ABSTRACT
Writing about ‘the digital’ is a difficult task. Associated with so much quantizing, so much reduction, the digital is itself an expansive, irreducible complex: at once something technical, socioeconomic, cultural, a logic and a subject, a frame and an object; it is imbricated in human and nonhuman nature; it is human and nonhuman nature. I recently participated in a panel on ‘digital cultures’. 1 An audience member asked if we speakers agreed that ‘the digital’ was the thing that best described the contemporary: we had all used it in our papers, but also talked of new media and computation, neoliberalism and late capitalism; we had talked about digital things but also stuff that isn’t digital. In the end we agreed it was a significant logic and that to varying degrees it was the concept we were thinking the contemporary through. One of the speakers, Seb Franklin, in his book Control (2015), suggests that we are in an episteme of ‘digitality’: both ‘a logical-technical substrate through which certain machines might operate’ and ‘a predominant logical mode with which to address both individual social actors and the body of interactions between these actors that can be dubbed “society”’ (xviii). The digital is both a technical form in the contemporary, and a form that delimits what is thinkable as the contemporary.
