Keynote Speech "Read, Write, Execute: What are the Machines that Determine Thinking?"

  • Forum Vertigo

What are the machines that determine thinking? We may approach the question in a number of ways. The typical approach is to consider (or perhaps even craft) a philosophy of media. This comes under the name of media studies or media theory, where media artifacts are taken as the objects of thinking. Yet there is also an alternate approach, the media of philosophy, where the a priori conditions of philosophy themselves take center stage, engulfing thought as a kind of object. For if "media determine our situation," as Friedrich Kittler once notoriously put it, is it not also true that philosophies shift according to the changing conditions of media technology? In this lecture we will explore a series of philosopher's devices drawn from the domain of machines and computers--Heidegger's Grundig, Nietzsche's Schreibkugel, Derrida's Macintosh Plus, Malabou's neural net--as a backdrop for a different kind of inquiry, not simply that our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts, but also that our thoughts themselves are instruments.

With Alexander R. Galloway Author and Teacher, New York University

We use cookie technology to measure our online audience and to allow you to share content on social networks via link buttons. Further information.