How little they differ from animals

Moreover, if the assault on the Deaf body was not a severeenough example

ntarity, and trace. In the Derridean sense, signed languages, ofcourse are forms of writing. But could one be so bold as to say as well, that writing was a form ofSign4—and that gesture is at heart “making meaning through movement.” In this respect, speech isclearly a form of gesture, only we can’t see it, all covered up by the mout

may speak outside the reach

On the horizon is the technology of usingstem cells to implant into the ears of deaf children, making them not like hearing people, butmaking them hearing.

The forces of bio-power are alive and well

developed pedagogies to discipline the deaf bodyinto normative language practices

Users of signlanguage

wandering outcast” of linguistics

Sign Language

Punitive Practices

listening

the disembodiment of the voice

But in fact, white supremacy provided the fuel for many early commercial phonographic recordings, including not only ethnic humor and “coon songs” but a form of “descriptive specialty”—the period name for spoken-word recordings about news events and slices of life—that reenacted the lynchings of black men

 World Listening Day is a time to think about the impacts we have on our auditory environments and, in turn, their effects on us.

That is, hearing without listening is response without responsibility; it is a form of pseudodialogue without ethics.

oral and literary

Scholars of nonverbal communication understand the importance of a listening eye that attends not only to words but also to the sounds and sights that comprise and surround them.

Listening, as noted, however, is a radically different epistemic process from that of visual perception—vision distances and separates while listening connects and bridges.

Levinas’s ethics of the face implies a seeing eye/I that is grounded in the subjectivity of vision’s objec-tification but that is also accompanied by the transcendent possibilities invoked by nonviolent speech.

This idea of a polymodal “face that speaks” introduces an interesting con-tradiction that Levinas himself addresses in 1951 when he asks, “How is the vision of the face no longer vision, but hearing and speech?” (1987, 11). That is, how can the face, a visual phenomenon in which seeing is the primary experience, manifest not in sight but in hearing?

Thus the contra-diction of face arises from the fact that it is both particular (in that every “other” is a completely unique and specific “other”) and at the same time universal (insofar that everyone is an “other”).

According to Derrida (1978), this depiction of the irreducible and infinite alterity of the other produces an unsolvable logical contradiction, because it is impossible to think the other without simultaneously thematizing, or containing, the other. In Perpich’s words, because “Levinas’s notion of an absolute other forbids us from assigning to the other any determinate predicate, it seems as if all unique, singular faces are the same” (2005, 104

alterity

One paradox resides in the fact that as an image, the face resists conceptual representation—it is unthinkable, ungraspable, unrepresentable. Yet so deeply does the modality of vision dominate that, ironically, even these remarks tend to reinforce a visual ren-dering of the face.

Ethics “begins in the face of the exteriority of the other, in the face of the other—that face which enlists my responsibility by its human expression” but that can be neither assimilated by interiority nor reduced to “the same” (1984, 317

he face is the manifestation of the ethical exigency that is woven into the very structure of human being

The diagrams reinforce the very anthropocentrism I’m seeking to resist. To address this concern, I’ve begun playing with other kinds of visualizations including the network graphs below.

triptych

As human dramas increase, mentions of flora generally decrease.

trace major connections among living beings and patterns across texts

leaf

the intellectual work that goes into designing a markup schema is integral to the success of addressing the research questions.

Webb characterizes Hazel’s suitors as “Reddin the destroyer” and “Edward the savior” (final page of novel)—a description that also maps onto Tess where Alec is the destroyer and Angel the savior. And yet both Angel and Edward are failed saviours: in each novel neither the protagonist nor her child survives. The similarities in the plots and themes of the two novels make them ideal for comparison.

To be too close is to lose sight of the larger systems in which we are imbricated. To be too distant is to remain outside, to see patterns without acknowledging one’s complicity within those systems.

consonances

corporeal

We are perhaps most familiar with “black box” technologies that separate user from code and mystify the processes through which new knowledge creation is facilitated.

Technology is often characterized in opposition to the natural world (and sometimes with good reason). But it is clear from Macfarlane’s account of his own research that digital technology has not displaced the language of the natural world—it has recorded, transmitted, publicized, and preserved it.

“Now I know the word ‘smeuse,’” Macfarlane writes, “I notice these signs of creaturely commute more often.”

