Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, mostly recently “The Interface Effect” (Polity, 2012). His collaboration with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, “Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation,” was published by the University of Chicago Press. Laruelle: Against the Digital Galloway’s monograph on the work of French theorist François Laruelle was published last fall by the University of Minnesota Press. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Galloway currently teaches media theory at New York University
Articles
The Philosophical Origins of Digitality
I think that photography is digital – if you understand photography in the classical sense – and that it has always been digital. Such a position only holds if we accept the previous definition of the digital, which has to do with subscribing to a fundamental rivenness of the world. Photography must reflect on or orient itself toward an object or toward the world. The viewer (or the camera as a ‘viewer proxy’) is already divided, or apart, or opposite from its subject. The viewer is inside the world of course, but the structure of immanence is not in effect. Rather, a structure of distance, difference, relationality predominates. If the dominant structure is distance, difference, relation, etc., it’s digital as far as I’m concerned. But that might not be a very satisfying answer!