Introduction and Overview

We are no longer able to deny the post-human; we are, as Rotman reminds us, “natural born cyborgs” (2008, 1). The dawn of this cyborg condition is not recent, nor is it merely the effect of digital culture — it begins with writing itself. For Western thought, the writing of speech has long been alphabetic, forming the “dominant cognitive technology (along with mathematics)” so ingrained in our processes of thinking that it becomes “almost invisible” (2008, 2). In this era of alphabetic saturation, we cannot help but be “described, identified, certified and handled — like a text” (1988, x). Brian Rotman, a multidisciplinary scholar trained across mathematics, semiotics, media theory, and the humanities, situates writing not as a neutral tool but as a technology that has structured Western subjectivity for millennia. Becoming Beside Ourselves is the third book in his trilogy on the semiotics of mathematics and writing, and it brings together his lifelong interest in symbolic systems — mathematical notation, alphabetic inscription, and now digital code — to examine how each medium reorganizes our understanding of the self.

Rotman argues that the stability of the alphabetic order was shaken in the 19th century, when new media challenged writing’s role as the primary mode of recording and transmission. Photography, he notes, undermined writing’s claim to represent reality; the phonograph “eclipsed” writing’s earlier monopoly on “the inscription and preservation of speech sounds,” leaving alphabetic writing “upstaged” (2008, 2). Today, that dethroning has accelerated. Virtual and networked media push the alphabet to its abstract limit — a binary code of only two letters . Meanwhile, the rise of parallel computing introduces new “modes of thought and self,” new “imaginings of agency,” whose parallelisms emerge from and yet exceed the “intense seriality” of alphabetic writing (2008, 3). 

This restratification of symbolic systems reshapes more than language; it restructures how we perceive, how we interact, and how we understand our own identities. The transformation becomes clearest through the use of the word I. Rotman traces the ‘I’ across three dominant media regimes: from the spoken ‘I’ grounded in gesture, breath, and bodily presence; to the written ‘I’, an incorporeal, forever marker of selfhood; and now to a virtual ‘I’, dispersed across networked, machine, and parallel forms of agency. The contemporary subject is therefore “plural, trans-alphabetic, derived from and spread over multiple sites of agency — a self going parallel: a para-self” (2008, 9).

To follow the movement of ‘I’ through these technological shifts is to see how older conceptions of identity — single, stable, invisible, and unified, like the God-entity or the classical Psyche — are as ghosts sustained by particular media environments. Rotman’s conceptual realization is ultimately an exorcism; by deconstructing the alphabet, he reveals the media conditions that made such ghosts possible, and shows why they may come to not haunt us any further.

Parallel vs. Serial

It is easiest to understand Rotman’s para-self by beginning with the difference he draws between serial and parallel thinking. Serial thought is the form the alphabet trains us into — one letter following another, one line after the next, one thought subordinated to the previous in a linear chain. Writing, even mathematical, demands sequencing. Each unit must wait its turn. The alphabet is not only a medium but a temporal discipline, a practice of regulating thought into ordered succession.

Parallelism, by contrast, is not simply “doing multiple things at once.” It is a fundamentally different mode of processing, one in which states coexist. Rotman frequently invokes the example of quantum superposition to help illustrate the shift; a particle exists in multiple states simultaneously until observation (measurement) collapses it. The para-self operates in a similar fashion — not by replacing seriality, but by layering multiple agencies, identities, and positions at once. Where alphabetic writing demanded commitment to one linear identity, parallelism allows for co-presence, simultaneity, multiplicity.

The virtual ‘I’ emerges from this parallel condition. It is “an invisible, absent writing agency, detached from the voice, unmoored from any time or place of origination, and necessarily invisible and without physical presence” (2008, 118). This invisibility becomes a form of multiplication; the subject disperses across interfaces, platforms, and computational processes. The para-self is not a metaphor but a structural consequence of computing’s parallel logics and the systems that beg us to adapt.

Yet Rotman insists that alphabetic seriality remains buried within parallel architectures. Even the most complex computational systems rely on ordered sequences of ones and zeros. This is why parallelism cannot be fully disentangled from alphabetic logic, because it emerges from it, even as it overwhelms it. What we call digital identity, then, is already the hybrid offspring of both mothers: serial inscription and parallel computation entangled in a new, collective structure of selfhood.

The End of Utterance

To understand the movement from spoken ‘I’ to written ‘I’, Rotman returns to the medium that first displaced the body: writing. In speech, the ‘I’ is inseparable from gesture, breath, presence — it is a “haptic” event. The voice vibrates through air, the speaker’s arms open; gestures anchor meaning in lived human motion. With writing, however, “the body of the speaking ‘I’ is replaced by an incorporeal, floating agency of the text” (2008, 110). The haptic becomes the abstract as the medium replaces the body.

