Digitality and Intent
I gave a two-person talk with Nan Z. Da last fall at U. Michigan on the theme of „Digitality and Intent.“ Here is my text for the talk, slightly revised and expanded. In prepping for this event, Nan and I decided on …
Normale Wissenschaft
Eine Vorhersage… wir treten in eine neue Phase der normalen Wissenschaft ein. Ich erwarte, dass diese ein Jahrzehnt oder länger andauern wird. Um die „normale Wissenschaft“ zu verstehen, kehren wir zu Thomas Kuhns einflussreichem Buch The Structure of Scientific Revolutions …
Normal Science
A prediction… we’re entering a new phase of normal science. I expect this to last a decade or more. To understand „normal science“ we return to Thomas Kuhn’s influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that text–devoted to …
LASST UNS AUF HEGEL SPUCKEN
Hegel ist ein Arschloch“-Karl Marx„Hegel ist ein Arschloch“-Carla Lonzi„Hegel ist ein Arschloch“-Gilles Deleuze„Hegel ist ein Arschloch“-Rei Terada Ehre, wem Ehre gebührt für die heutige Schreibaufforderung: Carla Lonzis Traktat „Let’s Spit on Hegel“ aus dem Jahr 1970, das ursprünglich von der …
Agre – Zuboff
When Shoshana Zuboff published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism four years ago, I remember feeling skeptical and slightly guarded. You’re telling me the Harvard Business School hates Facebook now too? Okay, sure, welcome comrade…better late than never. Zuboff’s book is …
Theory Hot and Cold
The artist Steve Lambert had a great tweet once that was something like “every time you send me a .doc file, my opinion of you decreases.” I have similar feelings about Bruno Latour. Whenever people cite Latour, my opinion of them …
Along the Diagonal Line
Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, Architecture Principe 5 (1966), p. 9. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about diagonal lines and processes of diagonalization. Inherently formal and spatial, if not also graphical, the diagonal or oblique line has played any …
Where Does Meaning Come From?
Nobody knows, not really. I’ve said in the past that no one has yet patented a Meaning Machine. And when it comes to the digital and the analog I’m mostly in the dark about the question of meaning. My intuition …
Is the Analog in the Real?
I’ve been talking recently with Beatrice Fazi about a structuralist theory of the digital. In my experience, the majority of digital theory today is essentially empirical in that it tries to understand words like „digital“ and „analog“ by looking at …
Derrida’s Macintosh
I’ve been finishing an essay for a friend about Friedrich Kittler and the „media a priori“ of philosophy. It’s an idea I have had on the back burner for several years. Ever since Wolfgang Ernst told me the story of Heidegger’s radio–a burgundy …
When something ceases not to write itself
I’m returning to Kittler more and more, and in fact trying to write about him… I hit on a treasure trove of material that I’ll say more about in future. But for the moment I wanted to post a few …
Software and/as Math
In the past I’ve made claims like „software is math“…and I usually get taken to task over it. I acknowledge that others, particularly humanists and social scientists, might be uncomfortable with such a reduction. Math and computation are not the same thing. …