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 (being qua being) 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 (without, at least in theory, the lossiness that philosophers at least as far back as Zeno of Elea have presumed inevitable) but also the rationalization of this discrete, symbolic data through forms of statistical processing (e.g. the various modes of signal processing derived from Fourier analysis) 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 (especially its apparently congenital inability to successfully think the real) 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.