Digital Materialism

Origins, Philosophies, Prospects

Baruch Gottlieb, Athina Karatzogianni

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787436695
• eBook ISBN: 9781787439610
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Digital materiality (digimat) proposes a set of basic principles for how we understand the world through digital processes. Digital instruments may seem forbiddingly complex but they are based on simple mechanical principles which operate today on the subatomic scale, creating challenges for conventional human epistemology. 

This short book sets out a methodical materialist understanding of digital technologies, where they come from, how they work, and what they do. This analysis starts from the classical materialism of the Greek physicist-philosophers, engages with the humanist and historical materialism of the flourishing of Enlightenment arts and sciences, and extrapolates from post-humanist new materialism informed by quantum physics. There can be no future without a present and that present is always, persistently material.  

Readers of this book must grapple with the mattering of digital material, especially the awe-inspiring epistemological schism between the infinitesimal, lightspeed reality of digital data and conventional, empirical human epistemologies which provide the vocabularies and cultural metaphors we must have recourse to in the attempt to discuss, communicate and decypher these phenomena. The obsolescent figure of anthropos (human being) will provide a central foil and subject for this challenge to understand our digital tools and their seemingly irrepressible reproduction. The future of humanity is at stake!

1

DOM

Domestication

— how we adapt all things to human needs

MATERIALITY: AESTHETICS AND ANAESTHETICS

I differ toto caelo from those philosophers who pluck out their eyes that they may see better; for my thought I require the senses, especially sight; I found my ideas on materials which can be appropriated only through the activity of the senses. I do not generate the object from the thought, but the thought from the object; and I hold that alone to be an object which has an existence beyond one’s own brain.

— Ludwig Feuerbach (1843/1890)

We live in a technical world, which is to say we live in an artistic world. Art in Latin is simply Techne in Greek; both words indicate something which is not simply found in the world, in Nature, where we, as human beings, emerged, making distinctions between ourselves and the rest of creation, artistic distinctions, technological distinctions. This distinction from the World, from Nature, assumes there is somewhere else to go, there isn’t. No matter how ingenious our arts, no matter how lofty our aspirations, no matter how transcendent our ideas we will always be bound by the laws of Nature, though we may never know them all. And so will our technologies always be bound by physical laws which are not of our making.

We are not ever separate from the world. A dream or the idea of God takes place in a fleshy gravity-laden metabolism called a body which must be sustained materially. Individualism is only a question of degree. We are all in this together, with the stones, with the ocean waves, with the sun in the sky, with the bulbs, stems roots of flowers, and with the darknesses inside. We know this to be true through constant confirmation of our senses. Our senses connect us with the world and reassure us that we are not alone, the world is with us and in us, we are the world and the world is us, anything else is non-sense.

Non-sense is only possible because of technology, because technology is an abstraction. Language is a technology. It abstracts simplified words, ‘terms’ to designate classes of things and actions in the world. Terms terminate. Definitions ascribe finitude, frontiers of pertinence. Language requires some arbitrary epistemic bounds in order to function as communication. Nature before language, perceived through human senses is still too effusive, to all-engaging to allow for communication.

The word apple is an abstraction from all the possible apples. It is a resonant word, if spoken it engages our ears and our tactility almost as completely as an apple itself, only without the expected tastes and smells. Unlike an apple, we can always have the word apple, but with this availability comes a loss, it is an abstraction. We get the semantic power of communication, we lose the immediate nutritive value, the particular smell or smoothness or colour of any particular apple, we lose the apple’s rootedness in the tree, and the tree in the earth and the air with the bees, we lose a lot with the word apple, and that is why it is such a powerful technology.

The word ‘apple’ is incomparably more flexible than is an apple. You can name your record company after it, or your computer company, or it can stand in for all knowledge in a parable of original sin. ‘Apple’ is an abstraction from the world of apples and therein lies its power. It is revolutionary. We are, and the world is still recovering from the appearance of the technology of human language. This is well recorded in the first books ‘in the beginning was the word […]’ (John 1:1).

