western culture with an absent monoGod and a disembodied Mind, it becomes possible to go beyond horizon of these ghosts. Possible to imagine that such writing-induced metaphysics might in fact be about to disappear; possible to think we are approaching a particular moment in the history of writing – the end of what Leroi-Gourhan calls the “era of alphabetic graphism”. Possible, in other words, that the very concept, discourse, reality, affect, and persuasional hold of such metaphysical entities will not survive the de-stabilizing virtualities of the post-alphabetic era. Perhaps the times are bidding us to shuck off these ancient entities to make way for new ghosts.
 
Certainly, the material history of Judeo-Christian “theography”, the written “mediation of God” as Regis Debray calls it (Debray 2004), suggests that the present juncture might mark a significant moment in the history of that illustrious Being. Consider three mediations, each connected intimately with a significant discontinuity in monotheism. First, inauguration of the Being in the transition from cuneiform writing of syllables on clay to alphabetic letters on skin scrolls. Next, universalization of the Being’s message in Christianity’s construction as a proselytizing religion of the gospels made possible through portable, random access codices. Third, from handwritten codex to the printed vulgate bible: unmediated mass privatization of the Being’s word in Protestantism. And now the possibility of a fourth mediation from paper books to writing on the post-alphabetic electronic screen and the possibility of a further discontinuity in the series: either a new and radically different Christian relation to the Being’s word or, more radically still, its demise within the emergence of digitally facilitated forms of post-monotheism.
 
If such is the case then one can read the rise and frenzied appeal of evangelical Christianity as well as the fundamentalist surge in Jewish Biblical and Koranic literalism as reactions to a perceived threat –  that of the end of their era. The threat of a God in danger, of a God displaced, a God about to be obsolesced by the heathen and secular ghosts that digital technology is conjuring into the future. Meanwhile, here in the all-too-archaic present, a God-saturated America, in thrall to the Bible and convinced again of its Manifest Destiny and special relation to the monobeing, continues to remake the world in its own image.
 
Brian Rotman
Department of Comparative Studies
The Ohio State University
 
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[1] There is a philosophical understanding of the virtual that I am sympathetic to but which lies outside my focus here. It stems from the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, according to which the virtuality of a being (which is always an assemblage) concerns what is actualizable in it, its lines of flight and becomings, all the futures it could inflect, give rise to, and take part in. On this view, unlike potentiality, which refers to determinationsthat are fixed but lack the conditions to realize them, virtuality is inseparable from tensions, problems, sites of instability, and open questions.
[2] Literally: For the last 20 years of his life Edison attempted to refine his machine so that it could pick up the faint emanations from departed persons whose personalities, he believed, survived death.
[3] Fast forward to last month: "Emails from beyond the grave" -- a  service (the "latest ghoulish offering on the internet") giving customers the chance to send friends or enemies an email after they've died. The messages (which can include visual material) are confidential and are not delivered until the company receives adeath certificate from the deceased trustees. [Guardian Newspaper October 7, 2004]
 
[4] To establish this claim one would need to construct a genealogy within post-Homeric texts of the written ‘I’ (and likewise for the written ‘We’ and ‘You’ along with it). An essential dimension of which would be the back and forth traffic between the grammar of spoken and scriptive ‘persons’.
 
[5] Snell’s etymological approach has been much criticized but has survived. And the question it addresses stands. “Why are the dualistic distinction betweeen the soul and the body, and the Heraclitean ... and the Platonic (comprehensive unified interiority) idea of the soul, all inconceivable in Homer?” asks Richard Seaford. [Seaford 2004: 12 n57]. His answer – the post-Homeric advent of a monetized society – is clearly quite different from the explanation – the advent of alphabetic writing –- suggested here.
[6] In the context of Christian spirituality laid down in the Gospel of St John – the spirit gives life and leads to salvation, the letter is dead and leads to damnation – Derrida’s formula presents a final overturning of the Christian elevation of voice over text.
 
[7] There are several different ways of accounting for characteristics that ghosts might have that are compressed here. There is the evolution based one of Boyer in terms of a violation of ‘natural’ categories, Talmer’s approach from linguistics where the ghost literalizes metaphors of movement used to describe spatial extension, and Taylor’s cognitive science based understanding of ghosts in terms of the theory of Blending.
[8] A fate anticipated and aided by an independent tendency within quantum physics towards the discrete and the quantized, culminating in Edward Fredkin’s hypothesis of a ‘finite nature’ where “at some scale, space and time are discrete” and the universe itself is theorized as a computer ticking itself forward a quantum of time at a time. For some of the background to physics’ antagonism to infinitary procedures, see Rotman 2000, chapter 3.
 
[9] The effect of digital computation on the content, form, and development of mathematics in relation to the concept of infinity is explored in Rotman 2003
[10] Captured digitally, any kind of movement (of a machine, animal, human) from the slightest gesture to a full-blown locomotion can be de- and re-territorealized in like manner to writing’s action on speech: captured kinetic patterns can be re-enacted in a proliferating range of contexts from virtual theatre to animation to telesurgery to remote sex. Though only in embryo, it seems already clear that by allowing the traffic of the body to be detached and rerouted in this way, motion capture opens a new arena of what ‘writing’ might mean. See Rotman 2002 for an elaboration.
 
[11] But intensely imagined in the fiction of the last two decades interested in narrating digitality. For an early example, see the ghost in a box explored by William Gibson in Mona Lisa Overdrive.