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· 147 ·· CHAPTER 5 · Digital Ontology and Example Aden Evens This chapter presents two incompatible ontologies of the digital . The first ontology contrasts the digital with Deleuze’s notion of the virtual: whereas the virtual is creative and fecund, the digital is sterile and hermetic, precluding creativity. The second ontology describes how the digital is (nevertheless) creative: by virtue of the fold in the digital, a subtle but crucial feature of digital ontology, the digital reaches beyond its flat plane to connect to the human world. In the fold, described by way of an extended example, the digital and the virtual thus overlap. These two ontologies are both essential to the digital and both are valid, but their simultaneous assertion is paradoxical. The paradox of these two ontologies is the political and aesthetic problem of the digital. As against the frightening fantasy of a world become virtual, theorists since the late 1990s have asserted the digital’s materiality: The digital is necessarily inaccessible in its pure abstraction and must always be apprehended through a material instance.1 This materiality cannot be dismissed as incidental, for the digital generates a copious material history in its artifacts.2 Any understanding of, any relation to these artifacts requires an embodied human being to mediate the passage from abstraction to sensation .3 So to engage with the digital is never to leave this human body entirely behind.4 The digital is inextricably material. Though digital materiality is essential, it is also deeply problematic.5 The digital is not just a particular case of the visual or cultural; it warrants its own ontology. Its distinction from other material histories lies in the abstraction at the heart of the digital, a constitutive abstraction that persists in its material. The abstraction of form, 0 and 1, remains at the surface, haunts the phenomenon of the pixel, the icon, the document. To use a word processor is to interact with a form of text; to use a graphic arts program is to interact with a form of image. To play a computer game is to 148 ADEN EVENS conform to its logic, its formal structure. The digital may be material, but it is a material become digital. The digital attempts to push the resistance of its material to a margin of irrelevance,toovercodethematerialviaitsapparatusofcapture,thebinary code. This erosion of the material constitutes much of the history of the digital. The computer chip shrinks, struggling against the material (heat, power, size, speed) that will not finally relinquish its hold over computer processing. An immaterial chip would be a node of pure programmable logic, not a Turing machine but the Turing machine, and this fantasy of the perfect computer drives the high-tech industry and shapes our relationships to digital technologies. Hard-drive storage grows larger and faster, the capacious and speedy a never-quite-adequate substitute for an infinite and immediate memory. The computer offers to the user a representation of a digital object, but ideally this representation would be fully equivalent to the data behind it, as if sensation could connect directly to form. The representation is a necessary prosthesis for the digital, an inconvenient and always too clumsy means to the end of access. What the user works on, after all, is the form of the digital object; every operation at the computer is a specific, determinate intervention to alter one or more formal characteristics of the data. What action do you take at your terminal that does not have a particular predetermined goal? This is the distinguishing feature of digital ontology: to work with the digital is to confront a material idealization, an abstraction made flesh. If the digital is an abstraction incarnate, if it informs the material and gives it its sense, isn’t this also true of Deleuze’s virtual? This similarity is false, however. Like the digital, the virtual is abstract, and it persists in the actual to which it gives rise and in which it makes sense. But the power of abstraction (and the nature of sense) in these two ontologies are entirely different. In chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition,6 Deleuze details an ontology of the virtual in terms of the problematic Idea: the virtual is the site of ontogenesis, where the Idea forms. In the beginning (and ever after), there is a throw of the dice, an aleatory point spewing difference; and the pips of the dice are differentials. Differentials (dx, dy), undetermined in themselves, obtain relations in which they are...

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