During the 2020-2021 academic year I’m lucky enough to be co-leader (with prof. Emily Apter) of a research lab at NYU focused on questions of translation. Translation is a notoriously difficult topic, not only within theoretical discussions, but also as a practical art form. Translation is hard to think; it’s ...
analog, computer, digital, featured, interface, transcoding, transduction, translation
A brief follow up to the previous allusion to Kant…
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defined the analytic as containing a non-additive predicate, while the synthetic as having an additive predicate. While I still need to work out the details, it’s clear that Kant also implicates the digital ...
A provocation: theories of the digital have generated very little digital theory. What do I mean? And why is this the case? First, one must separate the form of digital theory from the kinds of objects it wants to study. Thus a digital theory may make a claim about a digital object. ...
It began with a list. When addressing “the birth of a new medium,” Janet Murray responded with a list of properties. Digital environments have four essential properties, she argued. Digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic.
When tasked with the definition of “new media” a few years later, Lev ...
How to spot an analog philosopher? First look at his attachments… What does he love the most?
Analog philosophers value life and vitality, and thus have a special affection for nature. They talk about energy and aliveness, but also the same thing in reverse, dissipation and death. The ugliest ugly ...
Robin James’s recent book The Sonic Episteme is a fascinating tour through the contemporary culture and politics of sound. The book hinges on what she calls “acoustic resonance,” a paradigm of thinking where sound and sonic phenomena like vibration, oscillation, resonance, and diffraction are taken to be the very fabric ...
Euclid is remembered as a geometer, when he is remembered at all. But Euclid’s Elements was an omnibus compendium of all mathematical knowledge known to him at the time, beginning with the first mathematics, geometry, then addressing ratio and proportion–that is, logos and analogos–and ultimately arithmetic, irrationality, and other ...
In continuing to explore the domains of the digital and the analog, I’ve come to an unexpected conclusion, one that will no doubt be obvious to others but which I nevertheless found surprising. I’ve finally realized the extent to which analogicity has been hounded out of technical history. In the
In my graduate seminar we’ve recently been thinking a bit about machines. Given that our focus has been on the 19th Century, attention has been directed toward ergodic machines (from the root ergon meaning work). Ergodic machines are machines that run on heat and energy. Such machines are essentially mechanical
analog, anti-computer, digital, information machine, machinery, marxism, technology, tool
This is an excerpt from a forthcoming essay on “The Golden Age of Analog.”
What does the analog mean today? A hard question indeed. For the digital, many will simply make reference to things like Twitter, Playstation, or computers in general. Here one might be correct, but only coincidentally,
analog, Deleuze, deleuze/guattari, digital, logos, non-laruelle, non-philosophy, Real
I just spoke yesterday yesterday at the University of Pennsylvania on the topics of “control societies” and “ontologies of difference,” two themes that have interested me a great deal over the years. In fact I have been so struck by Deleuze’s essay “Postscript on Societies of Control,” a short and
analog, Deleuze, difference, digital, multiplicity, non-laruelle
Catherine Malabou is one of the most interesting thinkers working today. She has a broad facility with Western philosophy, writing on Kant, Hegel, Derrida, the themes of temporality, plasticity, difference, technology, and many other things. And at the same time she has published extensively on neuroscience and issues surrounding the ...
analog, biopower, catherine malabou, digital, feminism, life, logos, queer
