Abstract

I wish to investigate the possibility that the operative ontologies engendered by this sampling theorem, and its incalculable contribution to our contemporary media environment, have largely supplanted the traditional function of metaphysics – which is, at its core, an attempt to make sense of the world, to find stability within the interminable chaos of existence. For it would seem that even the most subtle and supple of metaphysical manoeuvres are found wanting in comparison to the technics of digital computation, capable of not only the conversion of the continuous into the discrete but also the rationalization of this discrete, symbolic data through forms of statistical processing that avoid recourse to any simple presence/absence dichotomy. My goal is not so much to denounce metaphysics, but to comprehend its persistent historical failures from the perspective of an episteme that would seem increasingly post- or even anti-metaphysical in tenor, and in doing so, to enquire also into the role that metaphysics should play today within academic and para-academic discourse.