He cites the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s contentious decision to “cull” many “nature words” (Macfarlane n.p.) from its list,  removing words like “adder, ash, beech, hazel, and willow” and replacing them with “attachment, blog, broadband, and chatroom.”

This is very much a work-in-progress talk, and I welcome feedback, questions, suggestions, and collaborations! 

humanity implies rights that are neither alienable, divisible, deferable, or debatable even if we are mired in discourses that make them seem

The more reflective and attentive we can be when tutoring writing, the more we can slow down the action, remember our commitments, and see challenging moments as moments both for teaching and for learning

should resist assumptions of deficiency and embrace a critical, reflective use of hybrid linguistic resources. This post-structuralist linguistic

epresentations of multilingual writers limit our perceptions of the students and the instructional models available to us

Geneva Smitherman, Suresh Canagarajah, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Matsuda, among others, have shed light on how language policies and perceptions of the racialized Other disguise and hide racial attitudes and prejudice

We learn to see these actions (and occasions that call for action) not as isolated events, but as multiple iterationsin an ongoing and always-striving process against racism and toward racial jus

ge. As we consider multiple interventions, we consider the ways power operates for the multiple players, and we become co-learners who occupy multi-dimensional roles in the process.

we step intoinstead of away from difficulty

Our recognition of a larger context needs to leave us with nuanced understandings of both the historical legacies and current systems of power and privi

We believe these articulations are especially important, for, as Nancy Grimm explains, “If we want to avoid complicity with racism and other forms of exclusion, then those tacit theories about language, literacy, and learning need to be made explicit and open to revision” (78).

n all three l

cally, we value the work beforeconferences as we study and construct our pedagogy and beyondas we reflect on our praxis;

eflectiveandattentive—meaning that, as tutors and administrators, weare observant throughout our interactions with others and adaptable to the ways in which power and privilege manifest in given moments. Third, because the work is sustained over time in deeply reflective and attentive ways, a pedagogy for racial justice recognizes the full personhood of all those involved: teacher and student, tutor and writer. As such, this pedagogy is embodied and engaged—affective, tangible, and holistic

such, processual and reiterativ

justice when working with writers one-with-one?

Jody Shipka argues for a broader understanding of multimodal texts within our pedagogical frameworks, expanding the definition to include print and digital texts, embodied performances, photographs, videos, physical objects, and repurposed or remediated objects (300). This definition speaks to the multiplicity of UDL and allows for a richer understanding of pedagogical accessibility: if students want to compose essays, collages, videos, or webtexts, these all fit within multimodal pedagogies.

The principles of UDL—multiple means of representation, actions and expression, and engagement—can help expand our teaching, learning, and composing practices. They can also help us to configure multiliteracies more inclusively.

As spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre argues, the physical spaces we inhabit affect our actions within those spaces; in turn, our actions and social practices impact those spaces. Thus, the material spaces of writing centers greatly impact what kind of pedagogy those spaces can enact.⁵ Even if a center is physically accessible, students cannot benefit from inaccessible pedagogy.

The push toward multiliteracy centers provides opportunities for spatial reconsiderations of how well centers support accessible literacy practices.

that physical environments construct disability because, as tools and technologies become naturalized, people who cannot use them are positioned as disabled (297).

Similarly, a multimodal pedagogy recognizes students as “agentive, resourceful and creative meaning-makers”

agency

embodied

the dominating limitations of print- and word-based literacies

How do our current pedagogical practices exclude particular students

rethink their practices in light of others who learn differently” (28)

Sherwood makes the argument that tutors are not trained for working with LD students, while he simultaneously argues that writing centers are incapable of helping students with LD. Tanya Titchkosky identifies this impasse as a “You can’t accommodate everybody” attitude that identifies some students, particularly those with disabilities, as “‘naturally’ a problem for some spaces” (35).

as Other

reposition representations of disability in both writing center scholarship and tutoring practices.

