Disintegrator 42. The Cut (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby)
Feb 4, 2026
Leif Weatherby, scholar linking Romanticism to digital architectures; Matthew Handelman, philosopher of quantitative thought; M. Beatrice Fazi, philosopher who locates the digital in discretization called the cut; Alexander R. Galloway, media theorist of networks and computation. They debate the digital as discrete mediation, the cut versus computation, historical roots of digital representation, and whether analog philosophy can account for computation.
01:04:56
Avoid Reducing Digital To Devices Or Digital Physics
- There are two common misframes: digital philosophy (world is fundamentally discrete) and consumer electronics theory that reduces the digital to devices and platforms.
- Alexander R. Galloway urges studying the digital as a noun — a specific condition of representation — not just as tech products.
Cut Versus Machine Distinguish Digital From Computation
- Distinguish digital (discretization, the 'cut') from computation (systematization, building machines that organize tokens).
- Beatrice Fazi argues digitality can exist without computation, while computation presupposes discretization for Turing-orthodox views.
Ordinality Powers Digital Judgment And Ranking
- Ordinality — the capacity to rank tokens in series — is central to digital judgment and its mechanics.
- Alexander R. Galloway highlights cardinality versus ordinality as core numerical properties that enable digital operations like ranking.
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Intro
00:00 • 1min
Defining Digital Theory as Discrete Mediation
01:07 • 3min
Distinguishing Digital Philosophy and Consumer Focus
03:57 • 3min
Historical Roots: Macy Conference and Representation
06:33 • 3min
Computation vs. The Cut: Methods Differ
09:11 • 1min
Devices, Abacus, and Ordinality
10:30 • 2min
Computation Requires Discretization?
12:08 • 2min
Ordinality, Cardinality, and Digital Judgment
13:45 • 1min
Synchronic Structures and Structuralism's Return
14:53 • 2min
Digital's Condition for Computational Possibility
16:34 • 2min
Why Build a Collective Digital Theory Book
19:03 • 2min
Skepticism Toward Analog Philosophy
20:35 • 3min
Deleuze as the Philosopher of the Analog
23:06 • 2min
Limits of Deleuze for Technology and Computation
25:15 • 2min
Holding On To Useful Deleuzian Insights
27:25 • 1min
From Rhizomes to a Critical Break with Deleuze
28:28 • 4min
Reclaiming Mathematical and Statistical Thought
32:20 • 9min
Resetting the Digital Historically
41:39 • 3min
Digital Representation's Exhaustive Capacity
45:03 • 3min
All Representation as Digital Abstraction
47:48 • 3min
Lossy vs. Lossless Deletion and Generic Compression
50:44 • 5min
Why Structuralism Matters Today
55:17 • 7min
Can Computers Produce Genuine Novelty?
01:02:26 • 2min
Outro
01:04:38 • 8sec
#7429
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Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism
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#49840
Uncomputable
Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age
Alexander R. Galloway
Uncomputable by Alexander R. Galloway explores the interplay between play, computation, and politics in what he terms the long digital age.
Galloway argues that certain forms of play and uncomputability resist instrumental rationalization and create sites for political intervention.
The book draws on media theory, game studies, and critical theory to analyze how computational systems shape social and political life.
Galloway critiques deterministic narratives of computation while mapping strategies of refusal and resistance within digital environments.
The work situates contemporary digital phenomena within a longer historical and theoretical trajectory of computation and culture.
#1570
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Theodor Adorno
Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" is a complex and influential work of critical theory, exploring the relationship between reason, myth, and domination.
The authors argue that the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason has paradoxically led to new forms of domination and control.
They trace the development of instrumental reason, which reduces everything to means-ends calculations, and its role in shaping modern society.
The book explores the interplay between reason and myth, arguing that myth is not simply irrational but can also be a source of critical insight.
"Dialectic of Enlightenment" remains a challenging but rewarding read, offering profound insights into the complexities of modernity and the dangers of unchecked rationality.
#39741
Contingent Computation
M. Beatrice Fazi
In Contingent Computation, M. Beatrice Fazi examines the philosophical and aesthetic dimensions of computation, arguing that abstraction and indeterminacy are central to computational practice and experience.
The book interrogates how computational systems mediate perception and aesthetic judgment, and how contingent factors influence computational outcomes.
Fazi draws on case studies from digital art and algorithmic media to show the limits of deterministic accounts of computation.
She proposes a framework that recognizes the openness and variability inherent in computational processes.
