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Gilbert Simondon

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FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media

Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University [Abstract] Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from…

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FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media

Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University [Abstract] Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from…

more..