A multiliteracy center that applies principles of UD and UDL can support students’ different physical abilities, modes of learning, types of knowledge, and literacies.

its attention to multiplicity in various modes and media and in its focus on flexibility in processes and products

As archives proliferate digitally, so do occasions for manipulating and modifying their contents—and, in the process—for engaging with voices of difference in the writing classroom.

use, remix, and repurpose

body

using “communication technologies in the interrogation of such constructions” ( Alexander & Banks, 2004, p. 273). The incongruity in the archive can help encourage more complex, multifaceted understandings of identity.

productive uncertainty and sensations of contradiction

incongruous and even contradictory elements

archive of historical material

gender-critical self-reflection

most alarming

homophobic

If two women were walking down the street holding hands/Would they be mistaken for sisters, relatives, best friends?

she began to notice that women's voices were few and far between

Despite their resistance to feminism earlier in the semester, many students elected a gender-critical approach in charting their line of inquiry through the archive.

this increased desire to keep working is particularly pointed in audio composing because of the kind of listening it demands:As our students have discovered, listening to recordings.. inspires a self-conscious perspective (a form of analytical listening) on what's being said, how it is being said, who is saying it, and to whom. Along with this self-consciousness comes the impetus to revise and revise again in order to achieve resonance (or dissonance) with an audience. (n.p.)7

But, while parodic remix is an effective and popular form of argumentation, it does not afford a stance of openness when engaging with the existing media—quite the opposite, in fact, since these remix practices often intentionally undermine the original source.

In these two examples, moments of awareness that the students’ lives might require the negotiation of gendered power imbalances—this was productive uncertainty—were quickly closed down and abandoned.

most students tended to reduce and silence the blogger to justify their resistance to feminism in their informal responses to the reading

gender-themed first-year writing course

gay liberation radio shows

Listening's dual meaning of understanding and hearing suggests that audio composing can be harnessed in affording a stance of openness to difference.

engagement is fundamentally guided by social relations of difference: “we pay closest attention to the optical and acoustic information that specifies what the other person is, invites, threatens, and does,” before acting accordingly (1979, p. 128). Paying attention to how students engage with sources before and during multimodal composing means shifting our understanding of affordance back to Gibson and back to difference.

challenge

an imagined user

listening

particular affordances of sound”

openness

Capitalism's

Ian Bogost

Fixed social structures produce an impoverished form of agency because agency always belongs to the same components or groups.

Assemblage theory does not treat agency as something that belongs to or stems solely from humans or from technology alone but from the interaction of a number of heterogeneous tendencies that together produce emergent properties that enable new capacities. In addition, every assemblage contains actants, like Go, that can modify other entities giving them new functions and abilities. Without new associations or without continually forming new connections this process cannot take place and agency cannot occur.

The examples of Foxtel Go and the LetsPlay channels demonstrate how new television can be thought of as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements that has moments of stability and moments of transformation depending on the kinds of connections that are formed. They also demonstrate how the social is refigured through the new productions and viewing practices they engender.

For them, the transmission of television via a simultaneous schedule is an entirely foreign concept, even though this has been one of the defining elements of television as a medium for decades

Latour argues that it is through the process of reshuffling agency that associations between objects are revealed as social. He argues that the social ‘is an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together’ (Latour, 2005: 65).

Reciprocal determination is a non-linear form of determination that emerges from a process of interaction. To appreciate the importance of this concept to the functioning of assemblages, it is necessary to understand how it relates to both the virtual and the actual. Assemblages function on two planes: the plane of consistency or virtuality, which is made up of becomings or pure differentiation; and, a plane of organisation that actualises these virualities by segmenting and stratifying them

Processes of deterritorialisation, on the other hand, undo fixed orderings, disrupt hierarchical power structures, and by privileging contingent relations between heterogeneous parts, open the assemblage to new possibilities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3–25)

Actants are entities that contribute something new to the assemblage and can be human or non-human.

Complicating matters is the fact that different theorists use different terminology to describe what might appear to be similar phenomena.

The implication of this is that social theory misses transformations in culture and the social itself.

in favour of a multi-determinate trajectory

deterritorialised and reterritorialised,

‘takes seriously the particular objects, technologies, and forms through which culture is brought together’

television once had a stable identity that is now being called into question

theorists suggest that there is a need to develop new theoretical frameworks that encompass more than the analogue broadcast model.

emerged

the way television culture can be deterritorialised and reterritorialised through new connections and in doing so introduce new qualities such as interactivity and reciprocal determination.

Perhaps Plato is right—storytelling is the foundation of rhetoric, and I am above all a storyteller.

My goals have evolved from just get in, get the most practical knowledge, and get out to more thoughtful academic pursuits

As a rhetor I am obligated to create a new, more vibrant, and sustainable truth for the emerging New South.

I began to think in a much broader sense about communication and how unconventional platforms could ultimately provide a voice for traditionally marginalized groups, e.g. women, the elderly, African Americans, and animals.