This replacement is only effective because the medium simultaneously effaces itself. Writing works when it disappears — when the reader forgets the physical marks on the page and is lost in the illusion of direct meaning. Rotman makes this clear in his analysis of “ghost-effects”; “They are medium-specific… their efficacy as objects of belief and material consequence derive from their unacknowledgement — their effacement — of this very fact” (2008, 113). Writing creates the illusion of a stable, enduring ‘I’ precisely because its own materiality fades from view.

As alphabetic inscription took hold, utterance became disembedded from the body. Writing “allows utterance to live beyond itself, thus inventing the idea of a perpetual, unending future and the reality of an unchanging, interminable covenant” (2008, 122). It is through writing that Western culture came to imagine enduring subjects, eternal contracts, continuous selfhood. Once utterance no longer depends on the speaker, the ‘I’ becomes a symbol instead of an event — an indication of the embodied self without body, without voice.

For media studies students, this moment marks the beginning of mediation as we understand it: the idea that the medium structures the message, the self, and the possibilities of experience long before we are aware of it.

God, Mind, and Infinity

Rotman turns to theology and ancient philosophy to show how writing generated the most influential ghosts of Western culture. Alphabetic inscription made possible the figure of a disembodied, omnipresent, invisible God — a being whose “presence” depended on the written marks that represented Him. As he asks, “How did a manmade array of written marks on a scroll of sewn-together animal skins become a ‘holy’ site, a fetish, for the presence of the eternal invisible God?” (2008, 119). Writing’s abstraction enables belief in invisible agencies. Once words detach from bodies, the divine may inhabit them.

The same process appears in Greek philosophy. The invention of the alphabet coincides with the rise of a non-somatic mental agency — the Mind — imagined as a unified, abstract, ruling entity. As Seaford notes, “both monetary value and the mind are abstractions… a single controlling invisible entity uniting the multiplicity of which in a sense it consists” (2008, 242). The alphabet produces the very idea of a singular interiority, a coherent psyche, a stable and commanding ‘I’.

Writing is not just “speech at a distance”, but “speech outside the human” (2008, 129). It is virtual in the sense that it removes utterance from people altogether. The God-entity and the classical psyche are therefore not timeless human intuitions but media-effects: ghosts generated by a technology whose power lies precisely in its invisibility.

By the time we arrive at digital media, these ghosts persist, but can no longer remain comfortable in their symbolic, alphabetic shells. 

The Virtual ‘I’ and the Para-Self

With the digital, the alphabet is pushed beyond its limits. Binary computation reduces writing to its minimal form — two characters — while parallel processing multiplies the agencies acting through and upon the subject. The virtual ‘I’ is no longer grounded in a single position. It is distributed across platforms, accounts, passwords, archives, histories, and data reports. It is acted upon by algorithms, automated processes, and network effects. The self today becomes an ensemble of collective memories, thoughts, and experiences.

Rotman’s para-self phrases this condition as a subject “beside itself”, simultaneously embodied and disembodied, local and networked, serial and parallel. It mirrors superposition — multiple potential states coexisting until interrupted by interaction. Media students encounter this every day in online identity play, algorithmically curated feeds, multi-windowed workflows, and the tension between one’s “real,” “virtual,” and “performed” selves.

The ghosts of God, Mind, and singular Identity do not disappear; they become unstable. The alphabet that once sustained them persists as binary foundations, but the computational environment overwhelms its old stabilizing powers. In this landscape, the ‘I’ is no longer an anchor, it is a node.

End Notes and Advents for Further Study

Rotman’s work opens numerous paths for further inquiry in media studies besides the topics he explores in his other works. As media students, we can use Rotman’s grounding in the logic of philosophy and mathematics to continue exploring the relationship between alphabetic seriality and digital computation, particularly through analyzing Kittler, Hayles, and Chun, among others. However, we can also use Rotman’s notions about the para-self to study how platform and digital identities form and are explored on contemporary media platforms (like social media). We can even go further back and revisit gesture, voice, and affect in a world increasingly oriented towards screens and disembodied interactions. 

All of these endeavour to explain how we as humans have transformed — evolved and contorted — around the advent of new technologies that have demanded more and more of ourselves. In order to keep up, we must constantly break the mold of what previously identified us as humans. Perhaps by revisiting the past, as Rotman suggests, we can learn an inkling of how we soar, afraid and yet determined, towards a future masked by fog and phantoms.

Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Duke University Press, 2008.

Writing and visuals by Allie Demetrick