Digital

Theory

Digital Theory argues that the digital is theoretical. It proposes a powerful new approach to the often overlooked conceptual side of the digital, starting with a minimal definition of the digital as a form of mediation using discrete units.

Digital Theory

Digital Theory argues that the digital is theoretical. It proposes a powerful new approach to the often overlooked conceptual side of the digital, starting with a minimal definition of the digital as a form of mediation using discrete units. Pushing the understanding of the digital beyond its interpretation as sheer consumer electronics and instead working with that conceptual definition, the three essays in this volume explore digitality’s relation to thinking, signs, and difference, each bringing out distinctive new aspects of the digital’s profound theoretical potential.

 

Publishing Year
2025
Language
English
Pages
123
Series
Print Edition Price
$ 18.00 RRP
License
CC-BY-NC 4.0
ISBNs
978-1-51792-019-7 (Print)
978-3-95796-084-9 (PDF)
DOI
10.14619/0849
Available as
Print, PDF

The Authors

M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working on computation, technology, and media. She is associate professor of digital humanities at the University of Sussex and author of Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics.

M. Beatrice Fazi's Author Profile

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age.

Alexander R. Galloway's Author Profile

Matthew Handelman is associate professor of German and interim director of digital humanities at Michigan State University. He is author of The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory.

Matthew Handelman's Author Profile

Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German and director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. He is author of Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.

Leif Weatherby's Author Profile

This book belongs to the

Digital Theory

Digital Theory argues that the digital is theoretical. It proposes a powerful new approach to the often overlooked conceptual side of the digital, starting with a minimal definition of the digital as…

Neural Networks

Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices, social histories, mediating techniques, and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name. If so-called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to…

Boundary Images

How are images made, and how should we understand the capacities of digital images? This book investigates images as well as the technologies that host them. Its three chapters discuss the boundaries…

Digital Energetics

Media and energy require joint theorization as they are bound together across contemporary informational and fossil regimes. Digital Energetics traces the contours of a media analytic of energy and an energy analytic…

Technopharmacology

Technopharmacology is a modest call to expand media theoretical inquiry by attending to the biological, neurological, and pharmacological dimensions of media and centers on emergent affinities between big data and big pharma.
“Technopharmacology…

Media and Management

Management is enabled by media, just as media give life to management. Studying the management innovations learned through media uncovers the evolving relationship between workers and employers. With a view to history,…

Really Fake

With anchors in feminist theory, queer discourse, and digital politics, Really Fake rescues “fakeness” from the morass of “fake news” and rejuvenates “fake” as a material and tactical reality. This book treats…

Undoing Networks

How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: “digital detox” is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life….

Action at a Distance

The mediality of transmission and the materiality of communication result today more than ever in “acting at a distance” – an action whose agency lies in a medium. This book provides an…

Organize

Digital media technologies re-pose the question of organization—and thus of power and domination, control and surveillance, disruption and emancipation. This book interrogates organization as effect and condition of media. How can we…

Archives

Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to show how expanded archival practices can challenge contemporary conceptions and inform the redistribution of power…

Remain

In a world undergoing constant media-driven change, the infrastructures, materialities, and temporalities of remains have become urgent. This book engages with the remains and remainders of media cultures through the lens both…

Machine

In today’s society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the…

Communication

Machine communication—to interact not just via but also with machines—has transformed contemporary communication. It puts us not just in conversation with one another but also with our current machinery. By analyzing the…

Markets

Markets abound in media—but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed…

Pattern Discrimination

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation—in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and…