I used expository writing, Google timeline application, and virtual modeling

The CTW assignment exploring the possible causes of Alexander the Great’s death reflected Plato’s theory that texts can indeed be misleading when the authors are long dead and conclusive evidence no longer exists, if it ever did.

divine inspiration

Kenneth Burke’s

aetiology,

the transitoriness of all levels of experienc

s meditation traditions have shown, one can most effectively remove the attachment to the ideas that structure and may contaminate our lives by a direct and deliberate confrontation with their manifestations on all levels of experience.

Dogen maintained throughout his work, perhaps most accessibly in his Instructions for the Cook (2001), that this attitude should extend into all of one's daily life. With it, one is able to act and respond freely and spontaneously, unimpeded by preconceptions or biases.

takes neither an affirming nor a negating attitude for its intentionality. Since it does not objectify ideas, there is no object for it to either affirm or deny. For Dogen, this pre- reflective or pre-conceptual state of mind is more fundamental than the other two and it is the proper attitude to assume in seated meditation

Thinking, then, is the tendency to reify concepts and thus to react to them as permanently existing entities. Not-thinking is simply the opposite of thinking, the rejection of thinking, its refusal, perhaps an attempt to achieve a sort of blanking out or a state of sleep (

designed to bring to experiential awareness the ways in which a distorted or false idea manifests in an individual's life and, in the process of achieving this awareness, create the possibility of change. What, then, is the proper use of concepts? The proper attitude to them? And how could using concepts in this way help the hypothetical male student I described above deal with his internalized ideology of masculinity, the effects of that ideology on his own experiences, and its effects on his reactions to others?

Likewise, and following the logic of emptiness, the self can not be accorded a fixed ontological status, although its phenomenal reality is not denied (p. 18). But if language is empty, that is, if it does not function to pick out essentialized entities, and if at the same time people are constituted by language-games and deeply attached to their linguistic categories, then what attitude ought one assume to language, to others, and to oneself? This is a key issue, or complex of issues, that yogic meditation techniques were designed to address.

linguistic categories do not function to denote essences or natural kinds

Although Western readers have often mistakenly understood Nagarjuna as an academic-style philosopher, his philosophical work is more accurately seen as one phase of a broader program of transformation of the self in the context of his home culture. He designed his anti-essentialist and anti-dualist arguments to be used in conjunction with other meditation practices and techniques to help overcome obstacles to the experiential understanding of emptiness

essentialism

manifestations of alterity

a central concern of feminist discourse

hey have arrived independently at surprisingly similar positions with respect to human ontology, epistemology, and conceptual logic.

reductio argumentation

oosen attachment to dualistic and essentialized thinking and consequently to the destructive ways of living that all cultures produce in their members

not simply by replacing problematic ideas with ideas they deem to be better

The theoretical confrontation of ideology is of the utmost importance, of course, but it is limited in its potential to effect liberation because its impact is largely limited to one level of a student's being: the cognitive. The second point, which follows from the first, is that the full scope of a student's relationship with ideology - what Nagarjuna's tradition identified as the person's forms of attachment to ideation - must be addressed as such and in ways that can enable a student to effect broad-based change in her or his life

Change, then, may involve a broad range of things including any or all of a student's beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, values, dreams, and aspirations.

cathected

On an ideological level a pedagogy that deconstructs masculinity to expose its contradictions and to reveal to the male student his own conflicted position as both oppressor and oppressed might successfully challenge sexism (Orr, 1993). Although this deconstruction might successfully change ideology, and even have a quite strong impact on behaviour, Wittgenstein's holistic human ontology suggests that important levels of a student's being remain unaffected by his new knowledge.

In a very real sense, then, with this work Wittgenstein has shown that people are the language-games they learn to play.

Language, he held, is part of human "natural history" (sec. 25) that serves to shape pre- and non-linguistic human experience in a range of culturally established ways. For example, in one well-known passage that throws light on the development of sexism, he maintained that in teaching a child the language of sensations, such as the word pain, adults teach the child "new pain-behaviour" (Sec. 244). The significance of this example becomes apparent on considering the differences in the uses boys and girls are taught to make of this word. In the modern West many boys are socialized to the mandated masculine identity by being taught that "big boys don't cry." Thus they learn that it is not appropriate for them to engage in a language-game that is strongly endorsed for girls. And along with the acquisition of their differential uses of language, boys and girls "swallow down" (1969, sec. 143) associated sexist attitudes and behaviours, as this simple example clearly demonstrates. In their differential learning of the language-game of pain their culture subtly shapes boys and girls in ways of which they may be largely unaware.