The world we live in today is a world in-formed by the abstraction technology of language. Philosopher of communication Vilém Flusser liked to stress that information was the process of applying formal constraints on something, ‘to put the form in’, in the sense that when we inform each other, we are changing each other’s form (Flusser, 2007, p. 19). Human language abstracts out generalizations, and human beings use these generalizations in a human economy of social gestures which allow us to communicate. Communication indicates commonalities, and the important commonality in language is that other human beings can understand it. This is how we, as human beings, to some degree, abstract ourselves from the all-encompassing omni-sensual, churning mass of universal existence. We take a ‘step back’ into human consciousness: the original sin.

Transfixed in our world of abstractions, it becomes easy, and even advisable, to forget that this new technical domain is still completely bound within Nature. Technologies of abstraction, which afford us so many unprecedented possibilities to act with effective precision, concurrently produce narcotic ellipses where the satisfaction of dominion over a particular material realms generates ecstatic fantasies of immanent omnipotence. This ecstatic state has buoyed our linguistic ability to communicate, in a realm of anthropomorphic terms, safely at one remove from implacable and all-enveloping Nature which always threatens to absorb us again forever. ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14). In an anthropomorphic world of abstract words we elaborate our highest human ideals which can supersede and numb the yawning pain of the rupture with universal integrity.

There can henceforth be no absolute truth in any language utterance, but only in the existence of languages themselves. Onomatopoeia shows how linguistic systems always and arbitrarily anthropomorphize all phenomena. Onomatopoeia reveals that even in the ancient technology of spoken language, the great heterogeneity and diversity of the world is first and fundamentally proscribed and conformed before it comes to serve its communicative function. Looking through this list of onomatopoeic dog sounds from various languages, it is easy to observe that what might be a common sound around the globe is refracted into dozens of local approximations to conform to the predilections of those local languages. The generalizable ‘bark’ of a dog (as a sound from ‘Nature’) is made precise as it enters civil language. Language is as much about control as it is about expression.

Dog barking:

In Afrikaans, woef

In Albanian, ham ham

In Arabic, haw haw, hab hab

In Armenian, hav hav

In Basque, txau txau (small dogs), zaunk zaunk (big dogs)

In Batak, kung-kung

In Bengali, gheu gheu, bheu bheu, bhou bhou

In Bulgarian, bow bow бау бау, djaff djaff

In Catalan, bup bup

In Chinese, Cantonese, wōu-wōu

In Chinese, Mandarin, wāng wāng

[zho 14]

In Croatian, vau vau

In Czech, haf haf

In Danish, vuf vuf, vov vov, bjæf bjæf

In Dutch, waf waf, woef woef

In English, woof, arf, bow wow, ruff

In Estonian, auh auh

In Finnish hau hau, vuh vuh

In French, ouah ouah, ouaf ouaf, wouf wouf

In German, wau wau, waff waff, wuff wuff

In Greek, ghav ghav γαβ γαβ, woof

In Hebrew, hav hav

, [heb 4] haw haw

[heb 4]

In Hindi, bho bho

In Hungarian, vau vau

In Icelandic, voff voff

In Indonesian, guk guk

In Italian, bau bau

In Japanese,

(wan wan)

In Kannada, bow bow

In Kazakh, арп-арп, шәу-шәу

In Korean, meong meong

In Latgalian, vau vau

In Latvian, vau

In Lithuanian, au au

In Macedonian, av av ав ав, dzhav dzhav џав џав

In Malayalam, bau bau

In Marathi, bho bho

In Norwegian, voff voff, vov vov

In Persian, vāq vāq

, hāf-hāf

In Polish, hau hau

In Portuguese, au au, ão ão, béu béu

In Romanian, ham ham

In Russian, gav gav

, tyaf tyaf

In Sinhalese, buh buh

In Slovene, hov hov

In Spanish, guau guau

In Serbian, av av ав ав

In Swedish, vov vov, voff voff

In Tagalog, aw aw

In Tamil, vovw-vovw, loll-loll, vazh vazh

In Telugu, bau bau

In Thai, hong hong, bok bok

In Turkish, hav hav

In Uropi, waw waw

In Vietnamese, gâu gâu, sủa sủa

— From a Wikipedia article list of Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias

The fact that thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• 1 DOM
• 2 ABS
• 3 AUT
• 4 DIG
• 5 FAB
• 6 MAT
• 7 EMA
• Postscript
• References
• Index