Prehuman writings

Marcello Vitali-Rosati

CSDH - Vancouver - 03-06-2019

Writing is everywhere

Everything is writing

Human, all too human

An artefact?

The non-human dimension of writing

Inhuman Trace
Inhuman Sign
Entrails

Christin, Anne-Marie. « Les origines de l’écriture: Image, signe, trace ». Le Débat 106, nᵒ 4 (1999): 28. https://doi.org/10.3917/deba.106.0028.

THANKS SERVANNE!

Actually, writing has always had a non-human aspect. One could even say a inhuman aspect - because of the moral connotation of inhuman. This is why writing is something which scares - cf Plato.

Anne-Marie Chritin proposes two possible interpretations of writing: writing as a trace or writing as a sign.

The first - which she associates with the names Ignace Jay Gelb, Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida, Carlo Ginzburg and that she criticizes strongly - would be inspired by hunting (the traces left by animals): the trace “is the immanent index, all the more nostalgic, of a reference which would be essential to it, but of which it could only mourn”. It is obvious that the notion of trace makes it possible to distance the writing from the human.

There are two characteristics of the trace which make it an interesting concept to apprehend the writing: in the first place, the fact that a trace is not necessarily produced by a human being and secondly the fact that it is not necessarily intentional. Everything can leave traces: a human being, of course, but also an animal, a plant, or an inanimate object. The wild boar leaves a trace that can be followed by the hunter, but also a stone, falling, may leave a trace. The trace is finally the trace of an action, or an event. The trace, in the second place, is not voluntary, on the contrary, it is often something that one wants to mask.

Christin’s critique of this notion is based precisely on the dissociation between the trace and the thing of which it is the trace. The non-intentionality of the trace eventually becomes a clean break. The trace is not only the trace of anybody, but in addition it does not refer to anything: what characterizes it, "besides the absence of its speaker, [it] is the absence of what it designates. (1999, 32).

One might think that writing as a sign loudly claims, in opposition to the trace, its human and intentional dimension. But this is not the case in Christin’s reflection: the sign is something that is part of a set of relationships. In this sense, and in an almost counter-intuitive way, the trace is in a representational regime, because it speaks of what is no longer there, while the sign “is an inaugural event, it participates in a revelation” ( 1999, 32).

If the trace is not necessarily produced by a human being, the sign is never produced by a human being. It is there, recorded, it lets himself be observed. The signs are the stars inscribed on the sky support and which impose themselves on the observation. They are the entrails of animals13 which also impose their organization, the whole of the relations between several organs, tissues.

This notion of writing as a sign is characterized by two fundamental aspects: the material aspect and the relational aspect. Writing is always an inscription, therefore material. And this inscription is always in relation to something else.

Inhuman, posthuman, prehuman

Interpretation and humanity?

zoosemiotics Sebeok, Thomas A. « Zoosemiotics ». American Speech 43, nᵒ 2 (1968): 142‑44. https://doi.org/10.2307/454548.
meaning as a dynamic production Paveau, Marie-Anne. « Réalité et discursivité. D’autres dimensions pour la théorie du discours ». Semen - Revue de sémio-linguistique des textes et discours, nᵒ 34 (2012): 95‑115.

One could say that, on the other hand, the interpretive dimension of writing, the fact of giving meaning to these signs, the fact of reading, in short, is necessarily human. To interpret the signs, like the diviners facing the starry sky or facing the disemboweled animal, would perhaps be what would give a fundamental human dimension to writing. Christin’s interpretative gesture ultimately consists of thinking of a unity between reading and writing and of moving humanity from the device to the reading side: this is where the production of meaning would be.

However, several works in semiotics have shown that this is not necessarily the case. The zoosemiotic literature (Sebeok 1968), which shows that many animals have read-write skills as a means of communication between individuals of the same species or even different species, in question the human primacy with regard to writing (see, for example, Davis 2015).

Another approach that calls into question - and even more radically than zoosemiotics - the “humanity” of the production of meaning in the reading-writing process is “the theory of the distributed cognition” aiming that interpretation is not based on human, but it is external, cultural and social, and non-internalistic and neuronal "(Paveau 2015a). This approach is part of a series of theories that attempt to challenge the dualisms that have characterized much of the history of thought:

The big dualisms (mind / world, intellect / affect, fact / value, man / machine, man / animal, etc.) are reworked and questioned (Schaeffer 2007) in favor of more complex visions that describe mixed or even hybrid categories . (Paveau 2012)

According to these approaches, meaning is not the product of a thinking human being - the idea of internalist cognition - but a dynamic of social, cultural, technical and technological interactions. Among the dualisms that are questioned, there is, of course, the opposition between human and non-human.

Posthuman studies

My posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of human and nonhuman, examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Second Printing edition. Durham: Duke University Press Books.

Digital writing as Prehuman writing

inhuman inscriptions, inhuman meaning
before the concept of “human”

The digital fact undoubtedly plays a fundamental role in this idea of non-human writing. It offers many examples of signs, traces and technical inscriptions that are essential as meaning, but which escape the control of strictly human mechanisms of meaning. These scripts have both the characteristic of presenting themselves as sign inscriptions which can be considered finally as a series of characters or more precisely of letters - simply the result of an encoding of letters in bit: 1 letter = 8 bit, to to know 1 byte - and the characteristic of being impossible to write and read by human beings. A binary file, an algorithm, a database are ultimately series of characters that a human being can visualize on a screen - or print on a sheet of paper - but whose writing and reading are reserved for machines. One may say that digital environments as artifacts, and therefore they are precisely human productions only serving to prolong human thinking. However, this objection is based on a very essentialized conception of human - the same conception that we have just criticized following Hayles, Wolfe, and Barad. Technological mediations can be interpreted as prehuman because the human is what derives from a series of interactions of agents, of which technology is just one part.

Writing, texts and spaces

Writing

any material inscriptions

Text

a set of organised material inscriptions. a series of relationships between indipendent scriptural elements

The notion of text makes sense as soon as one observes these inscriptions in a set - in this, the definition of writing proposed here is broader than those analyzed above which all include the idea of organization. To weave relationships between inscriptions - to organize writing - is what we call here “text”. As Samuel Archibald recalls, “text” is a term derived from the Latin texere, by which several Indo-European languages have made a fixed association between writing and the fabric, the act of weaving or weaving. "(2009, 204). The text is thus an organized writing, or better a series of relations woven between independent scriptural elements. This organization is obviously also scriptural, because these relations must also be inscribed, but the specificity of the text is to allow multiple relational configurations. A text is a limited set of scriptural elements related in an organized manner.

Spaces

dynamic organization of scriptural elements

we said that algorithms, formats, protocols, databases, programming interfaces (APIs) are forms of text. And again, the inscriptions on a magnetic medium that can be read by the machine as 0 and 1 are also texts22

These forms of text have a clerly operational power: they can produce things - other texts, relationships and so on.

Among the texts produced by the text there is a particular form: texts in which one can live, spaces. The Web - as a great text - can no longer be considered as a text to look at: it is now - and more and more obvious - a text to inhabit. And with the Web, all digital environments are infrastructures that produce spaces: relationships between scriptural elements - precisely inscribed in a discrete way - that organize the relationships of distance and proximity, visibility and invisibility. accessibility and inaccessibility, central or peripheral position of all the objects that populate the world.

In this sense, the digital space is a form of text. Digital writing thus takes on an architectural value.

Digital humanities

As digital humanist we question the production and the organization of space