It will colour, as McLaren (1989) has pointed out, the entirety of an individual's being - behaviours, feelings, values, aspirations, orientation of spirit - and often in very subtle and subconscient ways.

What is being foregrounded throughout Wittgenstein's work is that, because the person as a whole learns, not a disembodied mind or mechanistic body, learning affects the whole person.

concepts of mentation - knowing, believing, doubting, understanding, and others - lie in human experience and behaviours, not in the occurrence of inaccessible events in a hypothetical mind, nor in mere overt behaviour. To know, believe, doubt, or understand something is logically internally related to human behaviour in the broadest sense of the word

His attention to the role of language in language-games weakens the plausibility of purely cognitive models of learning and gives credibility to a more holistic and experiential model.

For Wittgenstein a language-game consists of "the language and the actions into which it is woven" (Sec. 7).

sui generi

by ostentation

concept of rhetoric

The thirst for the Common World is what there is of communism in compositionism, with this small but crucial difference: that it has to be slowly composed instead of being taken for granted and imposed on all.

eikos

a metanoia of sorts

The increase of disputability—and the amazing extension of scientific and technical controversies—while somewhat terrifying at first, is also the best path to finally taking seriously the political task of establishing the continuity of all entities that make up the common world.

the notion of matter is too political, too anthropomorphic, too narrowly historical, too ethnocentric, too gendered, to be able to define the stuff out of which the poor human race, expelled from Modernism, has to build its abode. We need to have a much more material, much more mundane, much more immanent, much more realistic, much more embodied definition of the material world if we wish to compose a common world.

They simply transform this discrepancy (which would make their worldview untenable) into a radical divide between human subjects and nonhuman objects.

concatenations

This conceit has the strange result of composing the world out of long concatenations of cause and effect where (this is what is so odd) nothing is supposed to happen, except, probably at the beginning—but since there is no God in these staunchly secular accounts, there is not even a beginning. . . . The disappearance of agency in the so-called “materialist world view” is a stunning invention, especially since it is contradicted every step of the way by the odd resistance of reality: every consequence adds slightly to a cause. Thus, it has to have some sort of agency. There is a supple-ment, a gap between the two. If not, there would be no possible way of discriminating causes from consequences. This is true in particle physics as well as in chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, or sociology. Thus, although in practice all agencies have to be distributed at each step of the whole concatenation, in theory nothing goes on but the strict and unaltered transportation of a cause.27 To use my technical language, although every state of affairs deploys associations of media-tors, everything is supposed to happen as if only chains of purely passive intermediaries were to unfold.28 Paradoxically, the most stubborn realism, the most rational outlook is predicated on the most unrealistic, the most contradictory notion of an action without agency.

One of the principal causes of the scorn poured by the Moderns on the sixteenth century is that those poor archaic folks, who had the misfortune of living on the wrong side of the “epistemological break,” believed in a world animated by all sorts of entities and forces instead of believing, like any rational person, in an inanimatematter producing its effects only through the power of its causes.

proliferation

neologism

the agreement that created the Bifurcation in the first place now lies in ruin and has to be entirely recomposed. This is why we seem to experience a sense of familiarity with the times before its invention and implementation.21

For we have simply conjoined the worst of politics and the worst of science, that is, the two traditional ways of producing indisputability. We have been here already

We compositionists want immanence and truth together. Or, to use my language: we want matters of concern, not only matters of fact. For a compositionist, nothing is beyond dispute. And yet, closure has to be achieved. But it is achieved only by the slow process of composition and compromise, not by the revelation of the world of beyond.

es extensa

The idea was that the more natural we became, the more rational we would be, and the easier the agreements between all reasonable human beings. (Remember the big bulldozers and warships of Avatar in their irreversible—in fact, fully reversible—advance to destroy the great tree of life?) This agreement now lies in ruins, but without having been su-perseded by another more realistic and especially more livable project. In this sense, we are still postmodern.

his was the time of the great political, religious, legal, and epistemological invention of matters of fact, embedded in a res extensa devoid of any meaning, except that of being the ultimate reality, made of fully silent entities that were yet able, through the mysterious intervention of Science (capital S) to “speak by themselves” (but without the mediation of science, small s, and scientists—also small s!).

