Can one reduce the digital to an analog apparatus? Of course. There are endless clumsy ways to reduce mind to body and body to mind. I am contesting whether we ought to make such a reduction. And if we ought not, then historicism and empiricism shouldn’t be primary methods in digital studies. Anathema, I know, but that’s why it’s important to scrutinize methodology.

Following in the spirit of book reviews written about books that do not exist, I offer here—no doubt at my own peril—a series of observations in anticipation of Alain Badiou’s forthcoming Being and Event 3: The Immanence of Truths, a book that does not yet exist but will exist at some point in the future. Already notorious for his defense of mathematics as ontology, Badiou has become a bit more evenhanded on the question of the matheme versus the poem, preferring instead to describe philosophy as poised “between” poetry and mathematics, not simply privileging the latter.
 

One might query any contemporary artist and, as a kind of litmus test, ask the following series of questions: Do you think of yourself as primarily working “on” the digital or primarily “within” it? Is the computer incidental to your work, a tool like any other? Or is the computer at the heart of what you do? Shall art orient itself toward the digital? Or shall art merely live inside the digital, while concerning itself with other topics entirely? Digital aesthetics can refer to the…