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In his essay The Cybernetic Hypothesis, published in the journal differences in 2014, Alexander R. Galloway expands common notions of ‘the digital’ by presenting a historical inquiry inspired by Foucauldian means of research. Borrowing the term “cybernetic hypothesis” from the French collective Tiqqun, he proposes a genealogy of the digital by discussing early historical examples of inventions that paved the way towards our today’s ‘common’ understandings of the current technological condition. Doing so, Galloway reflects on the conditions that made possible the rise of the digital as an epistemological regime in order to help providing a more comprehensive picture of this ubiquitous term and concept.
In our workshop, together with Alexander Galloway, we will discuss implications of the cybernetic hypothesis, its implications for current research practice as well as the possible difference between discrete and continuous forms of knowledge. If we are indeed witnessing the dominance of a new apparatus of knowledge and power today, then how can we make sense of the new conditions and what do they implicate for the so-called digital humanities, the relevance of scholarly research in general, and critical practice?