Nature is not a thing, a domain, a realm, an ontological territory. It is (or rather, it was during the short modern parenthesis) a way of organizing the division (what Alfred North Whitehead has called the Bifurcation)13 between appearances and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, history and immutability. A fully transcendent, yet a fully historical construct, a deeply religious way (but not in the truly religious sense of the word)14 of creating the difference of potential between what human souls were attached to and what was really out there.

Which is another way of saying that we don’t wish to have too much to do with the twentieth century: “Let the dead bury their dead.”

But when there is nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenly looks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath? This is precisely what has happened to postmodernism, which can be defined as another form of modernism, fully equipped with the same iconoclastic tools as the moderns, but without the belief in a real world beyond. No wonder it had no other solution but to break itself to pieces, ending up debunking the debunkers. Critique was meaningful only as long as it was accompanied by the sturdy yet juvenile belief in a real world beyond. Once deprived of this naïve belief in transcendence, critique is no longer able to produce this difference of potential that had literally given it steam.

iconoclasts

veil of appearances

compositionism takes up the task of searching for universality but without believing that this universality is already there, waiting to be unveiled and discovered. It is thus as far from relativism (in the papal sense of the word) as it is from universalism (in the modernist meaning of the world—more on this later). From universalism it takes up the task of building a common world; from relativism, the certainty that this common world has to be built from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a whole, but at best a fragile, revisable, and diverse composite material.

Zeitgeist

a new search for hope on condition that what it means to have a body, a mind, and a world is completely redefined.

technics

Or, to put this differently, we have argued that: logic is the medium of being, insofar as it inscribes the necessity of pure minimal differences before contradiction; mathematics the medium that concretises minimal differences into consistency-without-phenomenal-identity as the possibility of any actualisation; technics the actualising medium of modulating these consistencies in turn. This tripartite distinction—difference, consistency, modulation—entails that all phenomenal presentations are at once infinitely variable as they are entirely constrained in specific ways.

otiose

Yet our point here is that, at base, the digital is a model of logic, not a specific technology (Chun, 2011: 140). Second, and just as importantly, because the physical reality of the computer is an electronic and magnetic enactment of this logic, it is impossible to ever identify any specific being of digital data, since the ‘movement’ of data back and forth between disks, RAM (Random Access Memory), caches and registers on the CPU (Central Processing Unit), is in fact a constant process of modulation between states of magnetic polarity or electric charge in these physical objects. Because of this, it is impossible to say that any given bit of digital data is even the same as itself, or point to its localisation or appearance in the world as a criterion or determinant of its identity, laying bare the fundamental spuriousness of the concept of a ‘copy.’ Data’s ‘identity’ is a pure, non-phenomenal, distributed-cohering-across-materials. And, ‘underneath’ that, there are simply absolutely minimal differences or pure binaries—which are thus differences-without-identity, not subject to the laws of non-contradiction.

ferromagnetic

digital ontology as founded on pure differences established by the primacy of excluded middle, data should be considered a hyperdifferentiated consistency without identity. We thereby reiterate and extend our fundamental point about digital data, which is that it scrambles inherited metaphysical polarities. The principle of excluded middle rules the foundations of the digital universe, not the principle of non-contradiction. Digital ontology is paraconsistent, not classical or intuitionist.

incommensurable

Yet recent developments in logic—those broadly denominated ‘paraconsistent’—have attempted to construct logical systems in which contradictions are not necessarily ‘explosive.’ In traditional propositional logic, everything follows from a contradiction, but variants of para-consistent logic propose otherwise. As Greg Restall explains: Paraconsistent logics are distinctive in that they do not mandate explosion. […] Instead, for paraconsistent logics the entailment fails […] in the semantics for these logics there are interpretations in which A and -A may both be taken to be true, but in which not everything is true (Restall, 2006: 76). - 36 - It is essential here to understand that paraconsistency separates out contradiction from consistency, such that certain contradictions might be true, without all of them being so. Whereas consistency and the foreclosure-of-contradiction are identical in classical and intuitionist logics, this is not the case for paraconsistent ones. Moreover, this situation establishes the actuality that there may well be many different modes of constructing logical systems, even a kind of logical pluralism. This reopens the old question regarding the foundations of logic in a radical new fashion. - 37 - What we want to underline is that the instantiation of Boolean logic in post-war computing led very quickly to the appearance of a vacillation in the data computers were handling, such that paraconsistent logics initially came to be developed “to prevent computers, such as expert medical systems, from deducing anything whatsoever from contradictory data… because of the principle of ex falso quodlibet” (Meillasoux, 2009: 76). [12] Unlike regimes governed by classical logic, then, such a digital ontology would render pure difference (not identity) fundamental; unlike intuitionist logic, digital ontology could also affirm actual infinities. One corollary is the possibility, even actuality, perhaps even necessity, of true contradictions; another is the patency of contingency in any modulation.

