Recall the old terms from late-’60s and 1970s theory: slippage, residue, play, otherness, aporia, lack, trace, assemblage, decentering, desire, abjection, the Real. Digital technology can’t adequately account for these terms, and the phenomena they describe, except through clunky approximation. Note that I tend to sideline anthropological accounts of “digital culture,” which often project human traits onto machines, enacting a version of the pathetic fallacy. In other words, if we bracket the human user, I’m not aware of any actually existing digital machine where the integers are deterritorialized, or where procedures exhibit indeterminate play, or where variables follow the logic of desire and lack. On the contrary, those sorts of phenomena are militantly policed and actively excluded from digital tech. There’s a lot of magical thinking within theory circles that wants to say otherwise. But not much evidence exists to support it. So perhaps post-structuralism will supply the negative space, a ground for the digital’s figure, where the limits and shortcomings of the digital are revealed via silhouette, by way of what the digital can’t do.
Continue reading my dialogue with Patrick Leftwich at Diffractions.