Introduction : the computer as a mode of mediation -- The unworkable interface -- Software and ideology -- Are some things unrepresentable? -- Disingenuous informatics -- Postscript : we are the gold farmers.

Digital and analog: What do these terms mean today? The use and meaning of such terms change through time. The analog, in particular, seems to go through various phases of popularity and disuse, its appeal pegged most frequently to nostalgic longings for nontechnical or romantic modes of art and culture. The definition of the digital vacillates as well, its precise definition often eclipsed by a kind of fever-pitched industrial bonanza around the latest technologies and the latest commercial ventures. One common (...) response to the question of the digital is to make reference to things like Twitter, Playstation, or computers in general. Here one might be correct, but only coincidentally, for the basic order of digitality (the digitality of digitality) has not yet been demonstrated through mere denotation. And the second question—the question of the analog—is harder still, with responses often also consisting of mere denotations of things: sound waves, the phonograph needle, magnetic tape, a sundial. At least denotation itself is analogical. This article will aim to define the analog explicitly and argue, perhaps counterintuitively, that the golden age of analog thinking was not a few decades past, prior to the wide-spread adoption of the computer. In fact, the fields of structuralism and poststructuralism that emerged in the middle to late twentieth century, concurrent with the deployment of the digital computer, were characteristically digital, what with their focus on the symbolic order and logical economies. If anything, the golden age of analog is happening today, all around us, as evidenced by the proliferation of characteristically analog concerns: sensation, materiality, experience, affect, ethics, and aesthetics. (shrink)

_Laruelle_ is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In _Laruelle_, Galloway argues that the (...) digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology. (shrink)

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral (...) to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, _Excommunication_ pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, _Excommunication_ offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière, in his essay ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’, puts forth a challenge that is ever more pertinent to our times. What constitutes the unrepresentable today? Rancière frames his answer in a very specific way: the question of unrepresentability leads directly to the way in which political violence may or may not be put into an image. Offering an alternative to Rancière’s approach, the present article turns instead to the information society, asking if and how something might be unrepresentable in (...) a world saturated by data and information. Thus one approaches the issue of transparency and secrecy here from the perspective of the relative perspicuity of data visualization. Two theses structure the argument, first that ‘data have no necessary visual form’ and, second, that ‘only one visualization has ever been made of an information network’. The tension between these two theses leads to a disconcerting conclusion, that the triumph of information aesthetics precipitates a decline in informatic perspicuity. One is obligated therefore to call for a strong reinvigoration of poetics and hermeneutics within the digital universe, so that representation as such can take place, perhaps for the first time. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging conversation, Berry and Galloway explore the implications of undertaking media theoretical work for critiquing the digital in a time when networks proliferate and, as Galloway claims, we need to ‘forget Deleuze’. Through the lens of Galloway’s new book, Laruelle: Against the Digital, the potential of a ‘non-philosophy’ for media is probed. From the import of the allegorical method from excommunication to the question of networks, they discuss Galloway’s recent work and reflect on the implications of computation for (...) media theory, thinking about media objects, and critical theory. (shrink)

Could it be that Deleuze's most lasting legacy will lie in his ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, a mere 2,300-word essay from 1990? While he discussed computers and new media infrequently, Deleuze admittedly made contributions to the contemporary discourse on computing, cybernetics and networks, particularly in his late work. From the concepts of the rhizome and the virtual, to his occasional interjections on the digital versus the analogue, there is a case to be made that the late Deleuze has not only (...) influenced today's discourse on new media but also proposes an original set of arguments about society and politics at the turn of the new millennium. Focusing on the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and a handful of texts that surround it, we will reconstruct an image of what it means to live in the information age. This will have consequences for how we define the digital and the analogue, what the computer means, and ultimately provide some insight into one of the more elusive terms in all of Deleuze, the superfold. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized that riddles were part of literary and intellectual culture in late-medieval England, and considerable effort has been expended to ponder a prominent handful of late-fourteenth-century writings in Latin and English that use them, including John Ergome's commentary on the Vaticinium of “John of Bridlington,” the seditious vernacular letters circulated during the Rising of 1381, and most famously Piers Plowman, all notorious for the use of peculiar and difficult riddles that flaunt their interpretative challenges and the social (...) power of their hermeneutical barriers. Comparatively vast gaps, however, remain in our knowledge of the range, distinctive modes, and customary contexts of riddles in this period, so that the isolated uses of them that have been studied seem, in May McKisack's words about Piers Plowman, to speak “to us from a forgotten world, drowned, mysterious, irrecoverable.”. (shrink)

Unter Bezugnahme auf Philosophie und Mathematik schlägt dieser Artikel allgemeine Formeln für das Digitale und das Analoge vor, wobei das Digitale als das Verhältnis der diskreten Terme (a/b), das Analoge als eine Verhältnisgleichung (a/b = c/d) definiert sind. Mit diesen allgemeinen Formeln zur Hand werden wir in der Lage sein, zwei der häufigsten operativen Ontologien (Digitalität und das Analoge) zu erforschen und gleichzeitig ein ontologisches Szenario zu enthüllen, in dem keines der beiden zutrifft. Taking into account both philosophy and maths, (...) this article suggests general formulas for both the digital sphere and the analogue, defining the digital sphere as a relation of discrete terms (a/b) whereas the analogue is described as a proportion (a/b = c/d). Falling back on those general formulas, one will be able to study two of the most frequently used operative ontologies (the digitality and the analogue) while at the same time unveiling an ontological scenario to which none of the aforementioned ontologies apply. (shrink)

Taking into account both philosophy and maths, this article suggests general formulas for both the digital sphere and the analogue, defining the digital sphere as a relation of discrete terms (a/b) whereas the analogue is described as a proportion (a/b = c/d). Falling back on those general formulas, one will be able to study two of the most frequently used operative ontologies (the digitality and the analogue) while at the same time unveiling an ontological scenario to which none of the (...) aforementioned ontologies apply. (shrink)

Instead of a ?meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a ?return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelle's work is presented here as a kind of ?meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kant's two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as ?merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is (...) recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an ?autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to offer, in straight forward terms, some practical insight into distributed data surveillance. I will use the software project Carnivore as a case study. Carnivore is a public domain riff on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s software “Carnivore,” which was developed to perform electronic wiretaps of email. As founder of the Radical Software Group (RSG), and lead developer on the Carnivore project, I will describe the technological, philosophical, and political reasons for launching the (...) project. I will also offer an account of the development cycle of the core engine, identify trends in “client” interface designs, and present a series of design challenges that still remain. (shrink)