But we, four, disagree that ontology must be classical, as well as, five, that logic can only describe (and therefore does not prescribe) existents. So it is time for us to bring together all the points we have made above into a clear and distinct summary of digital ontology.

they are ideological in this new sense, that they are produced on the basis of absolute binary operations whose operations vanish in the presentation of numbers, thereby also remodulating the data they present. The very organisation of data through various forms of modulation puts all sorts of pressures on the numbers that numbers themselves cannot say (Mackenzie, 2012: 335–350). We are thus committed here to understanding the digital as prior to number. Above all, we use this fact as a hint in our construction of a digital ontology. We maintain that it is vital to understand that to construct a digital ontology is to have recourse to a logical and not a mathematical ontology. But what does this mean?

The move to pure quantities is far easier to understand when we accept the numerical as simply another parameter in the modulation process between data and its display, and may help us move closer to an understanding of the relationship between the contemporary technical interdependence of virtual/material and the Deleuzian interdependence of virtual/actual (Nash, 2012).

it is that the unprecedented powers of thought and action that derive from the electrification of Boolean algebra first established by Shannon, and now incarnated globally in the form of contemporary computing, must have some fundamental anchoring in ‘being’ for it to function at all (Shannon, 1937). Second, this means that to speak of ‘digital media’ is not simply to speak of a set of hardware and software components developed by a particular species on a particular planet at a particular time using particular materials: it is rather to be given a new access to being itself, and one which must thereafter guide our thinking of natural processes more generally. Third, if there remains something unthought in the Wolfram-Fredkin hypothesis, it is simply that there is something preprogrammed, indeed too representational, about the direct projection of a contemporaneously-dominant media paradigm onto being itself. Moreover, if the social conditions of such a projection are occluded, then we should expect such an occlusion to create certain symptoms too; not least the immediate carrying-across of a number of features of contemporary computing to nature itself in an unjustified manner. What we wish to do here, then, is radicalise the Wolfram-Fredkin hypothesis along logical lines. Above all, we agree that when we speak about the ‘digital,’ this must have an extension far greater than simply referring to the actualities of new media, at the same time that these new media must simultaneously function as our primary mode of access to this recognition. But we disagree that the universe is a computer. We believe, rather, that being is digital, if in a very particular sense.

at all other times it exists as unmodulated digital data with no clear ontological state. This is true of all digital data. These may perhaps be termed ‘immanently digital entities,’ and could be said to be true of any and all of the excess of data created by the use of digital data and networks. ‘Likes’ and ‘friends’ and ‘photos’ and ‘text’ and ‘links’ and ‘Tweets’ and ‘followers’ and all other ostensibly differentiable digital phenomena–some of these may have identifiable provenance in the non-digital world, and some may be uniquely generated by and in the digital sphere, but all can be said to be ‘immanently digital entities.’ It is this problem, unique to the non-medium of the digital, that leads thinkers such as those mentioned above to concepts of ‘inorganic life’ and technogenesis, as well as scientists like Stephen Wolfram and Edward Fredkin to posit—in a move emblematic of Kittler’s assertion that “media determine our situation”—an hypothesis of the universe as a digital computer (Kittler, 1999: xxxix; Chaitin, 1999: 108).

chimeric

the ‘experience’ of the digital becomes one of process, a performance (Groys, 2008: 84). As we have already implied, being qua data proceeds from its operations. When modulating some digital data into a display state and experiencing it as an image (say, in order to show a picture of your child to a friend on your phone), you can no more say that it is the same, or even a copy of the image you showed a different friend yesterday than you could say the D flat played by Martha Goldstein in her 1970 performance of Chopin’s “Etude Op.25 No. 8” was the same D flat that Hermann Scholtz played in his 1879 performance of the same work, let alone the same D flat that Abel Tesfaye sang in The Weeknd’s 2011 performance of their song “The Knowing”.

phenomenological