Analogue and Digital

Abstract

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the hegemony of a digital universe in India seems without limit. The digital now stands in for a larger environment, ranging from media culture, climate monitoring, governance, surveillance technologies, medicine and the entire landscape of the political. This sense of media as a constitutive plural, transcending medium specificity or geography makes our task doubly difficult. From its emergence in the 1990s, media culture began relentlessly digitising from the first decade after the millennium. By the next decade, global digital infrastructures spread rapidly in India and much of the non-Western world, aided by better bandwidth and the increasing use of smartphone mobile interfaces. This linear story hides the remarkable hybridity of the digital world, existing in conjunction with analogue. In his remarkable essay, ‘On the Superiority of the Analog’ Brian Massumi, suggested that analogue’s variable impulse allowed it to cross ‘from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain. Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination’ (Massumi, 2002, p. 135). For Massumi, analogue’s expression was topological, the digital had potentialities of the virtual only through an ‘analogue’ expression. Massumi’s focus is on the continuity of transformation, where topology is the ‘science of self-varying deformation’ (2002, p. 134). Here Massumi closely follows Deleuzian metaphysics, which stress the continuity of the virtual in contrast to the discrete in the digital. The quantified forms of the digital fail to measure up to the strengths of the analogue, which better approximates the process of becoming and its indeterminacy. As Sterne (2016) points out the designation of the analogue as a ‘not-digital’ sphere in the 1980s has been hugely problematic; blurring a rich traffic between technologies. In fact, says Sterne, ‘reality is just as analog as it is digital; and conversely, that it is just as not-digital as it is not-analog’ (p. 41). Massumi’s essay aligns with arguments on the transductive being of technicity (Simondon, 1958/1980). In transductive arguments, technical objects are ontogenetic, defined by evolution and indetermination, existing in associated environments or milieus. The topological impulse has become a larger drive in a calculative infrastructure so important to contemporary capitalism. Some scholars have argued that becoming topological is a larger impulse of contemporary culture, the normalisation of continuity, life measured according to capacities for change (Lury et al., 2012). Topological culture is relational and interconnected. The ‘ordering of continuity’, Lury et al. argue, ‘makes itself felt ‘in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating’ (2012, p. 4). In this context, the sharper oppositions of analogue