The work situates computational aesthetics within broader debates about representation, agency, and the theory of technology.
#49705
How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File
Hito Steyerl
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Lacan's engagement with binary encoding and cybernetics appears in his seminars and contributed to later theoretical intersections with information theory.
The volume is part of Lacan's broader project that recontextualized psychoanalysis within structuralist and post-structuralist debates.
It remains a key reference for scholars connecting psychoanalysis, language, and systems theory.
#33443
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The Mathematical Imagination
Matthew Handelman
The Mathematical Imagination investigates the historical and conceptual intersections between mathematics and critical theory, particularly within the Frankfurt School tradition.
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#11247
• Mentioned in 5 episodes
Elements
Euclid
Euclid's Elements is a comprehensive mathematical treatise that presents definitions, postulates, propositions, and mathematical proofs.
It is a compilation of earlier Greek mathematicians' works, including those of Pythagoras, Hippocrates of Chios, Theaetetus, and Eudoxus.
The work is renowned for its logical and systematic presentation, starting from a small set of axioms and developing deep mathematical results.
It has been a cornerstone of mathematics for over two thousand years and remains influential in modern geometry.
We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work.
Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation through discrete units — is a condition for thinking as such.
Just to get it out of the way, listeners to the pod know that these four thinkers need no introduction. This is literally the cohort that we've held in our minds over the past few years (there's probably nobody whose shaped our brains as formatively on this subject than Alexander Galloway, whose writing was the subject of Marek's en route masters thesis and the first PDF sent between Marek and Roberto).
The conversation opens up a series of productive disagreements within the group. What's the relationship between the digital and computation? For Fazi, the digital is discretization — "the cut" — while computation is systematization, building, constructing. This distinction allows the book to think the digital before and beyond the computer, back to proto-writing tokens and forward to whatever comes next.
A major target here is what Galloway calls "analog philosophy," the dominant strain of theory over the last few decades that privileges affect, sensation, intensity, immanence. Deleuze is named directly as the great philosopher of the analog: obsessed with the fold, hostile to structuralism, drawn to "a language of breaths and screams." The authors aren't throwing Deleuze overboard entirely (to them the "Postscript on the Societies of Control" still hits) but they're skeptical that his ontology can account for digital technology as a form of thought.
REFERENCES:
Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation through discrete units — is a condition for thinking as such.
Just to get it out of the way, listeners to the pod know that these four thinkers need no introduction. This is literally the cohort that we've held in our minds over the past few years (there's probably nobody whose shaped our brains as formatively on this subject than Alexander Galloway, whose writing was the subject of Marek's en route masters thesis and the first PDF sent between Marek and Roberto).
The conversation opens up a series of productive disagreements within the group. What's the relationship between the digital and computation? For Fazi, the digital is discretization — "the cut" — while computation is systematization, building, constructing. This distinction allows the book to think the digital before and beyond the computer, back to proto-writing tokens and forward to whatever comes next.
A major target here is what Galloway calls "analog philosophy," the dominant strain of theory over the last few decades that privileges affect, sensation, intensity, immanence. Deleuze is named directly as the great philosopher of the analog: obsessed with the fold, hostile to structuralism, drawn to "a language of breaths and screams." The authors aren't throwing Deleuze overboard entirely (to them the "Postscript on the Societies of Control" still hits) but they're skeptical that his ontology can account for digital technology as a form of thought.
REFERENCES:
- *Digital Theory* (In Search of Media series), University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920197/digital-theory/
- M. Beatrice Fazi - *Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics*, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606082/Contingent-Computation-Abstraction-Experience-and-Indeterminacy-in-Computational-Aesthetics
- Alexander R. Galloway - *Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age*, Verso, 2021 https://www.versobooks.com/products/2656-uncomputable - "Golden Age of Analog," *Critical Inquiry* 48, no. 2 (2022) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/717324 - Galloway's website and blog https://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/
- Matthew Handelman - *The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory*, Fordham University Press, 2019 https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823283842/the-mathematical-imagination/
- Leif Weatherby - *Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism*, University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/language-machines (our book of the year, for what it's worth) - *Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx*, Fordham University Press, 2016 - Digital Theory Lab at NYU https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/leif-allison-reid-weatherby.html
- Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1992)
- Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment*
- Euclid, *Elements*, Book V (on analog/logos)
- Jacques Lacan, *Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis* (on cybernetics)
- François Laruelle and Alain Badiou, on the generic
- Eve Tuck, "Breaking Up with Deleuze"
- Hito Steyerl, "How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File" (2013)