Concerning the Digital

Abstract

ion, but at what point in this process is content or the actual left behind? In order to count with them, we align fingers with objects in the world. Fingers measure an amount, they are matched against whatever needs counting, be it figures on a hilltop, trees in a grove, or other fingers. In this alignment, fingers become placeholders, tokens that stand for the objects they count;28 and manipulations of those fingers yield results that apply to the counted objects. Note that in this usage fingers lose their internal difference. As tokens or representatives, one finger is as good as another, and my fingers are equivalent to yours. If there is still a distinction, it is the merely formal distinction of place: as counters, second and fourth fingers do not differ in themselves, but only in the order in which they are assigned. When the finger is removed from the hand to become a line on the ground or on paper, when the finger no longer points to what is before us, but rather, to an abstract or absent case—the general—then we are no longer employing its singularity or haecceity, but treating it as a member of a species, an arbitrary digit, one among others. Soon enough, fingers give way to other tokens (stones, beads, dollars), signs, and sounds, and these various practices of counting constitute numbering per se, which grounds itself in fingers but encompasses a variety of tokens and their uses. (In this sense, phylogeny recapitulates genealogy, for children learn to use numbers along these same lines.) Not only is every finger, as a counter, equivalent to every other, but tokens are generally interchangeable, and we choose to count with signs, sounds, or material tokens based purely on convenience, for the end is the same in any case. Each of these things loses its specific content, its haecceity, when it is used for counting, to become a general representative, not of an object to be counted, but of a step in the process of counting. Not just anything could serve as the basis of numbers; neither tails nor teeth fit the bill. The possibility of aligning fingers with countable objects is not invented from nothing, but derives from their form. Prior to counting, we discover in holding hands the align-ability of fingers, the way in which they match each other to the point where they are almost indistinguishable. (Hand-holding is possible by virtue of the multiple articulations of fingers, but also by virtue of the complementarity of left and right.) Where I impress my fingers in clay, there your hand too will find a grip. The manual manipulation of form is almost always generalizable: what one hand can do another can soon learn, primarily because the hand operates almost entirely through its form, and we all share this 64 Concerning the Digital same form. Alignment is thus given as part of the hand, so that the hand, by its nature, already directs us toward the abstraction of counting. (Alignment relies also on the liminal character of fingers, noted above. Fingers could not become alignable objects if they were too close to us. Though part of the body, the hand is also at arms length, so that one can see and otherwise experience one’s fingers as external objects to be manipulated, aligned with other even more distant objects.) With this genealogy of the digital in mind, we can appreciate more perspicaciously its deficiency. When the digit is itself abstracted, it loses touch with the actual and so renders all difference extrinsic or formal. The digital still makes two articulations, but it substitutes in both cases an external, formal difference for an actual, productive one. The difference between 0 and 1 has nothing to do with 0 or 1, either of which, when taken as a digital bit, is strictly nothing. The difference between 0 and 1 is external to them both; it is just a formal difference, and what it divides is itself only form. Whereas the fleshy articulations of fingers divide heterogeneously, leaving always an actuality to be further articulated, the digital makes two only by repeating one, which is why there is no positive difference, no internal difference between 0 and 1; they are exactly the same, only formally distinct, and could be wholly interchanged in the digital technologies that make use of them. The second digital articulation, of the object into parts to be measured, is also a means of making difference external. As far as the digital division goes, there is no difference remaining internal to the digital object. It is entirely comprehended by the formal distinctions that represent it.29 This analysis demonstrates the further conclusion that the digital is hermetic. Whereas the deictic remains in a context, necessarily operating in an already shared space, the digital, which makes two only by repeating one, no longer points outside of itself. It is a binary that is effectively not doubled, a binary that refers only to itself, which confirms Baudrillard’s digital interpretation of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.30 Certainly, the digital is doubled, and more than once, but, lacking any actuality and with only formal difference, its doublings never leave the plane of the digital to point beyond it.31 Imprisoned in its own domain, the digital does not refer or show directly (which is the hallmark of the deictic), but merely represents. If it refers at all, it refers to the generic—not to a particular actual, but to a species of the actual: a type. The digital makes contact with the actual only by accident or convention and only through the mediation of the nondigital. Which is why digital signature, digital d i f f e r e n c e s 65 time-stamping, and other techniques that attempt to mark a digital object as unique are so problematic.32 The digital is never unique, never singular. It represents but does not present. This understanding of the sources of the digital’s power and the extent of its limitations allows us to look anew at the danger it poses. Indifferent to content and material, the digital renders everything it touches in the pure abstract form of form. When the digital is our means of approaching the world, when we apprehend and interact with the world through the digital, then we risk reducing everything to its form. In the digital, all differences become formal differences, all value becomes formal value. We can measure, quantify, and compare everything in the digital world, all according to a single, universal, formal standard. Human beings, apprehended as digital, are nothing more than a sum of formal characteristics: a digital résumé, a set of statistics, usage habits, sites visited, target marketing groups, a digital voice print, a digital signature, a digital image, homepage, isp, ip address, screen name. Digital art foregoes aura by default, to become generic, reproducible, equivalent to its representation. The digital world does not offer a new experience each time, does not unfold itself to reveal unique forces gathered from the depths of history, for a digital object is static and without history; it offers instead the promise of generic and repeatable experience, measured by bandwidth, buyable by the byte. This conclusion—that the danger of the digital is a reduction to form—should come as no surprise, for it is just this fear that thinkers of the digital have expressed in their commentary. Distrust of the digital resonates in the popular imagination, and skeptical questions are reiterated and codified in an endless stream of books and articles on cultural theory and technology. (Most of these questions relate to the Internet and to computers, as those technologies are the best representatives of digital technology in general.) Does the digital impoverish our experience of the world? Do computers, in spite of their promises of enrichment, actually offer only sad simulacra of reality, flattened images of finite resolution, 1024 × 768 pixels, at 120 Hz? Is the excitement and danger of fleshy human contact a thing of the past, replaced by low-risk encounters in chat rooms and Multi-User Domains (muds) where only data pass from one person to another? Does the Internet narrow our daily experience, confining us to predetermined possibilities and outcomes? Is choice now only a matter of the selection of one of a finite number of links determined by the website designer? Does the Internet tend increasingly toward corporate 66 Concerning the Digital control, the capitalist model, where the digital is just another form of money, a general equivalent that serves to define and measure all value? Does the digital, by guaranteeing the absolute equivalence of every copy, destroy the preciousness and fragility of art, obliterate beyond memory the singularity of the “live”? These are the pressing questions of the digital, posed in the margins of the mainstream by unlikely comrades: academics, intellectuals, the elderly, artists, Luddites, the Unabomber, naturalists, environmentalists, the disenfranchised, communists, and other crazies. Their warning cries are loud enough to hear, if one listens. And each of these many questions derives from the central question: does the digital reduce experience to pure form, making every difference effectively equivalent or homogeneous? Not to worry, assure the champions of the digital, only good things can come of it:33 the affordability of digital technologies, the decentralization of the Internet, its unregulable character that defies national borders and subverts existing law—all ensure that the Internet and its associated technologies will serve populist interests, will bring a richer world to a greater variety of people, will break down the distinctions of class, ethnicity, and access to information that adhere so closely to national boundaries.34 From one perspective, browsing the Internet presents the user with finite and limited choices, predetermined by the web designer or dhtml code; this limitation is consistent with the pure formality o