In a fairly detailed reading of what might constitute ‘the digital’, principally through the lens of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alexander Galloway offers a really interesting and quite rich set of reflections on ‘the digital’ not as the reduction and shattering of being by making everything discrete and infinitely reproducible but as a performance of immanence.
As a sort of crib-sheet, here are Galloway’s ten theses:
Thesis 1. The digital means the one dividing in two.
Thesis 2. The analogue means the two coming together as one.
Thesis 3. An analogy creates an identity.
Thesis 4. The digital produces the transcendental.
Thesis 5. Flat digitality is from the multiplexing of the object.
Thesis 6. Deep digitality is from the multiplexing of the subject.
Thesis 7. The one is imaginable only through the waning of being.
Thesis 8. Philosophy is rooted in grand illusion.
Thesis 9. Philosophy is a digitisation of the real: the one dividing in two.
Thesis 10. Immanence is always the greatest heresy.
If you’re interested in thinking about the nature of what is digital and how we might contextualise that within broader theories of thought, materiality and so on its well worth spending the time watching Galloway’s talk:
Galloway: 10 Theses On The Digital from bkm on Vimeo.
Galloway’s 10 theses on the digital: Seems to me a long-winded way of saying philosophy is a human practice that has an inbuilt anthropocentric prejudice; Fair enough as far as it goes, but this is perhaps also down to its literate, orthographic, digital origins, and the humans doing it became this kind of human in practicing/developing the techniques it made possible.