
Becoming Beside Ourselves by Brian Rotman
Presents the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum ...the Ghost in Turing's Machine: exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose.
“Becoming Beside Ourselves is a bold, provocative, and highly original argument about the relation between medial effects and changing manifestations of subjectivityIt traces a sweeping trajectory from what Brian Rotman calls the ‘lettered self,’ associated with alphabetic inscription and the codex printed book, to the subject as distributed assemblage associated with network culture. While others have made parts of this kind of argument before, Rotman’s analysis is unique in placing special emphasis on gesture and revealing its traces in orality and print. In a brilliant synthesis, he mixes evolutionary theory with a Deleuzian view of agent-as-assemblage, arguing that computational media both reveal and perform distributed cognition as a crucial aspect of human being-in-the-world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the interrelations between computational media, contemporary subjectivity, and human evolution.”—Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles
“Brian Rotman’s exciting new text not only adds to his previous work on signifying technology (zero, infinity), it expands his study of abstraction to encompass the construction of subjectivity itself. Becoming Beside Ourselves will open up all kinds of unexplored terrains, from grammatology to psychoanalysis, from the history of technology to the study of culture and religion.”—Fredric Jameson, Duke University
“Brian Rotman’s exciting new text not only adds to his previous work on signifying technology (zero, infinity), it expands his study of abstraction to encompass the construction of subjectivity itself. Becoming Beside Ourselves will open up all kinds of unexplored terrains, from grammatology to psychoanalysis, from the history of technology to the study of culture and religion.”—Fredric Jameson, Duke University
Brian Rotman is Distinguished Humanities Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting; Ad Infinitum...The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In; and Signifying Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero. Rotman has a doctorate in mathematics. Timothy Lenoir is the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair of New Technologies and Society at Duke University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780822342007 |
| ISBN 10 | 0822342006 |
| Title | Becoming Beside Ourselves |
| Author | Brian Rotman |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Duke University Press |
| Year published | 2008-07-16 |
| Number of pages | 216 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |